by Phil Jarratt
None of this made it any easier for Duke and his family. For generations the Kahanamokus had been proud retainers of the royal family and the land at Kalia was a royal bequest. Times had not always been easy, but Halapu, now a police captain, had a good job and the boys, first Duke and now David, were not afraid of hard work. They did not need anyone’s charity, but they also did not wish to offend anyone in the community. When Duke did finally raise the matter with Bill Rawlins, he was told: ‘This is not charity, son. This is the community paying you back for what you’ve given them.’
Halapu and Julia just looked confused when Duke passed on this explanation.
Like Duke, Cecil Healy took his time getting home from his 1912 Stockholm Olympic triumph. And make no mistake, despite having been beaten by Duke in the 100 metres, it was a triumph. Healy was a star of the Australasian team, in the water second only to Fanny Durack whose two gold medals surpassed his own silver for the sprint and shared gold for the 800-metre relay. Moreover, once the true story of Healy’s silver medal had become known, the Australian press had had a field day with his sportsmanlike refusal to contest the final without the Americans. The shorthand version of this was that Healy had forfeited a gold medal but won worldwide respect as a man of honour. It was to become his epitaph as a swimmer, because at 31 years of age, his grand days were behind him.
But there was enough fuel left in the tank to cut a final swathe through the swimming baths and salons of Europe. The weather remained glorious as Healy made his way first to Brussels for a half-mile scratch race, then on to Paris where he swam against the best of the European champions in the baths in the Seine. Although listed to swim in the same carnival, Duke and the other Americans arrived too late for the first day’s events, and Cecil only caught up with them in the lounge bar of the Hotel Regina for a brief drink before catching the overnight train to Italy.
Late in the summer Healy returned to Britain, where after a sabbatical in London, he took the ferry to Dublin where he dispatched the Irish champion over 220 yards, then went on to Scotland where he bettered Frank Beaurepaire’s record in winning the 220-yards all-comers event. It was becoming one hell of a swansong.
In Scotland Healy was also reacquainted with the delights of surfing, about which he later wrote:
Scotland was the only country where I had any real surf-bathing, and the locality was Aberdeen. The beach is a good one, and the waves were suitable for shooting. It happened to be a boisterous day when I arrived, and it took me fully ten minutes before I could persuade the man at the dressing box to let me go out. It was the assurance that I came from Australia that secured me his permission at last. When I rode a few waves he stood and gaped!
Healy finally sailed for home in early October and, after a stopover in Ceylon, where he also found the surf shooting to his liking, he arrived home in Sydney in November and was immediately subjected to media attention. ‘Old Cecil’ was home, proclaimed the Daily Telegraph:
The success of the team. The man who surpassed himself and made Australia famous as a swimming nation at the late Olympic games—Cecil Healy—is back … Who has done more to bring Australia to the front as a swimming nation? None. Healy stands alone.
While somewhat overstating the achievements of a courageous and principled Olympian who probably fell just short of true greatness, the homecoming article certainly reflected the general feeling of the Australian public, who wanted to love this slightly pudgy fellow who hid behind the softness of his flesh an extraordinary athleticism that enabled him to perform at the highest level in surf and baths while simultaneously conducting a business career. The Telegraph continued:
Early in his career the great Healy had the misfortune to strike such giants as Cavill, Wickham and Keiran, but despite being relegated to second place again and again he stuck gamely at it, and at last, by sheer pluck and determination, he achieved the coveted honours. And now, in this, his 34th year [in fact he was just 31], when most people would put him in the veteran stage, he returns from a victorious tour, having at the Olympic games done more for his country than any other representative.
His old swimming club, East Sydney, had disbanded in his absence overseas so there was much conjecture in the press as to which club Healy would now join, although he made no secret of the fact that he felt his future lay in Manly where he was captain of Manly Surf Club. But Healy was more interested in expressing his views in the opinion pages of the newspapers, rather than fuelling speculation in the sports section.
