The first of today’s swimmers started at 9 a.m.; we’re split into ‘waves’ and I’m in the 11 a.m. ‘white wave’, which means I wear a white hat with my number on it. I watch a group of people in wetsuits walking down a jetty; they look like upright beetles as one by one they go in. I can see the course runs down the right-hand side of the dock, past a series of yellow buoys resembling bouncy castles, then the swimmers seem to disappear before returning along the left-hand side. Unlike in Ralphs’ time, there’s no floating platform in the middle of the dock for people to dive off.
I’ve been warned about dehydration, so I drink a bottle of water before going to change; there are no tugs to undress in as there were in the 1930s, instead there are large canvas tents across Westferry Road. But I’m stopped at the entrance to the women’s tent and asked to produce my hat. I’ve left it in another bag with my daughter, and now they won’t let me in. This is my bad dream coming true. I sit on a small stone wall by the toilets and put on my wetsuit, then return to the starting area. ‘Look, Mum,’ says my daughter as she hands me my hat, ‘look at the faces of everyone getting out, they’re smiling!’
I chat to a woman behind me who has just done the Great Swim in Windermere. She seems seasoned and sympathetic and I must look worried because she asks, ‘Have you ever swum outdoors before?’ It’s now 10.30 a.m. and time to check in for the white wave. I fix the timing chip provided around my ankle, secure the Velcro strap, give my name to someone with a clipboard and am told to rest my ankle against a block. This is nothing like my upper river swim; the challenge here seems not so much to swim in the Thames but to do it as speedily as possible. We all mill around near the start, helping ourselves to water. I drink two bottles, so now that’s three I’ve drunk and I really need the toilet. We’ve been advised not to drink any alcohol the night before, but I overhear a woman saying she had three beers and a curry.
We’re let into the acclimatisation area, a roped-off section of the dock next to the starting pontoon. This is a chance to get used to the water, and we’re told to swim clockwise. I walk down what appears to be an underwater ramp. ‘When you get to me,’ says a man in a red t-shirt, ‘you can swim.’ I get to him and throw myself in, hoping I’ve cleared the ramp. The water isn’t too bad, it’s 19.5 degrees, just half a degree colder than Gospel Oak lido has been this week, but I hear a man behind me say, ‘Shit, it’s cold.’ I start to swim leisurely, not wanting to use up any energy. Then I feel a sharp pain in my side as someone overtakes and when I look round someone else kicks me in the foot.
We’re herded out of the water and a man takes a microphone to welcome us. The fastest time so far has been just under twenty minutes but for some it could take two hours. ‘In twenty minutes,’ he says, ‘you’ll wonder what all those sleepless nights were about. An hour from now, you’ll be in the pub.’ He asks the newbies to put up their hands; nearly everyone in this wave of around 200 people is doing it for the first time. But one or two have done all the Great Swims this year; this is their last and the warmest. The man expertly mixes jokes with information and reassurance. He tells us about the people in kayaks, the lifeguards and volunteers. If we have any problem at all, we just stop and put our hand up. Then he passes the mike to a woman who launches into a manic group exercise routine.
I wonder how the dock events would have started in the 1930s, whether a gun was fired before the swimmers in their one-piece knitted costumes leapt in. There would have been no safety canoes back then, and probably no written warnings about the state of the water either. My ‘on the day guide’ advises that all cuts or abrasions should be covered, to try not to swallow any water, to take ‘a full shower at the earliest opportunity’ and ‘if you feel unwell for a period of up to three weeks after your swim, visit your GP and advise them you have been swimming in open water’. Unlike my SwimTrek trip, however, there is no specific mention of Weil’s disease.
Lining up to enter the Millwall Dock. I’m fourth from right and about to start my first mass-participation swim.
Thankfully, there isn’t a scrum to get into the dock. In previous years, I’ve been told, people ran in and smashed into each other and so I’ve been advised to stay right at the back. As the hooter sounds we’re let in, one small group at a time, with everyone walking politely. But why is the PA system playing an Olly Murs song, ‘Troublemaker’, with the refrain ‘I swear you’re giving me a heart attack’?
