But unfortunately for Gleitze, four days later another swimmer, Dr Dorothy Cochrane Logan, a Harley Street physician and professional swimmer who swam under the name of Mona McLennan, set a new Channel record for women, with thirteen hours ten minutes. Only she didn’t: rather, she admitted, she’d done part of the course in a boat and had been paid £1,000 by the News of the World to claim a record swim. She said she was just showing why Channel records needed to be independently verified, but now Gleitze’s swim was in severe doubt as well, to which her response was, ‘All right, I’ll do it again.’ Like Lily Smith and Elsie Aykroyd who came before her and Ivy Hawke who came after, she exhibited the same sort of matter-of-fact determination. There had been previous bogus Channel claims. A Mrs Hamilton had ‘spent the night’ in a friend’s motor boat in Dover harbour rather than swimming; another had been towed across by her accompanying boat. Gleitze told the press she had never suspected Logan of lying: ‘what I have not got in my favour is the fact that no one saw me land’ (apart from those on the accompanying boat), and she agreed there needed to be a governing body for Channel swimming.
Mercedes Gleitze (centre) was the first British woman to swim across the Channel, but she found the Thames more ‘treacherous’. Norman Derham, the champion Southend swimmer, is behind her.
On 21 October, Gleitze set off on her ‘Vindication Swim’ in order to ‘restore the prestige of British women Channel swimmers in the eyes of the world’. As a result of the advance publicity, Rolex, which the year before had patented the first waterproof wristwatch, the Oyster, asked her to wear their prototype in exchange for a testimonial afterwards. This time she had the backing of a British businessman, Summers Brown, who had volunteered to finance the venture. And so, exactly two weeks after her first successful crossing, she entered the water once again at Cap Gris Nez. But after over ten hours, in water sometimes as cold as 50 degrees, she slipped in and out of consciousness, and seven miles from the end the medical officers accompanying her decided the swim should be abandoned. After protests from her to ‘let me go on’, those on the boat threw a twisted towel over her head and under her arms, and she was forcibly pulled on board.
The watch, which she actually wore round her neck, was still keeping good time and Rolex were quick to place a front-page advert in the Daily Mail with a picture of Gleitze, who became seen as a ‘poster girl’ for swimming. There was much coverage of her ‘splendid failure’, she had a ‘wildly enthusiastic’ welcome in London where she was besieged by autograph hunters and ‘an excited woman admirer broke through the throng at Charing Cross and kissed her’. Gleitze announced she was not going back to being a typist but would become a professional long-distance swimmer and ‘take up social-welfare work’.
By now she had signed a statutory declaration that her 7 October Channel swim was ‘a bona-fide one’, in the presence of the Commissioner for Oaths and a representative of the Daily Mirror. The declaration was also signed by her trainer, and on 1 November 1927 the swim was duly entered into the record book of the recently formed Channel Swimming Association, founded in order to authenticate swimmers’ claims to have swum the English Channel and to verify crossing times. Mercedes Gleitze’s record as the first British woman to swim the English Channel was now official.
And so began years of worldwide endurance swims. In December that year she set off to swim the Strait of Gibraltar. The following April, after five failed attempts, she finally succeeded in crossing the Strait, watched by ‘hundreds of women’, becoming the first person ever to swim the eight-mile course, in twelve hours fifty minutes. She also returned to the Thames and in December 1928, in water that was 36 degrees, swam from Tottenham Bridge to London Bridge on Boxing Day. The press reported ‘six other girls refused to enter the water because of the wintery conditions’. That same month she was photographed barefoot working in a Manchester cotton mill where she’d been employed for ten days under an assumed name ‘studying industrial conditions’. It’s unlikely no one would have recognised ‘England’s heroine of the day’ and the press, of course, were there to photograph her. But industrial conditions were close to her heart and she later used her earnings to set up the Mercedes Gleitze Home for Destitute Men and Women in Leicester in 1933, which survived until the Second World War.
‘The most amazing girl in England’: Mercedes Gleitze.