Healy had toured extensively in Germany in 1906 and 1907, and been profoundly impressed by the ‘power, strength and resources’ of the nation. He wrote of an international swimming carnival in Hamburg: ‘I have never witnessed a better organised sporting gathering … They seem to have a genius for detail, everything dovetails so completely. Nothing is out of place.’ On his return to Australia in 1907 he adapted the German approach to club swimming, and ‘Healy’s made-in-Germany schemes’ became well known, if not always well loved. In particular, he admired the enthusiasm, patriotism and ambition of German sportsmen, and their incredible loyalty. When he returned in 1912, however, Healy saw that the virtues he had once admired, taken to extreme, were now redefining the nation. Fearing that the seeds of German nationalism had been sown in sport, he began a prophetic article for The Sunday Times by recalling an address that the Crown Prince of Sweden had made during the Games:
He had traced the origin of the ancient Olympiads, and explained that they were not organised for the purpose of amusing the people, but that they owed their initiation to a much more worthy and practical object. That was, to divert the minds of men from the practice of cutting each other’s throats, in which occupation they were mostly engaged in those turbulent times, and thus ensure, at any rate, occasional periods of peace and quiet.
Now, Healy feared, sport was playing the opposite role—creating a nationalistic fervour and militaristic mindset in readiness for war. ‘It all prompts the thought,’ he wrote, ‘that when the order is given for her army to march, Germany’s battalions will move swiftly and surely, withersoever they are directed, without hitch or hindrance.’
Healy was rarely out of the news during the early Australian summer of 1912–13, but neither was his friend and rival, Duke Kahanamoku. The idea of an Australasian tour for the Hawaiian champion had been mooted since Stockholm the previous July, when Australasian team manager A.C.W. ‘Bert’ Hill had approached Duke, the Canadian champion, Hodgson and the British champion, Hatfield. While Hatfield and Hodgson had other commitments, Duke had expressed a great willingness to tour, and he had confirmed this to Healy when they met again in Paris.
Back in Sydney Hill chaired a committee meeting of the Amateur Swimming Association, of which he and his brother, Bill, were vice presidents. The prospect of Kahanamoku touring New South Wales as a guest of the association was greeted with such enthusiasm that the committee broke into a chant: ‘We want Duke!’ Or so sporting reporter Bill Corbett later wrote. Corbett also noted that ‘a flyer such as Kahanamoku would be sure to prove a great draw’. Although it seems unlikely that he had met the young Hawaiian at this point, Corbett was certainly impressed:
A well-educated young fellow is Kahanamoku. He has been through the college course at Honolulu and he can speak several languages. In manner he is free, easy and companionable, reminding one of Alex [sic] Wickham. He is of modest disposition. With his great reputation he would, without doubt, draw great crowds to all the baths here in which he appeared.
Duke had been through no college courses and, while he could speak both English and Hawaiian, he most often employed a pidgin combination of the two, but Bill Corbett was never one to let the truth stand in the way of a good story. The Duke legend was growing by the day, and Sydney wanted a piece of it. It seemed that a Kahanamoku visit for the NSW championships at the Domain Baths in January 1913 was a done deal. Duke had told Bert Hill he wanted to come and he had co
nfirmed this to Cecil Healy in Paris. Edward Rayment, a director of Percy Hunter’s NSW Tourist Bureau, passed through Honolulu in late October, spent an afternoon canoe-surfing at Waikiki with Duke and other Hui Nalu beach boys, and wired back to Sydney that Duke had confirmed again his intention to make the trip.
Surfers at Waikiki, c. 1912. Photo courtesy Outrigger Canoe Club.
But by the time the NSW Association actually issued a formal invitation through Bill Rawlins in December, Duke was deeply involved in preparation and rehearsals for Waikiki’s Mid-Winter Carnival, a sporting and entertainment extravaganza that would include a re-enactment of the landing of Kamehameha the Great, played by Duke, in a traditional double war-canoe. This would be followed by swimming, surf-riding and canoeing events in which the Olympic star was the major attraction. Sydney would have to wait.
