Daisy Belle

by Caitlin Davies

  It was then that you came swimming towards me, moving so close that your face almost touched mine and without saying a word you clambered gently onto my back. You were holding yourself so lightly that I could barely feel you were there, but for your plump little feet dangling on either side of my arms and your hands resting around my neck. Then I ducked under and you squealed with delight, thrown with a splash into the water.

  When you came up we began to slowly make our way across the pond, and as we did I was certain that I could hear the sound of cheers and applause as if thousands had come to watch us. Halfway across I stopped and turned my head, saw Johnnie Heaven standing on the jetty smiling and waving his hat. Then I cast my eyes higher, up to the diving platform. I had thought my life had ended the day I stood up there, but here I was starting again. And as I looked at the diving platform I had a sudden thought; if I could swim then could I possibly dive? And if I could, then what if you and I were to swim and dive together? I heard a chuckle in my head and my father’s voice: ‘Just think, Daisy. It will be a sensation. Mother and daughter, never been done in England before!’

  At once I caught myself. Whatever was I doing, thinking a thing like that? You weren’t here to perform, that wasn’t why I was teaching you, it was the joy of swimming for its own sake that I wanted you to learn. I would never treat you as my father had treated me. I would not repeat his mistakes, whatever your ambitions or mine, your happiness would come first. But oh, how I had missed being in the water, and how I had loved to show the world what I could do.

  I felt you come close and your hand pat the side of my face. ‘I want to dive,’ you said, turning to stare at the platform.

  I smiled. ‘I know you do.’

  ‘I want to dive with you.’

  ‘One day,’ I said, ‘perhaps we will.’ Then I felt so tired that I knew it was time to get out.

  *

  That afternoon I took you home to my room above the Essex Road Baths and I sat you down and held you close and told you who you were. I could not explain the full story, not then, for you were far too young to understand, but the joy on your face when I told you the truth was enough for me. The woman you had called mother left London with her children the following week, and she seemed not at all upset to go without you. We were safe from Dob, he could do nothing to us from prison, and we were a family now. At night I would wake and feel Johnnie Heaven next to me, know that you were sleeping in your bed, and in the mornings I watched you swimming on your father’s back like a porpoise. Of course there were disagreements sometimes, for you were an obstinate child just as I had been. ‘When will we dive together?’ you asked every day, ‘you promised we would dive together.’ And I said soon, when I felt stronger then we would dive at the baths. I would ask if we could have the pool to ourselves for an hour. But this wasn’t good enough for you, you wanted us to dive so everyone could see us, and you wanted it to be at the pond.

  *

  You remember that day, don’t you Hettie? It was Easter Monday of 1888, a mild day with clear skies. The Heath was busy with boisterous crowds; the air full of dust and the scent of oranges. It was the sort of morning when beauty seems to return to the fields and woods. There were no wagers to be had that day, no bets or entrance fees. It was a free event and our only purpose was to inspire.

  We had practised for months at the Hornsey Road Baths and then when spring had arrived we’d returned to the pond. It was all a matter of timing, you knew that, we had trained ourselves to work together and now we had to see if we could make it.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ called the announcer as we took our places on the diving platform, you standing on the top and I sitting beneath. I looked to my left and saw Miss Hope next to your father, Billy and Violet standing arm in arm by the boatman, little Percy between them. Then I took a quiet breath and steadied my beating heart.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ the announcer cried again, silencing the murmuring hum of the thousands who lined the banks of the pond. ‘Introducing the world-famous Miss Daisy Belle and her very clever pupil… Miss Hettie Belle!’

  I looked up and saw your eyes full of delight, your arms held aloft, an expression of utter concentration on your face. You were clearing your mind of trivial things, just as I used to do. Then the gun fired and off you flew and a split second later I joined you. There we were, mother and daughter in a faultless double dive, touching the water together and setting off swimming across the pond, back where we both belonged.

  Afterword

  Daisy Belle is based on the lives of several Victorian swimmers and divers whose daring deeds were once well-known, but who have now been largely forgotten. Agnes Beckwith was the primary inspiration for the novel. I first came across her in 2010 while researching Taking the Waters: A Swim Around Hampstead Heath. I saw a poster advertising one of her performances at the Royal Aquarium in London in 1885 in which she stands dead centre, resplendent in a white satin costume, stockings and boots, one arm resting casually on a rock. Just behind her in the water a man has both arms raised in the air, his mouth open in alarm, presumably in the process of drowning. Then I read a brief reference to a swim Agnes had completed in September 1875, when at the tender age of 14 she had plunged into the Thames at London Bridge and swum all the way to Greenwich. When I came to write Downstream: AHistory and Celebration of Swimming the River Thames I had the chance to further explore her career, and realised just what a trailblazer she had been.

  Agnes Beckwith was born in Lambeth, south London, in 1861. Her father Frederick is believed to have come from Ramsgate and was a leading swimming professor, as well as an English professional champion. By the time of Agnes’ birth he was swimming master at the Lambeth Baths and his ‘Family of Frogs’ started giving public displays in the early 1860s. At the age of nine Agnes was performing with her brother Willie, himself a champion swimmer, as ‘Les Enfants Poissons’ in a plate-glass aquarium at the Porcherons Music Hall in Paris. All seven of Frederick’s children were involved in his aquatic galas; his second wife Elizabeth (whom he married in 1876 after Agnes’ mother died) played the piano during shows, while his daughter Lizzie went on to became a renowned swimmer and performer.