In 1929 she swam thirty-nine miles in the Thames in twelve hours, which must have been a record for a woman (no one had yet beaten Holbein’s fifty-mile continuous swim of 1908) and completed many endurance swims at indoor pools. During a forty-and-a-half-hour swim at Dundee Corporation Baths police had to ‘deal with an attempt to rush one of the doorways’ after ‘thousands were unable to get admission’. Gleitze travelled extensively in Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, completing fifty-one marathon swims, nearly half of which took at least twenty-six hours. For many of these she was accompanied by music playing on a wind-up gramophone. Gleitze retired from swimming in 1933, after a failed attempt to cross the Channel from England to France, and withdrew completely from public life. She later became ill and eventually housebound, refusing to give interviews and shunning any further publicity, until her death in 1981.
Mercedes Gleitze is unusual when it comes to the story of Thames champions because, unlike other women, apart from Annette Kellerman, she is still honoured today. But until recently, just as with Webb, this was because of her Channel rather than her river swims. In 1969 she was inducted into the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame (IMSHOF), although it’s not clear if she was ever aware of this, and many press photos of her still exist, partly because she was so photogenic. Here she is standing on a beach, her legs being rubbed with grease, sitting on the floor doing warm-up exercises and, oddly, wearing dainty heeled shoes, or preparing to dive into the Lambeth Baths. Unlike Ivy Hawke ‘the smiling swimmer’, or Lily Smith, resplendently covered in medals, Gleitze often looks a little shy in these posed shots. But images of her during her Channel swim tell another story, of sheer exhaustion and triumph, and her story was suitably included in The Girls’ Book of Heroines.
Her legacy in terms of Thames swimming, however, has yet to be properly recognised. The fact that she swam 120 miles from Westminster to Folkestone in 1927 means she was the one who paved the way for the men who came after, such as Andy Nation, Lewis Pugh, Charlie Wittmack and David Walliams. When it comes to long-distance swims lasting days, it was a woman who got there first.
Lewis Pugh swims past the Houses of Parliament during his journey along the length of the Thames in 2006. Westminster has been the site of daring swimming feats since Victorian times.
Now at last Mercedes Gleitze is being celebrated as a pioneering open-water swimmer. In October 2013, at the Global Open Water Swimming Conference held in Ireland, she was enshrined into the IMSHOF as an Honour Pioneer Open Water Swimmer. This was followed in September 2014 by another enshrinement held in Scotland, this time into the International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF) as an Honour Open Water Pioneer Swimmer. In addition, a documentary, Mercedes: The Spirit of a New Age, has been made about Gleitze’s swimming career by Northern Ireland producer Clare Delargy, and a feature film is underway. Mercedes’ daughter, Doloranda Pember, meanwhile, has just finished writing a fully illustrated chronicle of her mother’s swimming career.
I meet Doloranda at Tate Britain, a fifteen-minute walk upstream from Westminster Bridge, where I’ve suggested we chat in the gallery’s restaurant because it first opened, although not to the general public, in 1927, the year of her mother’s record-breaking Thames swim. The Rex Whistler Restaurant was once considered ‘The Most Amusing Room in Europe’, thanks to its specially commissioned mural, The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats.
Doloranda is already seated when I arrive and I recognise her at once; she has the same delicate features as her mother. Behind her Whistler’s mural covers every wall of the basement room, in hues of green and blue with many a watery
scene. Not long after it was completed the mural was under 2 feet of water as a result of the massive Thames flood of 1928, but it survived and has recently been cleaned. Doloranda has come by coach from her home in Gloucestershire and she’s brought some examples from her mother’s extensive archives. There’s a clink of cutlery and a chink of wine glasses from the lunch party at the table next to us, a waiter brings a tray of freshly baked rolls, then she begins to show me some of her mother’s treasures.
