‘The estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventurous imagination’
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, 1907
It’s 9 a.m. in mid-July, the first week of the school holidays, and I seem to be the only person on the train from Barking to Southend Central. The longest heatwave for seven years has just come to an end with dramatic thunderstorms, but the air is still hot and humid. As the train stops at Benfleet and then Leigh-on-Sea I catch glimpses of foreshore and boats moored on land like metal crabs, while at Chalkwell the tide is so far out there are miles of mud. I get off at Southend where the paved pedestrian street is deserted and a lone seagull screams in the air. Southend is a seaside town not yet open for the day. Only it’s not really a seaside town, it’s an estuary town, where the River Thames meets the waters of the North Sea in one of the largest coastal inlets in Britain. A major shipping route for oil tankers, ships and ferries, it’s tricky pin-pointing where exactly the estuary ends or begins. The western boundary is said to be Sea Reach, near Canvey Island, while the eastern boundary is a ‘line’ drawn from North Foreland in Kent to Harwich in Essex. It’s that imaginary line (or variations thereof) that has posed a serious swimming challenge both in the 1920s and today.
For novelist Joseph Conrad the Thames Estuary was a perfect place for adventurers, a route both to and from the empire. He lived upstream in Stanford-le-Hope in the 1890s and Heart of Darkness opens on board the Nellie, a cruising yawl: ‘The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway . . . leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.’ Conrad’s later novel The Mirror of the Sea, published in 1907, has much the same theme, with the estuary promising ‘every possible fruition to adventurous hopes . . . Amongst the great commercial streams of these islands, the Thames is the only one, I think, open to romantic feeling.’ Unsurprisingly, considering its location, there is a long tradition of swimming in Southend, for both competition and pleasure, and it was the training ground for two noted Channel champions.
Its reputation as a resort began in Georgian times, and its beaches and good rail links with London led to an influx of summer visitors. In Victorian times Southend was mocked by comic writers for its ‘cockneyism and vulgarity’, but it was a clean, quiet town according to Dickens’s Dictionary of the Thames, the air fresh and invigorating, ‘a well-built, well-arranged, and old fashioned watering–place’. ‘’Arry occasionally descends upon the place in his thousands’, and was to be found on the pier where ‘arrayed in rainbow tweeds, he delights in fishing for dabs’. The bathing machines on the beach were well used ‘although the strict rules of decency are not observed as well as could be wished’.
The bathing machines are long gone, of course, but the famous pier and its railway line still stands. I get the first train of the day, ducking my head to get into a carriage with shiny brown bucket seats. It rattles off like a ghost train ride, and there must be plenty of ghosts around this pier, first built out of wood in 1830 and then replaced with iron in the 1870s. It has survived fires, collisions from barges and boats and two world wars. Yet here it still is, the longest pleasure pier in the world at 1.33 miles, and it’s had a tram (and then railway) running along it since 1890.
From the window I see patches of water, clean and clear, then mudflats, and then finally the estuary proper. It looks broody today; a low purple cloud hangs over the landscape like a bruise. I get off the train and walk to the edge of the pier and put 50p in a talking telescope. A recorded voice tells me I’m opposite the Kent coast and the River Medway. There doesn’t seem much to swim towards except for what look like factory chimneys. At the far end of the pier is the RNLI station, and before that a restaurant with a large decked terrace. No one seems to be around and there isn’t much traffic on the water either; a sailing boat passes by and I can see a dredger in the distance near Canvey Island. To my left is the North Sea, a shimmering horizon lit up in a sudden burst of sunshine interrupted only by a single silhouette of what looks like a huge building. To my right the river heads towards London, to distant chimneys and the crest of a low hill. There are, as Conrad wrote over a hundred years ago, ‘no features to the land . . . no conspicuous, far-famed landmarks for the eye’.
As I walk back along the pier the air is silent but for the water gently sloshing underneath, the flap of tape warning about wet paint, and the rattling clatter of the returning train. The mudflats near the shore look like a sheet of ice. Unlike other piers, such as in Brighton, there isn’t actually anything to do on the long walk back except enjoy the views. There are places to sit, and two drinks machines with a big sign saying ‘Thirsty?’ and then a smaller sign saying ‘Out of order’. There is little evidence of modern life, but for regular no smoking signs, until I come to the end and there is the carnival of Adventure Island, an amusement park opened in the 1970s. I turn back and look along the pier; the ‘building’ I thought I saw near the North Sea is now clearly a massive boat.