The following May, Duke gave his first public swimming exhibition at home since his return from Stockholm, at the request of a team of Australian cricketers on their way to a series of matches in California. The exhibition was held off the end of the Moana Hotel pier, after which Duke posed for photographs with the cricketers and then took several of them out canoe-surfing. Over drinks later, the prospect of an Australian swimming and surfing exhibition tour was raised again.
A Sydney Morning Herald representative travelling with the cricketers reported that Bill Rawlins had received an invitation for Duke to tour the following summer from Bert Hill of the Swimming Association and that the visit was ‘almost assured’. Although the report was not credited, it appears to have been written by either Percy Hunter or Edward Rayment, both of whom had met Duke at Waikiki the previous year:
I met Duke on my way home from America last year, and have never met a finer fellow. He is 23 years of age, a fine stamp of an athlete, and he never smokes nor drinks. Duke is a very smart fellow, and is a draughtsman in the Public Works Department. He has already refused an offer of 50,000 dollars (£10,000) to turn professional. The offer was made by a gentleman who wanted to take him on a world tour.
A familiar refrain was emerging in the Australian press: Duke was coming, we just weren’t sure when. And not only was he the world’s greatest waterman, but he was also astonishingly handsome and perfect in every way. Charming, erudite, intelligent, cultured, fluent in several languages and holding down an important skilled job with the works department, not a crude word would leave his lips nor demon drink enter them. It was a wonderful story but it was somewhat at variance with the truth. It almost seemed as if the press of White Australia had to manufacture a superman to compensate for Duke’s skin colour.
In fact, since his return from Europe, Duke had struggled with bouts of depression brought about by his fears for his future working life. His travel expenses were all met by public funding and he was feted everywhere he went, but the fund to set him up for life had failed to reach its target of 5000 dollars, and its goal of buying Duke a house looked like falling by the wayside until Bill Rawlins negotiated a deal with wealthy landholder and industrialist W.R. Castle to purchase a small house on Ala Moana Road, near its junction with Kalia, for just 1800 dollars. On 14 March 1913, the Kahanamoku Fund committee, chaired by Rawlins, voted to finalise the deal and ‘inspect the property and ascertain what repairs were needed before Duke Kahanamoku could move in’. In order to protect his amateur standing arrangements were made so that the ‘title to the property would be held by the Waterhouse Trust Co. as trustee’.
As an amateur who was determined to protect his status for the 1916 Berlin Olympics and beyond, he could not accept any of the lucrative offers that came in each week to tour as an exhibition swimmer. Moreover, far from the image presented in the media, Duke’s only qualification was his 1909 diploma in industrial arts from Kamehameha School. When he settled back into the realities of needing to earn a living in Honolulu he took a job with Public Works but he was no draughtsman. He read water meters and then worked as a chainman with a surveyor.
Duke discussed the situation with his father, who told him he should go professional, and with Bill Rawlins, who said he should stop worrying as the city would support him. It was certainly about the money—he was the most famous Hawaiian in the world and he rarely had ten bucks in his wallet—but it was more about self-esteem. Duke wanted to feel that what he did better than anyone would one day pay his way in the world. He prayed that day would come soon.
The Hui Nalu tour of the US West Coast in the summer of 1913, led by Big Bill Rawlins and starring the world’s greatest sprint swimmer, Duke Kahanamoku, was a huge commercial success, filling grandstands up and down the California coast. But it was also an assertion of the Territory of Hawaii’s emergence as a sporting power, and perhaps more importantly for Duke and his beach-boy buddies, it was evidence of Hui Nalu’s emergence as one of the most powerful swimming clubs in America.
The Honolulu press didn’t hold back. The Pacific Commercial Advertiser bragged:
President W.T. Rawlins’ invasion of the Pacific Coast with his Hui Nalu swimming team, of which Duke Kahanamoku was the one great shining star, made history for little Hawaii, history of the kind which travels wherever newspapers are published no matter in what language they may be printed. President Rawlins contributed powerfully to make this year’s Pacific Coast Swimming Championships at San Francisco the most memorable in the history of the West Coast. The Hui Nalu team brought with it back to Hawaii the major portion of the cups and medals offered and won during the big two-day meet, with special mention going to the relay team in which each member proved superior to every other member of the opposing teams, and to Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian lad who has broken more world’s swimming records than any other swimmer known in history.