Mercedes Gleitze left over 2,000 documents, including letters, newspaper cuttings, photographs, witness statements and swimming logs in boxes in the attic, and Doloranda has spent several years charting every single swim. ‘Although she seldom spoke to us in detail about her achievements, because she left all these documents I’ve been able to record her career accurately in the biography I’ve just written. We had no idea how famous she’d been in her day. Now and again she might mention something but she kept her memories to herself, she was just a mother to three children and a housewife. She made herself invisible when she retired into domesticity and became totally reclusive. That’s why she isn’t as well known today as, say, Gertrude Ederle, but I’m about to put that right.’
Doloranda brings out one of the red exercise books her mother bought from Woolworths, its thick pages crammed with press reports. ‘She glued them all in, and when she ran out of glue because of war shortages, she sewed them in.’ Next she shows me posters announcing indoor swims, press photos from the Channel swim, a copy of the Channel Swimming Association’s verification of the crossing, and several pages listing all her mother’s endurance and open-water swims from 1923 to 1933. The collection is particularly important because when Gleitze returned home to her flat in Pimlico after her successful Channel swim in October 1927 it was to find that a leather travelling case presented to her by the Amateur Swimming Club had been stolen from her bedroom. The case contained ‘swimming articles, programmes, and a number of press photographs of the last few years’ and although there was money in the room, only the case was taken.
We talk about her mother’s Channel swim and Doloranda explains that a journalist who had been invited to accompany the crossing cancelled at the last moment. As a result of this, Gleitze would never again undertake a swim without it being properly documented, and as just one example Doloranda shows me the original documents attesting to the fact she swam the Strait of Gibraltar, page after page, in both Spanish and English, listing the names of every single spectator. But despite all these records, ‘the thinnest file I’ve got is on the Thames swims’, and, like me, she’s been frustrated trying to find out more details.
We finish our lunch and leave the Tate, walking along Millbank before crossing the road to the Thames. We sit on a bench in Victoria Tower Garden South, the wall that separates us from the river dappled in shadow from overhanging trees. The water today is as green as Whistler’s mural. The afternoon is sticky and muggy, we’re disturbed by planes overhead and motorbikes on the road behind us, and I have to listen carefully to hear Doloranda as she tells me the story of her mother and the Thames.
‘What do you think this was like,’ I ask, ‘when Mercedes swam here?’ ‘The Thames won’t have changed, or most of the bridges,’ she says, ‘but the London Eye,’ she lifts an arm to point across the river, ‘that’s new. And the water in the Thames in the 1920s would have been much more polluted, there would have been dead animals and other obnoxious deposits for a swimmer to contend with.’ But this didn’t deter Mercedes. ‘Most women still led restricted lives at that time,’ says Doloranda. However her mother ‘was one of the new women of that era, and was determined to follow her dream’, which in this case meant swimming the Channel.
‘American swimmers who came to try their luck were heavily sponsored by newspapers; they had the money and came here and trained full-time. British women didn’t have any funding. My mother had to earn a living; she was a working girl, she had rent to pay and limited holidays. She had little chance to train in the sea, and suddenly she had an idea one day, maybe she could use the Thames to train in at weekends. She lived in Pimlico and worked as a shorthand typist for a shipping company in Westminster, where her fluency in English and German was an asset. It was one of the new white-collar office jobs being offered to women, and better than domestic service. In the holidays she went to Folkestone to train, but at the weekends the Thames offered her similar conditions to the Channel because of its tidal flow. She walked along the Embankment every day to and from work and that’s what gave her the idea. It was not her original ambition to swim the Thames but she saw it as an opportunity. Swimming the English Channel was such a target, especially for a woman, because at that time no woman had ever done it.’
I say I’m amazed her mother could just get in and swim. ‘She couldn’t,’ explains Doloranda, ‘she got a licence from the Port of London Authority.’ I stare at her, astounded that the PLA granted Mercedes permission to swim in the filthy, crowded river in the middle of London. ‘She applied for a licence to swim on Sundays and they gave it to her. I find that incredible. The PLA didn’t raise any objections about health and safety; they didn’t say “no, it’s too polluted”. Mercedes just saw this body of water as somewhere to train. She used her initiative! Her motivation was to break records and make money for her planned charity, these were her parallel aims. On her walk to work she witnessed the unemployed, all the destitute people on the streets and under the bridges; this was during the years leading up to the Great Depression.’