A council booklet on the history of the pier makes no mention of swimming, yet it has been associated with races since Victorian times when the town hosted summer regattas with rowing and other events. In 1873 the press reported that ‘the annual aquatic festival was conducted . . . with even more than the usual spirit, and passed off with the accustomed eclat . . . the swimming, considering the state of the water, was most excellent’ and ‘there was the usual laughter splitting walking the greasy bowspit for a pig in a box’.
In May 1894 the Southend Swimming Club was formed and it ran an annual long-distance swim from the pier head. In the summer of 1909, the course, presumably along the length of the pier, was completed in fifty-five minutes.
The most famous club member was Norman Leslie Derham and in 1926 he was chosen as their candidate for an attempt to swim the Channel. Lord Riddell, owner of the News of the World, then the largest circulation paper in the world, was offering £1,000 to any English person who could beat the time set by an American swimmer. In other words, Gertrude Ederle, who that year had swum from France to England in fourteen hours thirteen minutes. In 1923 another American, Henry Sullivan, had swum from England to France in twenty-six hours fifty minutes.
Southend Swimming Club’s most famous member was Norman Derham. The future Channel champion trained in the Thames.
Derham’s archives are housed in the Southend Museum where Ken Crowe, Curator of Human History, has left them out for me. I’m expecting a few press reports; instead I find a large cardboard box on a table in a top-floor office. The first item is a neatly folded letter, several typed pages written by Derham’s daughter, Penny, who describes her father as ‘perhaps the last of the great adventurers’. I can’t believe my luck, I’m actually going to read about him in the words of a family member. Born on the Isle of Wight in 1897, his family originated from Germany, and were ‘lower landed gentry’ with a long naval tradition. In his early teens he was a midshipman cadet and before he was twenty he had ‘travelled three times around the world’. Conrad unsurprisingly was one of his favourite writers. During the First World War Derham joined the Royal Flying Corps, while in the Depression he worked as a pig farmer, an iron and brass bed manufacturer and a distributor of Fyffe’s bananas.
He later travelled to Canada and spent a season exhibition swimming with Johnny Weissmuller, the swimmer and actor who became known for playing Tarzan, before he went to Germany to become a glider pilot.
I’m entranced by Derham’s story, until I turn the page and Penny suddenly declares that her father was an admirer of Adolf Hitler, because of what he ‘was doing for the material welfare and advancement of his then bankrupt country’, although he also warned that the German leader was a ‘mad dog bent on conquering Europe if not the world’. Then Penny feels the need to confess something; sounding hesitant and asking for her father’s spirit to forgive her, she writes that he had ‘a tendency to Anti Semitisms’. I stop reading, feeling shocked; what does she mean by a ‘tendency’? But then she adds that this ‘did not prevent him
from volunteering to swim around the “St Louis” [in 1939] when it was off Plymouth to assist in picking up the Jewish Refugees who had planned to join hands and jump into the water rather than return to Nazi Germany when no port due to International Red Tape would allow them to land’. The way around this was if they were picked up out of the water. Her father’s view was that when you saw someone drowning ‘you don’t stop to ask his religion and look at the colour of his skin’ but get in the water and try to rescue them.
I refold Penny’s letter, still wondering about Derham’s character and prejudices, and put it back in the box, to find the next document is his very own thirty-one-page ‘my life story’. He could swim by the age of six and at seven had made up his mind ‘that I should swim the Channel and do the same as Captain Webb had done . . . I could stay in the water and swim for hours if they would only let me.’ As a twelve-year-old he swam a ‘few miles’ to East Cowes from Newport, and in 1911, when Thomas Burgess swam from England to France, this ‘again fired my imagination to conquer the Channel’. Taking advantage of his parents being away he swam for six hours from Osborne Bay to Calshot Point.
