Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (18 page)

Now standing five foot six and weighing perhaps 140 pounds, Trudy was no movie star, but she was unquestionably pretty and, only one day after swimming three and a half miles, displayed absolutely no fatigue. Marshall described her as a "glowingly tanned, brown-eyed, yellow-haired youngster"—her auburn hair, recently cut into a modern bob, was bleached by a summer in the sun—"tall with square sturdy shoulders and symmetrical limbs; a beauty by right, utterly unpretentious ... [with] frank, beautiful eyes, brown, with a glint in them, like brook water on which the sun shines."

In short, the scene was pure Americana. Her education had recently ended with her graduation from grammar school at Public School 69, and now Trudy was, as Marshall described her, "an old-fashioned domestic daughter" who "stays at home and helps mother." Trudy Ederle came off as a poster child for wholesomeness, even telling Marshall that she personally didn't believe women should wear one-piece suits, similar to the suits she herself wore in competition, at public beaches. "I like the other suits better," she said, speaking of the less-revealing swimming dresses nominally still in vogue, but then, as if telling a secret, added, "although I don't wear stockings." Then, with a giggle she admitted that she usually removed the bathing skirt when she was ready to enter the water, making her appear both traditionally modest and modern at the same time.

With a day to reflect on her achievement, Trudy was absolutely effervescent, full of nervous chatter, answering each question, and then asking and answering another one or two or three more questions herself before Marshall could get another word in. For Trudy, that was something of a habit. She was already compensating for her partial deafness in subtle ways, and one strategy was to anticipate questions before they were asked to save her from the embarrassment of asking the speaker to repeat the question. On this day, giddy with excitement, the words poured out of Trudy in a flood of giggles and unintentional, genuine charm. After all, she had never been interviewed for a newspaper before and had rarely been the center of attention, even within her own family. As the third of what would eventually be seven children, she was sometimes lost in the family drama as her parents understandably paid more personal attention to her older sisters, both of whom were dating and embarking on a social life of their own, and her younger brothers, who still needed plenty of supervision. It was not intentional or reflective of anything but the dynamics of a large and growing family, but the self-reliant Trudy was often a bit overlooked.

She had been in a similar position within the WSA, where to this point she was viewed as simply a good swimmer of some promise but was not held in anything close to the same regard as Aileen Riggin or Helen Wainwright or any of the girls who had competed in the 1920 Olympics, or even her sister Margaret. But now, finally, it was Trudy's turn to talk and she loved it.

"I don't train," she offered as she ironed and folded and ironed some more, "if you mean eating special food or anything like that. And I don't practice much. The girls in the swimming association simply can't get me to practice. For a day or two before a race—yes—but not every day. Down here at the beach I am in the water an hour or two daily, because I love it and it's such fun. But the swimming association has an indoor pool for winter work, and do I go every day? I should say not!"

That was another reason why Trudy's victory had been such a surprise. Compared to the other top swimmers in the WSA, like Wainwright, Trudy was something of a slacker who did not appear to take swimming seriously, at least in her training sessions at the pool. In fact, though, once summer started and she was on her own in the Highlands, she was, in fact, swimming more than most of the other girls because she swam every day, for fun, rather than confining her efforts to a concentrated period of training. In that way she was lucky, for few of the other girls had as much unfettered access to the water as Trudy.

That was the key to her success, for Trudy's training "method" was, in fact, just as revolutionary as Louis de Breda Handley's improvements to the Australian crawl. She was in and out of the water all day long at the Highlands, reinforcing Handley's teachings and building her stamina. Purely by accident, as she went through puberty, her daily routine had allowed her skills to keep pace with her changing body. By swimming virtually every day, she had not only grown markedly stronger, but had retained and even enhanced her coordination at an age in which many adolescents become awkward and gawky. And by rowing and canoeing, she had also been cross-training, adding to her strength and fitness level. She had energy to spare, as she also told Marshall, "I love to row a boat or paddle around in a canoe. I love basketball and all the things you do in a gymnasium. I love—LOVE—dancing. But swimming is the best of all.

"I think it's the most splendid sport in the world. It develops you all over, not just one or two sets of muscles. It improves your general health—I never was really ill," she said, perhaps alluding to her bout with measles, and then thinking better of it, for as yet her hearing trouble was known only to her family and close friends, "but I've been ever so much better since I took up swimming. It strengthens your lungs and tones up your nerves. And it's such a clean sport!"

Then Marshall, obviously smitten, asked Ederle, "What is your secret? What made you swim away so easily from those other world beaters?"

Trudy grinned broadly before answering, "I just did the best I could, and I never thought of winning. I guess I swim as easily as I breathe or walk. And I truly think it ought to be just as natural for everybody. The scientists say we were all water animals to begin with, then why shouldn't we go back, now and then, to our first home—the ocean?"

Neither she nor perhaps even Marshall realized it, but Trudy had just articulated what made her different from swimmers like Hilda James or many of the other girls who swam in competition of the WSA. Most of them had come to swimming later in life, first learning for safety reasons, then, as their skills improved, competing, and then continuing to swim only to compete. When swimming became a sport it also became something that was practiced like a chore—a pleasant one perhaps, but nevertheless a chore, something that they had to work at to become good.

But to Trudy Ederle, swimming was something else altogether. It was play transformed, a way to herself. She never thought of winning while she was swimming because, well, she really never thought of anything when she was swimming. And that was the best part.

Ironically enough, although Louis de Breda Handley deserved credit for the American performance in the 1920 games, he bore little direct responsibility for Trudy's victory in the Day Cup. Handley was not even aware that she had regularly been swimming long distances and afterward didn't even recall that she had tried the swim in 1921, telling reporters she was "a rank outsider never having competed in a race longer than 220 yards."