I’m in the last six as we head towards the waters of Millwall Dock. Then off we go, and I think, it’s easy after all, it’s just swimming. It feels a little like being in a pond, the water is dark and smells of bracken and when I open my eyes underneath I can’t see a thing. I wonder how deep it is; there’s no chance I could put my feet down here and feel mud between my toes as I did near Buscot Lock. I swallow some water by accident and it tastes like metal, but it’s clear enough for me to see my hands in the water, with a faintly yellow tinge.
All around me the dock is being churned up by swimmers, arms and legs thrashing, and I can’t quite get the right rhythm, unable to decide which stroke to use. In the upper Thames I tried to follow the curves of the river; here there’s a set course I have to follow. The warm-up man has told us that after the first buoy at 200 metres we will be fine but it’s not until I reach the second one that I calm down. I seem to be veering near the wall where people are standing cheering and waving. It’s strange being watched while I’m swimming, it makes me feel self-conscious and so I tread water and take in the views: a tree-lined walkway on my right, ahead a single chimney rising up over a small park with bushes like giant bunches of broccoli, on my left the sun bounces off the reflective windows of shiny office blocks. I want to take in this city swim experience, to lie and float and think about things, but I have to keep an eye out for everyone else. A woman is doing a strong backstroke seriously off course; she’s heading my way and she can’t see me and I stop as a man on a kayak puts her back on track.
I get to the end of the dock and swim alongside boats, some like old-fashioned tugs; on one a couple are sitting having their breakfast as hundreds of people swim past. I turn on to my back; there are no overhanging trees here, no bright blue dragonflies, instead I see a man high up at an office window, leaning out, smoking a cigarette. I feel like I’m part of some bizarre entertainment as still the people on the walkways cheer and shout. Then I reach a bridge, behind which is the inner dock and after that Millwall Cutting. Now I’m on the final stretch, swimming towards the finishing line through two large buoys. I’m enjoying it more now, because I can see the end and nothing has gone wrong except my bladder is ready to burst. I tread water as discreetly as possible and at once a man in a kayak zooms over and asks if I’m OK. ‘I’m fine!’ I tell him. But my daughter later says, ‘You didn’t look like it, Mum, you looked like you were drowning.’
I see a digital clock face ahead of me. It’s 11.50 a.m. So I’ve been a bit slower than I thought, although I have had quite a few stops and floats. But I can speed up now, I don’t have to worry about getting tired and suddenly it feels like the most brilliant day to be swimming round a dock.
A man helps me out of the water and on to the exit ramp. I’m a bit dazed; although I don’t feel the euphoria I had with my upper Thames swim.
I’m given a finisher’s bag and follow a sign to a shower. Then I start to cough, and soon I’m coughing so much I’m nearly retching. I think of Kathleen Ralphs’ mother, waiting at home with a dose of sennapods because of what her daughter may have swallowed while swimming in the dock. But I also think how proud she must have been to have won three silver cups, just as my daughter asks, ‘Have you got a medal?’
I walk back to the tent to get changed and it’s now I appreciate how well it’s all been organised, the venue was transformed in less than two days, thousands of people are being carefully supervised swimming round a dock in half-hour waves. An hour later I’m home and the first thing I want to do is have a bath; I have an urge to wash off the Thames.
Then I look at my Just Giving page. Entrants to the Great Swims are encouraged to raise money, helped to create a Just Giving page and nominate a charity, so I’ve put down Solace Women’s Aid. I see that in five days I’ve raised £520. If the majority of people swimming today were doing it for charity, and if the average pledged is a few hundred pounds, then today’s event could have raised £100,000.
In Victorian times people made wagers on swimming races across and along the river, in the 1930s they competed for silver cups in the docks; now we actually pay to swim here (the London Great Swim fee is £39) and make money for charity in the process.
‘The charity element is huge,’ says Alex Jackson, Great Swim operations manager. Thirty per cent of swimmers today were raising money, although it’s not the main motivation. Twenty-six per cent want a challenge, a quarter are looking for a good time and/or to beat a personal best, while 12 per cent do it to raise money. Men make up 51 per cent of the swimmers, overall 32 per cent are aged 26–35; there are 20 per cent in my age group of 46–55, four per cent over 61 and 12 per cent under 25.
