On 6 August 1926, Gertrude Ederle made history by becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel. A hundred years on, Ettie Neil-Gallacher celebrates the American trailblazer who changed sport forever.
Last year, I failed to swim the Channel.
This isn’t unusual for attempted Channel crossings, but it was particularly devastating after years of training. I was 45.
The blow was softened by the camaraderie of my cheerfully eclectic relay team – a motley crew, ranging in age from 35 to 78, who cut through the swell at bewilderingly different rates. But it was a blow nevertheless, and one I feltparticularly keenly as I’d wanted to do it for 40 years.
My mother never learned to swim. So she determined that we would as soon as we could stand. She sourced a series of appropriately sadistic coaches, including a retired Australian special-forces officer, and a vast former Commonwealth medallist. He taught me to dive at the shallow end of the pool, warning that if I got it wrong, the rest of my life would be spent in a wheelchair.
My mother then felt that her job was done, and she was uncharacteristically relaxed about my being in the sea. As she reclined in her deckchair, merrily disassociating on the beach at Eastbourne, I would hurtle for red-flag seas from March to October, when I was really very small indeed.
My much-adored grandfather would charge in with me. As we bobbed and dived, he would tell me tales of Captain Matthew Webb (1848-83), the first man to swim the Channel, 150 years ago, on 24th-25th August 1875.
My grandfather would then recite John Betjeman’s ode to Webb, A Shropshire Lad.
He would then gleefully enrage my mother on the shingle by encouraging me to swim to France.
With the passage of time, Webb’s triumph seems all the more extraordinary. It was a further 36 years before anyone could replicate it.
A storm thwarted Webb’s first attempt. Covered in porpoise oil and clad in red silk togs, he tried again 12 days later. The conditions he encountered were far rougher than would allow a crossing to be attempted today.
Eight miles from France, the tides forced him to swim parallel to the shore for five hours. But, on 25th August 1875, he finally made it ashore, having swum breaststroke for 39 miles in 21 hours and 45 minutes. Webb would go on to participate in various aquatic endurance and exhibition events before drowning in 1883 as he tried to swim across the rapids below Niagara Falls to claim a $2,000 prize.
Today, only 20 per cent of attempted Channel crossings succeed. Around 300 people try annually and only 60 make it. Those aren’t quite civil-service fast-track odds, but they’re disheartening.
Webb said, ‘Nothing great is easy.’ But even he might have balked at embarking on the swim today.
The process has become eye-wateringly complex, protracted and expensive.
Choosing an association to ratify your crossing and chartering one of their pilot boats are only the first steps.
You have to book a couple of years in advance, as the slots, from late June until the end of September, get booked up.
While unratified crossings are possible, the most established associations have very strict rules about what you can wear (nothing that offers buoyancy or thermal protection) and what you can slather yourself in (antichafing grease seems to be more popular than goose fat these days) to complete an accredited crossing.
Then there are the rules on setting off from England and touching down in France (France-England crossings stopped in 1993 when nos amis across La Manche objected on safety grounds).
Swimmers can have no physical contact with the boat, apart from sustenance being passed via a feeding stick. While Webb enjoyed beef tea, ale, coffee and cod-liver oil, we had bananas, flapjacks and dehydrated food pouches – every bit as lacking in romance as they sound. Like Webb, we’d had bacon and eggs for breakfast, but we limply failed to wash them down with claret like him.
Then there’s the cruel element of luck.
Our departure was shunted on from a neap tide to a spring tide. You have to reach a certain point before the tide turns; if you haven’t, it’s curtains. You simply don’t make any progress and you get pushed back.
In the end, we were a mile shy of where we needed to be when the tide turned. Infuriating. The water wasn’t cold – just over 16 degrees (slightly colder, though, than it has been at that time of year for the past four years).
Regardless, we were all set for a 1am departure, only for our skipper to call it off an hour beforehand because he thought it too windy. He insisted we’d stand more of a chance the following day when, he gleefully assured us, the sea would be ‘as flat as a witch’s tit’.
In the event, there was quite a swell the next day. As we reached halfway, and despite our enthusiasm for battling on against the turning tide, the skipper called time.
Nothing great is easy, simple or cheap, but it was galling to fail.