At the end of the interview with Marshall, Trudy was photographed in athletic poses, touching her toes and, oddly enough, boxing. Although she is wearing a sweater over her suit in the photographs, compared to swimmers like Aileen Riggen or Helen Wainwright, whose bodies still resembled those of children, Trudy was much more athletic, with powerful arms, legs, and shoulders.

For a few days anyway, Trudy's Day Cup win made her nearly as well known as Olympians such as Thelda Bleibtrey and Helen Wainwright, girls that she had always looked up to. Swimming had always been fun for her, but now Trudy seemed to sense that it was something more. Near the end of the interview, Marshall asked her "What else do you want to do?" Trudy, who just a few minutes earlier had confided to Marshall about the Day Cup that "I never dreamed I could win. It never occurred to me that I could beat the other girls," now had an answer.

"Win some more races," she blurted out with a grin. "And I want to go to the Olympic Games."

Now that Trudy Ederle had a goal, she might even start trying to win.

A
FTER THE GREAT WAR
some looked out upon the English Channel and were reminded of the recent conflagration, others thought of shipping and commerce, and artists saw a subject for their work. Jabez Wolffe and Bill Burgess, however, saw something else.

Money. As soon as the war ended, swimmer after swimmer traveled to the English Channel, desperate to be the next, next man, after Burgess, to cross the waters. To that end, both Burgess and Jabez Wolffe suddenly found themselves not only popular among these new aspirants, but in competition once again. This time they would not compete against each other directly to see who could first cross the Channel, but compete they still would, through the men—and women—who had decided the take up the challenge.

By 1920, in fact, it was even beginning to get a bit crowded, both in Dover and on Cape Gris-Nez, as it sometimes seemed that anyone who could stay afloat for more than fifteen minutes suddenly wanted to swim the Channel, or at least announce that they did and for a brief time bask in the spotlight. To Jabez Wolffe and Bill Burgess, that was the best news possible at a time when the European economy was in tough shape. For much of the next decade Wolffe and Burgess spent almost as much time in Channel waters assisting others who wanted to swim the Channel as they had when each was trying to do so himself.

Before World War I the English Channel was little more than a name to most Americans. Most were almost completely unaware of the great naval battles that had taken place on its waters during the Napoleonic Wars or when the British fleet repelled the Spanish Armada. If they knew anything about the Channel at all, they knew it only as a simple fact of geography, that it separated England from France. For most, the Channel was a place with little romance and absolutely no story.

The Great War changed that. Early in the war German destroyers, U-boats (submarines), and other vessels roamed the Channel waters like sharks, sinking vessels of all nationalities, including those sailing under American flags. In February 1915 the German government declared "the waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole English Channel, a war zone from and after February 18," daring any vessel to test the prowess of its navy. Early in the war there was even speculation that if Germany could gain control of Calais it would use the port to launch an invasion of Britain across the Channel.

Both sides also made use of mines to deter boat traffic. The German navy laid mine fields at the mouth of many Channel harbors, while the British navy, hoping to prevent U-boats from roaming Channel waters in a pack, seeking out and destroying ships at will, maintained a mine field across the Strait of Dover from Dover to Cape Gris-Nez. For much of the war all but the most necessary military and transport boat traffic stayed in port. It was simply too dangerous to be exposed in open water, and those that did venture forth usually did so with military escorts.

Aspiring Channel swimmers were likewise confined to port, as the war made any notion of swimming the Channel an act of pure madness. And even after the war ended in November 1918, it was more than a year before the Channel was cleared of mines—even then the occasional rogue mine sank ships, or, still dangerous, washed up on the beach. Not until 1920 did swimmers again venture into the Channel waters and once more dream of reaching the other side.

Although the list of Channel aspirants before the war had almost exclusively been confined to swimmers of either English or French citizenship, after the war the nature of the combatants changed. The Americans were not only coming, they were already there and they were staying.

By then the English Channel meant much more to the American public than it had before the war. Now they understood not only its geography, but its recent political and military importance. Hundreds of Americans and dozens of American vessels had been lost in the Channel during the war, and thousands of American soldiers had either crossed the Channel on their way to fight in Europe, breathing its heavy, salt air and looking in wonder at the white cliffs of Dover, or else stood on the French coast, weary of battle, and dreamed of the end of the war and a return to peacetime. The reopening of the Channel after the war to both boat traffic and swimmers marked not only a return to normalcy, but a shift in world view. The Channel was no longer seen solely as a barrier that separated England from France, but as a passage that united England—and America—not only to the European continent, but to the future.

The war had changed everything. As soon as the passage was cleared of mines, swimming the Channel suddenly took on a significance that it had previously lacked. Before the war men like Webb, Holbein, Wolffe, and Burgess had been celebrated—and occasionally castigated—as individuals. Their desire to swim the Channel had been seen as a kind of partly eccentric, partly exotic, somewhat quixotic pursuit. But the Great War had spawned a strong sense of nationalism among all combatants, and now those that came to swim the Channel did so not only as individuals but as representatives of both their country and their culture. The next generation of swimmers to test the Channel did not try so much to cross the Channel as they tried to conquer it.

Unburdened by war, in the 1920s citizens on both the American continent and in Europe, eager to forget, found themselves spellbound by athletes and athletic achievements, giving attempts to swim the Channel new significance. The Channel Swimming Club was formed to oversee and support Channel swimmers, and the London tabloid the
Daily Sketch
made a standing offer of one thousand pounds to any swimmer who could match the efforts of Webb and Burgess. Over the next few years the
Sketch
would give Channel swimmers more and more ink, leading newspapers on both sides of the continent to do the same. In a few short years Channel swimming would evolve from an act of madness to a sport and even something of a craze.