In 1921 Derham moved to Southend, still aiming to do the Channel, and a few years later he set ‘myself the task of swimming the Thames Estuary’. On 4 June 1925, he made his first attempt, giving up after four hours because of cramp, but earning the name Sinbad the Sailor as ‘several miles from the shore a large porpoise rose to the surface beneath me, lifting me completely out of the water’. A porpoise? I stop reading again, picturing Derham midway across the estuary riding for a moment on the back of a harbour porpoise.
Then, on 10 June, he managed the crossing of thirteen miles in five hours and modestly explains, ‘I may mention that this was the first and only time that the Thames Estuary had been conquered.’ He doesn’t describe his route; one press report says his five-hour swim was from Southend to Sheerness, another that on his third attempt he ‘successfully swam across the estuary from Sheerness to Westcliff . . . starting on the Kent side he had 500 yards’ expanse of mud to walk’ and ended at the Southend swimming bath. So perhaps Derham tried it in both directions.
Either way, his stated aim now was to beat Montague Holbein’s fifty-mile Thames swim of 1908. Derham was clearly aware of the swimmers who had come before him; first he wanted to emulate Webb, then he was inspired by Burgess, and so, unlike many women Thames swimmers, he saw himself as part of a glorious tradition. He knew what other men had done and he wanted to beat them; his motivation was to set a new record, to achieve fame like them, and, considering that he later took up the challenge from the News of the World, to make money as well.
On 2 August, in pouring rain, Derham started from Putney Bridge and swam to Woolwich, but was forced to give up after twenty miles, again because of cramp. ‘They fed me with tomatoes and anything they had,’ he explains, ‘and it is a wonder that I did not sink long before I reached Woolwich.’ He then swam twenty-one miles from Blackwall Pier to Gravesend but ‘the condition of the water [was] terrible’. The press explained that with just three miles to go he was ‘made to swallow more of the odoriferous and heavily chemical laden water of the lower Thames than was good for him’ when tugs and steamers went past just after the Woolwich Ferry. At Barking Creek an outward-bound Belgian steamer ‘saw fit to open her bilges just as she was level with the swimmer . . . it made [him] terribly sick and although bodily he was strong, he looked as though he had been poisoned’. Derham was ill for three weeks and decided he’d had enough long-distance swims for that year.
In July 1926 he began his first Channel attempt, but a heavy storm meant he stopped five miles from the end. His next attempt came on 2 September. ‘A London paper had offered a prize,’ he explains, ‘and I was advised by my wife to start from France . . . she said “why not go the easiest way and win the money?”’ He started from Cap Blanc Nez but only two miles from the end fog ‘robbed me of a certain victory’. On 16 September he tried again, covered in 10 pounds of grease, and this time he made it despite being so dazed and exhausted that just 15 yards from land he rolled on his back and lost direction. Then finally his feet touched bottom: ‘I shot up my arms and proclaimed to the World that I had conquered.’
Pathé News was there to see Derham arrive, filming him yards away from shore, where he was making no progress at all until a group of women swimmers enter the water, clapping and urging him on. Out he trudges, his limbs almost flopping as he emerges on to land. A few shots later he is fully dressed and combing his hair, beaming uncontrollably. And no wonder: he was the first Briton to swim from France to England, from Cap Gris Nez to St Margaret’s Bay, in ‘13 hours, 55 minutes’, and the third British man to cross the Channel after his heroes Webb and Burgess. And, of course, he had beaten the American Gertrude Ederle, knocking around forty minutes off her time. Naturally the British press was ecstatic and he was photographed leaving the News of the World offices both ‘chaired’ and cheered.
I leaf through the rest of the items in the box; someone has certainly put together a treasure trove of memorabilia, perhaps it was Derham himself. Postcards show him with slicked-back hair and a black swimming suit with the Southend Swimming Club badge; others depict his final moments as he reached shore. There is also an envelope of congratulatory telegrams sent to 5 Holly Gardens, Southchurch Road, Southend, just a few minutes’ walk from the museum. One is from the founder of the Webb memorial, Alfred Jonas, who congratulated him ‘on your regaining the glory for England’; another is from the president of the Otter Swimming Club. There is also a telegram sent from Derham himself, ‘DONE IT WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE OLD MAN NOW HOME TONIGHT LESLIE +’. Presumably these brief but triumphant words were sent to his family. The ‘old man’ had finally proved himself.