‘Initially some people did think, “hmm, a dock: do I want to swim where people throw their rubbish?”,’ says Alex, ‘but we’re very vigilant about testing the water.’ While the organisers were aware of a tradition of people swimming in the London Docks, ‘to be honest, it was more about having a good product and wanting to put it on and find a location; we’ve missed the history element a bit. But we’ve come full circle, from leisure use to industrial use and back to leisure.’
The morning of my swim, after I’ve had a bath, I check the comments on the Facebook page. People say the venue was excellent and want Millwall again next year; many boast they beat their personal best; others want to know when the results will be up. A few hours later I search for the timings; the category ‘Elite Men and Masses’ is topped by a man who did it in nineteen minutes and one second. But there are women listed here as well, and when I ask Alex if they are ‘the masses’ he assures me he’ll look into it.
I put in my name; I did the mile in forty-seven minutes fifty-two seconds. The quickest in my wave did it in twenty minutes thirty-eight seconds, the slowest in one hour ten minutes. My overall position is 1806. Now I’m tempted to come back next year and be a bit faster. How many minutes did I waste before actually starting to swim and what about all the times I stopped to take in the views? It’s only the next day that I open my finisher’s bag. Inside there is a snack bar, shampoo, a small tube of toothpaste, nuts, a t-shirt – and there it is, right at the bottom, my medal. Here is the proof that I swam in the London Docks, just as people have been doing since the 1930s when the oil was so thick that Kathleen Ralphs shot through the water during the PLA Swimming Club Ladies Championships at twice her normal speed.
22
Greenwich–Woolwich–Grays–Gravesend
‘How pleasant from that dome-crowned hill
To view the varied scene below,
Woods, ships, and spires, and, lovelier still,
The encircling Thames’ majestic flow!’
William Gifford (1756–1826), ‘Greenwich Hill’
It’s a muggy summer’s morning when I come out of Woolwich Arsenal station on my way to the Royal Arsenal, once one of the world’s leading centres for manufacturing munitions. There are only around forty miles left of my journey down the Thames and today I’m heading for the Greenwich Heritage Centre, on the hunt for swimming stories and in particular the history of Greenwich Beach. Few people are out today on this recently redeveloped site; a woman is walking a dog; another pushes a crying child in a buggy. I walk down a wide paved boulevard past expensive looking apartment buildings and then Firepower: The Royal Artillery Museum. In the distance, by the Royal Arsenal Pier, there seems to be a group of soldiers and it takes me a while to realise they’re rather menacing cast-iron statues. At the pier itself there’s the usual warning sign, ‘Danger of injury, strong currents and deep water’, but when I look over the wall the Thames is motionless and the water silky.
In Victorian times this was the site, just east from here, of the Princess Alice disaster, then described as ‘one of the most fearful disasters of modern times’ and today as the largest loss of life in peacetime Britain. On the evening of 3 September 1878, several hundred passengers were returning from a ‘Moonlight Trip’ from Swan Pier, near London Bridge, to the Rosherville Pleasure Gardens in Gravesend. The Princess Alice was one of the London Steamboat Company’s largest saloon steamers and at around 8 p.m., in sight of North Woolwich Pier, it collided with a Newcastle-bound collier, the iron-built SS Bywell Castle.
The Princess, said to be as ‘thin as eggshell’, split in two and sank in less than five minutes. Many passengers were trapped in the wreckage and drowned; others died in the river in which an hour earlier raw sewage had been released from sewer outfalls at Crossness. Hardly any of the passengers would have been able to swim, only ‘a few’ were reported as having made it to shore, and the paddle steamer was barely equipped with life belts – the press reported ‘a dozen or more lifebuoys onboard’. Around 700 people died, just 100 were rescued. Newspaper reports painted a horrific scene, with ‘the river for a hundred yards full of drowning people screaming in anguish and praying for help’. The captain of a nearby ship launched a rowing boat and although he managed to save eleven people the vessel was so swamped by crowds ‘shrieking and drowning’ that ‘it was necessary to quench their hopes by knocking them off the sides with the oars’.
On the evening of 3 September 1878 the paddle steamer Princess Alice sank in less than five minutes after colliding with the coal ship SS Bywell Castle. Around 700 people died, many because they were unable to swim.