Duke’s triumphant tour was just what he needed to pull him out of his post-Olympic slump. While his easygoing manner usually hid his inner feelings from his adoring public, those closest to him could tell when there was a problem. Julia knew something was bothering her big keiki, but all she could offer was unconditional love. Halapu knew that at least part of it was Duke’s embarrassment at having to use a begging bowl to further his career. ‘Take da haole money while it’s there,’ he advised Duke. ‘Won’t always be offered, you know.’
‘Surf for your fun, swim for your life,’ Bill Rawlins counselled. ‘That’s all you have to think about for now. Do the times, make the team. Berlin is only three years away.’
Of course, it was nowhere near that simple, but Rawlins had got Duke the house on Ala Moana and a small allowance, so his views were not to be dismissed. Whenever he could push his fears for the future to the back of his mind, Duke relaxed in the moment, spending his days with the Moana beach boys and his friends in the Hui Nalu, surfing, swimming, canoe paddling, helping out a sister or two. But he soon found that an Olympic swimming star came under a lot more scrutiny than your average happy-go-lucky beach boy.
Fuelled by a growing rivalry over sales, Honolulu’s two daily newspapers, the Star-Bulletin and the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, both vied for the hot scoop on Duke on an almost-daily basis, with the loser quickly publishing a rebuttal of the other’s story. The only problem was that the mainland newspapers invariably ran with the scoop, no matter how far-fetched, and ignored the rebuttal. Such was the case in January 1913, when the Advertiser reported on ‘Duke Kahanamoku’s terrific battle with a high-powered, man-eating eel’, while the Star-Bulletin contended the next day that Duke had been nipped on the finger by a small eel while retrieving a coin from the coral reef, and that no medical attention had been required.
Reversing the flow of nonsense, the Philadelphia Enquirer syndicated group published an entirely fictitious account of Duke’s youth, in which ‘Boy Dodged Sharks For Sport’, that soon found its way back to the Islands, although the Star-Bulletin debunked it as ‘this week’s giant eel story’.
Sordid revelations about Duke’s alleged love life were of more concern, but he was held in
such high regard by the community that exaggerated tales of beach-boy romantic adventures rarely made it into print. The Star-Bulletin, however, in the midst of a circulation drive, did pick up an article from the San Francisco Call in which a beauty-contest winner sponsored by the newspaper alleged on her return from Hawaii that she had become ‘romantically involved’ with the famous swimmer. Duke maintained a dignified silence until the story went away, and it was never revealed whether he had in fact offered any kokua to this particular sister.
Duke’s departure for California with manager Bill Rawlins and six other Hui Nalu swimmers by the Wilhelmina on 18 June was something of a relief. He needed a campaign to focus on, for while he had swum exhibitions and kept fit through surfing, his preparation had lacked the intensity of the Stockholm campaign through the first half of 1913. That was until he got on the boat and Bill Rawlins was in his face every morning, the best motivator Duke knew. Duke had his favourite surfboard with him and intended to use it on the mainland, but first he had the Pacific Coast Championships at Sutro Baths, San Francisco, on the first weekend in July, and nothing would distract him from his purpose, which was to win everything he contested and to smash world records.
This he did with ease, establishing new world records for the 75 and 100 yards in the same swim, but the meet was also noteworthy for the emergence of a fine new middle-distance swimmer, Ludy Langer, who broke records for the half-mile. Duke had a special interest in Langer, who had been mentored and trained at Redondo Beach by his friend, George Freeth. At the post-meet reception Duke took the teenager aside and told him: ‘Damned fine swim, Ludy. You got a good man behind you in George, but that don’t mean much unless you go the distance, and boy, you sure did that. And how is brudda George?’