  Agnes Beckwith completed several record-breaking swims in the Thames, including 20 miles in 1878. She then formed her own ‘talented troupe of lady swimmers’ and travelled the country giving exhibitions. In September 1880 she spent 100 hours submerged in a whale tank at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster, eating her meals in the water and reading daily accounts of her swim in the press. Two years later she was being billed as ‘the premier lady swimmer of the world’ before setting off on a tour of the United States. In June 1883 she attempted to swim from Sandy Hook, New Jersey, to Rockaway Pier, New York. But a mistake in the calculation of the tides, along with bad weather, meant she was forced to give up.

  Back in the UK, Agnes continued to take part in shows with her family and was still holding exhibition swims in the early 1900s, now married to theatrical agent William Taylor. Their son William performed alongside his mother as ‘the youngest swimmer in the world’. Agnes later accompanied her son to South Africa, where she died in a care home in Port Elizabeth in 1951.

  While my novel draws on much of her long and successful career, Agnes Beckwith’s relationship with her parents is entirely fictionalised. I have also taken liberties with some of the dates of her swims, and with various aquatic events and venues. The Hornsey Road Baths, for example, didn’t open until the early 1890s.

  Other real historical characters who appear in the novel include Emily Parker, a swimmer from Clerkenwell, London, whom Agnes was initially meant to race against in the Thames and who later became a swimming instructor. Captain Matthew Webb was the first person to swim the English Channel and was briefly trained by Frederick Beckwith. On 22 September 1874 he went out on a boat from Westminster Bridge with Frederick and journalist Robert Watson, who described the swim in his memoirs A Journalist’sExperienceof Mixed Society. In 18
79 Agnes did indeed join Captain Webb in the pool during a six-day swim at the Lambeth Baths. The Channel champion died in the Niagara River in 1883.

  The scenes set in Margate are fictitious, but the Beckwith family did have numerous links to the town. In 1884 Agnes performed and taught lessons at the Marine Palace Baths, situated on what is now the site of the Turner Contemporary, and that same year she saved a drowning woman in the sea off Margate sands.

  While there are no records of Agnes Beckwith appearing at the Mixed Pond on Hampstead Heath, north London, this was one of the few places in the capital where women could officially swim outdoors. The Mixed Pond had been a bathing place for men since the early 1800s, and towards the end of the nineteenth century women were allowed to swim at the pond on Thursdays. Their elegant costumes and swimming performances were said to have become a local attraction.

  Daisy Belle also draws on the career of high diver Annie Luker. She was born in 1870, in the Thames-side market town of Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Like Agnes, she was the daughter of a swimming professor who also trained Captain Webb. Annie started off as a river swimmer and in 1892 she attempted to swim nearly 19 miles from Kew to Greenwich to establish a claim to ‘the female championship of the world’. Two years later she was ‘World Champion High Diver’, performing at the Royal Aquarium where she plunged head first 70 feet into a tank containing just eight feet of water. Annie Luker successfully challenged a male diver, Professor O’Rourke, and remained at the Royal Aquarium for six years, as well as training female divers at the Caledonian Road Baths in north London.

  I’m grateful to four modern-day family members for providing me with further details of Annie’s life, and particularly Allie Gallop who sent a wonderful bundle of images and archive documents. According to family lore, Annie Luker was later arrested as a suffragette after a protest dive off a bridge in London and imprisoned in Holloway, under the name Annie Parker.

  Women like Agnes Beckwith and Annie Luker are yet to be properly recognised; there has been no induction into any swimming hall of fame for them, and yet what they did made it possible for women to swim and dive today.

  Daisy Belle also draws on the biographies and autobiographies of later swimmers, such as the Australian Annette Kellerman who pioneered the one-piece swimming costume for women, and the American Esther Williams, popularly known as the Million Dollar Mermaid. In 1952, while filming a stunt, Esther ‘swan dived’ from 50 feet wearing an aluminium gold crown, breaking three vertebrae in her neck. She made a full recovery.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to the following people: Dr Dave Day, Professor of Sports History at Manchester Metropolitan University, who is the leading expert on Agnes Beckwith and the first person to rescue her from obscurity. Along with his partner Margaret Roberts, Dave answered numerous questions and generously shared his own research. Dr Ian Gordon, medic to the British Olympic Swimming Team, provided invaluable help on the running of Victorian swimming baths and was always willing to dig into his own extensive archives. Patricia Sener, who in 2015 swam 17 miles from Sandy Hook to Atlantic Beach to raise awareness for local charities working to keep the ocean clean, kindly answered my questions about what it was like to swim the New York Bight. She became the first person to succeed in the crossing, taking a route very similar to that of Agnes Beckwith in 1883, although Patricia had never heard of her Victorian predecessor. Helen Wright from the Cally Masters club in north London re-created a Victorian swimming gala at the Parliament Hill Lido on Hampstead Heath and told me what it was like to swim in full Victorian clothing including pantaloons, a corseted dress, hat and boots.

  Thanks also to Keith Myerscough, Paul Hitchings, Ern Dick for his research on Clara Beckwith, Frank Chalmers, Lee Jackson whose Dictionary of Victorian London http://www.victorianlondon.org/ is an excellent resource, Ian Dickie, chair of the friends of Margate Museum for educating me on the history of Margate, the swimmers and lifeguards on Hampstead Heath, and members of the Mixed Pond Association http://mixedpondassociation.weebly.com/. Last but not least, thank you to my editor Claire Baldwin and to everyone who pledged for the novel on Unbound, and made it possible for Daisy Belle to see the light of day.

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