Derham received an enthusiastic welcome in Southend: flags were hung out, there was a civic welcome by the Mayor, dinners in his honour and a parade around the local football pitch. But, like Webb before him, now he had to come up with something new. His daughter, Penny, recalls him setting off from Tower Bridge to try and break a world record for canoe paddling, having designed and built ‘a sort of canoe with broom handles for paddles’. He began on the tide ‘one very murky peasouper evening’ and was nearly run down three times in the estuary before giving up. The press headlined the attempt: ‘Reckless Adventurer or Bizarre Suicide Attempt?’ The date isn’t clear, but in April 1928 he set off from the sunken garden at Southend in a collapsible boat with a passport in his pocket intent on reaching France. But a mile from the pier head a large wave overturned him and two hours later he was rescued. The following month the Southend Pictorial Telegraph shows him in a small Gaskin Ships’ lifeboat leaving Westminster Bridge to ‘conquer the channel again’. Presumably this ended in disaster, too.
In 1929, after having ‘a complete rest from long distance events’, Derham again decided to return to the Channel. He was also training a ‘Mrs. Coleman’ of Kentish Town in London, who was preparing for her Channel swim ‘under his supervision’ at Southend. Coleman had already shown ‘that she possesses the requisite stamina in a number of long-distance trials from Tilbury down the Thames’. Another paper reported ‘BIG SWIMS BY MOTHER AND DAUGHTER’ with ‘Mrs. Coleman, the well-known swimmer and her wonderful eight-year-old daughter, Edna, who recently swam five miles in the Thames in remarkable time, are now in Southend training for two big swims’. Edna Coleman would tackle Southend to Sheerness; her mother would attempt Tilbury to Southend. By now another swimmer called ‘Mrs Inge’ had created ‘a record for a Thames Estuary Swim’ in 1928 between Gravesend and Southend. She swam ten miles in two hours forty-three minutes, in the face of a strong easterly wind.
By 1938, however, Derham was working as a swimming pool superintendent. ‘I thought I was made,’ he told the press, ‘but the world forgets quickly. For a year or two I have lived like a lord, but in the long run I lost money over it. And then I had to find a new career.’ Now he had another idea: he would be the fir
st to glide across the Channel ‘from a straight take-off . . . And then I think that will be enough records for me.’ It doesn’t look like this was successful and, when Derham died at the age of forty-seven, the local paper described him as ‘Southend’s greatest ever swimmer’. His club, Southend-On-Sea Swimming Club, still exists today; members train in indoor pools not in the Thames, and it has fielded a number of Olympic swimmers, including Mark Foster and Sarah Hardcastle.
Norman Derham attempts to boat down the Thames and ‘conquer the channel again’ in 1928.
I leave the archives and head back to the pier, thinking of another champion Channel swimmer, East End insurance clerk Edward Temme, known as Tammy, who also chose the Thames Estuary as his training pool. He became the first person to cross the Channel in both directions; in 1927 he swam from France to England and in 1934 from England to France. Tammy, who trained at Leigh Creek, was 6 feet 2 inches and weighed 200 pounds and was said to ‘romp across the surface of the sea like a porpoise’. He was also a member of the British water polo team at two Olympic Games.
Other would-be Channel swimmers similarly came to Southend to train, such as Eva Coleman – it’s not clear if she was related to the ‘Mrs. Coleman’ whom Derham trained. In 1933 the press reported ‘Girl to Attempt Channel Swim Training Diet of Steak and Peaches’, describing Coleman as having ‘big brown eyes, black hair, an infectious laugh, and a swinging, supple-limbed stride’. Coleman worked as a cashier at a hotel in the Strand in London. Her mascot song was ‘This is My Lucky Day – l’m Going to Win Through’, and she was determined to have it playing on a gramophone on the accompanying boat, saying she could swim much better to music. Her motto was ‘No slimming for swimming’; just like Agnes Beckwith and Annette Kellerman before her the effect of swimming on women’s weight seemed to be of some interest, although perhaps she was just answering a question from the press. She was said to ‘hold a few records’, including a twenty-one-mile swim in the Thames, and a ‘seven hour test’ at Southend.
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