I wonder if Mercedes worked in an office overlooking the river, and I ask where she swam from on these training weekends. Did she dive in from a beach or leap off a bridge? Did she hire a boat? ‘I don’t know,’ says Doloranda, ‘there are gaps in my knowledge.’ Another gap is the 120-mile swim, and I ask where her mother would have spent each night. ‘I suspect she would have got B&B accommodation at each of the landing places en route to Folkestone. It would have been the most practical thing to do. Unfortunately in her archives there are very few details of the actual swim – just about the start and the finish. However, I did find one press report that said she swam the tide out after that “near death” incident and landed at Erith at the end of the first stage. Lack of detailed information on this swim also frustrated me. I know the Daily Mail covered it because I have a letter she wrote to them asking for copies of the photographs they took of the swim.’
As for her liquid diet, Mr Garman, the boat skipper, would have handed her mugs of tea, coffee and hot milk, and when she turned to solids her menu while swimming normally consisted of egg and bacon, ‘which must have been difficult to eat in the water!’, ham sandwiches, fried fish, ‘a raw egg drink that was supposed to be nutritious’ – Doloranda pulls a face – ‘Bovril, Ovaltine, grapes, and on one or two occasions roast duck’. I ask if her mother was aware of the swimmers who had come before her, the women who also broke records in the Thames going back to Victorian times, and she says she doesn’t know and that the press reports in her mother’s archives don’t mention them.
For Doloranda, her years spent charting Mercedes’ swims have been enlightening. It has given her the chance to learn about her mother’s outstanding career – the details of which as a child she knew very little. Doloranda and her siblings all loved to swim, ‘but none of us had her ambition’. She has only swum once in the Thames herself, at Maidenhead sixty-five years ago with friends, when she remembers getting tangled up in reeds. And today she no longer swims in public pools, because ‘I’ve become sensitised to chlorine’.
Doloranda is immensely proud of the way Mercedes managed her own career and the fact that her ‘endurance swims in corporation pools gave city-dwelling people, especially women and girls, the opportunity to see a woman do physical things’. As for the charity her mother established, ‘although enemy action during the war destroyed the Charitable Homes, her Trust Fund is still active today and is being used to help people in poverty. The revenue from my book will go to Mum’s
charity.’
17
Charing Cross–Blackfriars
‘Here at Hungerford Bridge floating swimming-baths are in the course of erection . . . [they] will be open for bathers of either sex’
Walter Thornbury, Old and New London, 1873
It’s a sunny morning in May and the riverside at Charing Cross Bridge, around half a mile downstream from Westminster Bridge, is crowded with luxury cruisers, boats with restaurants and nightclubs on board, tourist coaches and open-top sightseeing buses. It’s a good spot for visitors to London, with the steel railway bridge leading over the Thames to the Festival Hall, and nearby the London Eye glinting like a silver beaded bracelet. But in Victorian times this was a bleak place. In the 1820s ten-year-old Charles Dickens worked close by at Hungerford Stairs, opposite the entrance of today’s Embankment Tube station, as a ‘shop drudge’ at a blacking warehouse on six shillings a week. Dickens later described it to his biographer John Forster as ‘a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and swarming with rats’. He was based in the counting house on the first floor, overlooking the Thames, where his job was to ‘cover the pots of paste-blacking’ with paper. ‘No words,’ he said, ‘can express the secret agony of my soul’ as his ‘early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast’. He uses much the same words to describe the young David Copperfield’s experiences at the fictional Murdstone and Grinby’s Thames-side warehouse.
While Dickens would later enjoy swims at Richmond, his early experiences of the river explains why the Thames was such a lurking presence in many of his novels, a deadly sewer lined by festering mudbanks where in the opening chapter of Our Mutual Friend a boatman pushes off into the slime and ooze looking for corpses to rob.
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