As a result of the tragedy, new safety rules were put in place, as they would be again after the Marchioness disaster in 1989. All ships would pass each other on the port side, and there would be enough life belts for everyone on board. The Thames River Police’s rowing boats based at Wapping were replaced with steam launches, there was a new plan for dumping sewage at sea, rather than releasing it downriver, and treatment works on shore.
A few years later, on the northern side of the Thames from here, the Royal Pavilion Pleasure Gardens (now the site of the Royal Victoria Gardens) was the starting point for a race which ‘severely tested the strength of amateur swimmers,’ reported The Times, ‘as they had to go nearly across the river and back again’. But by the early twentieth century newspaper reports on Thames swimming in this area tend to focus on tragedies. In the summer of 1920 two men jumped into the river at midnight ‘for a wager’ and attempted to swim across, with fatal consequences. The same year a man was seen swimming fully dressed before he sank opposite the North Woolwich Pier. As ever with the story of the Thames, the river has been the scene of pleasure, sport and, because of lack of swimming ability and pollution, tragedy.
Upstream from here, to the west, is the Thames Barrier, one of the world’s largest movable flood barriers, run and maintained by the Environment Agency, and where the PLA swimming ‘ban’ from Putney ends. The barrier opened in 1982, spanning 520 metres across the Thames, and is said to protect 125 square kilometres of central London from flooding caused by tidal surges.
This was a memorable spot for Kevin Murphy during his 1980 swim, when he ran out of tide. ‘They were building the Thames Barrier at the time,’ he explains, ‘and I had to fight to get through the pillars, the workmen were cheering and shouting me on but I couldn’t get through. I spent six and a half hours going nowhere. I might have gone backwards a bit. The water was really, really black and sludgy. What I didn’t know then, what no one told me, was I was stuck at the sewage works, which was probably why I got ill.’
Lewis Pugh’s Thames swim around a quarter of a century later, to raise environmental awareness, was rather different. When he reached the barrier he had no problem getting through, but was shocked at what he saw: ‘the Thames Barrier is supposed to save us from climate change and a storm surge, but when
I got there I realised how small it is, it’s nothing.’
I leave the Royal Arsenal Pier and walk back up the boulevard to the Greenwich Heritage Centre, which houses the local history library and the Royal Borough of Greenwich’s museum. There’s nothing on display about swimming, but archivist Jonathan Partington has some documents in the search room where the local studies collection is kept. It’s quiet inside; there are the usual filing cabinets, wooden tables and the obligatory blue carpet. I sit by an open door, hoping for a breeze; outside I can see a courtyard where a group of primary school children in full camouflage gear are being told to stand in line.
Jonathan hands me a thin manila folder labelled ‘Swimming’. Inside there is just one newspaper article, dated September 1895, which explains, ‘we announced that Sam Martin, of Woolwich Baths, would attempt the great swim from Blackwall to Gravesend. He has done it – that is the attempt. But he did not quite succeed in the task.’ Only two others had managed this nineteen-and-a-half-mile course, Captain Webb and Fred Bownes. Martin almost made it; he only had half a mile to go when the tide turned and his friends persuaded him to stop. ‘Unless a man can swim 3¼ miles an hour with the tide for six successive hours,’ noted the paper, ‘he has no chance.’
Jonathan wheels in a trolley with three old books of council minutes, as well as a huge cardboard box of photographs labelled ‘Greenwich beach, pier and power station’. Then he brings a box of Thames riverside pictures, and yet another until I have five boxes on the table in front of me. This is the best photograph collection I’ve yet to see in any Thames-side archives.
I’ve already read that in the 1930s an official beach was created at Greenwich, and, like the beach near Tower Bridge, it became a popular place for those who couldn’t afford to get to seaside resorts. Children went beachcombing, collecting pieces of chalk and selling them, while families spread out on the sand to have tea. I’ve also been told by Dr Pieter van der Merwe, General Editor and Greenwich Curator at the National Maritime Museum, that in the hot summer of 1933, in the depths of the Depression, ‘when to provide some holiday opportunity for people who had no means of taking one, Greenwich Council imported thousands of tons of sand and – presumably with Admiralty agreement – spread it on the Royal Naval College foreshore’.
Downstream Page 30