Swim Girl, Swim

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” appears every Wednesday at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please "like" it and let me know what you think by commenting. (Please check out previous columns while you're at it.) All support is appreciated. Don't forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

Did you watch the feature film Young Woman and the Sea when it was released in May? Me neither. I might see it now, though, after researching the life of Gertrude Ederle, who in the movie is played by Daisy Ridley. It was 98 years ago this week that Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. And, as it happens, she lived to be 98. Plus, on the O’Brien side of the family, both my mother and grandmother were named Gertrude.

Ederle – who the press would dub “Queen of the Waves” -- was born on October 23, 1905. She grew up in Manhattan where her father owned a butcher shop, on Amsterdam Avenue. She learned to swim in Highlands, New Jersey, and at only 12 she joined the Women’s Swimming Association. The same year, she set her first world record in the 880-yard freestyle, becoming the youngest world record holder in swimming. She set eight more world records after that, seven of them in 1922. In total, Ederle held 29 U.S. national and world records from 1921 until 1925.

A century ago, at the 1924 Summer Olympics – in Paris -- Ederle won a gold medal as a member of the first-place U.S. team in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay. Together with her teammates, she set a new world record of 4:58.8 in the event final. Individually, she received bronze medals for finishing third in the 100-meter freestyle and 400-meter freestyle races. When they arrived back home, the U.S. Olympics team was treated to a ticker-tape parade in New York.

In 1925, Gertrude Ederle turned professional. The same year she swam the 22 miles from Battery Park to Sandy Hook in 7 hours and 11 minutes, a record time which stood for 81 years before being broken. That same year, the Women's Swimming Association sponsored Helen Wainwright and Ederle for an attempt at swimming across the English Channel. Wainwright cancelled due to an injury, so Ederle decided to go to France on her own. She trained with Jabez Wolffe, a swimmer who had attempted to swim the English Channel 22 times. On August 18, 1925, Ederle made her first attempt but she was disqualified when Wolffe ordered another swimmer (who was keeping her company in the water), Ishak Helmy, to recover her from the water. She bitterly disagreed with Wolffe's decision and it was speculated that he did not want Ederle to succeed.

She returned to New York and began training with Bill Burgess, who had successfully swum the Channel in 1911. Ederle also received a contract from both the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune to pay her expenses and provide her with a modest salary. Almost one year after her first attempt, on August 6, 1926, she tried again to cross the Channel. She started at Cape Gris-Nez in France at 07:08 a.m. and came ashore at Kingsdown, Kent, having swum the 35 miles in 14 hours and 34 minutes. Rough waters had kept pushing Ederle off course, adding 11 miles to the journey. Still, she bested the times of the men who had crossed the Channel before her.

The first person to greet her was a British immigration officer who requested a passport from the bleary-eyed, waterlogged teenager.

Ederle’s record stood until Florence Chadwick swam the Channel in 1950 in 13 hours and 23 minutes. Prior to Ederle, only five men had completed the swim across the English Channel, with the best time of 16 hours, 33 minutes by Enrique Tirabocchi. When Ederle returned to New York, there was yet another ticker-tape parade, with more than two million people along the parade route.

Now it was time to cash in. Ederle did appearances at the Brooklyn Mark Strand Theatre, and she was paid a far greater amount than they had ever paid an individual performer. Subsequently, she went on to play herself in a movie appropriately titled Swim Girl, Swim and tour the vaudeville circuit, including Billy Rose’s Aquacade. She met President Calvin Coolidge and had a song and a dance step named for her.

However, Ederle's career in vaudeville was not a huge financial success. The onset of the Depression also diminished her earnings. A fall down the steps of her apartment building in 1933 twisted her spine and left her bedridden for several years, but she recovered well enough to appear at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

Ederle had poor hearing since childhood due to measles, and by the 1940s she was almost completely deaf. Having little money left from her time in vaudeville, she taught swimming to deaf children. She never married and in later years lived in a nursing home in Wyckoff, New Jersey. She died there on November 30, 2003, at the age of 98. Her grave can be found in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The trade paperback edition of The Last Outlaws is being released this month. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to purchase a copy.