Female athletes were still mostly ignored when Gertrude Ederle, who has died aged 98, made her historic swim across the English Channel from France on August 6 1926.
By the time she landed on the Kent coast at Kingsdown, just south of Deal, 14 hours and 31 minutes later, she had not only become the first woman to make the crossing but had also beaten the previous record — held by a man — by about two hours.
Her immediate fame and adulation were well deserved, for her epic feat was accomplished in appalling weather conditions, which had forced her to swim 35 miles instead of the minimum 21. Her record held until 1950, when Florence Chadwick, another American, crossed in 13 hours and 20 minutes in a relatively calm sea.
Ederle, who was only 20 when she made her crossing, entered the water at Cap Gris-Nez smothered in mutton grease and wearing a two-piece — though copious — bathing suit she had designed herself. Small boats were warned of a choppy sea, and she also had to beware of debris, poisonous jelly fish, and cross currents. The wind blew up, the waves grew larger, and members of the press in a following boat became seasick.
‘I had to keep joking with them to keep up their spirits,†she recalled. At one point, she refused her trainer’s request to quit, and her entourage sang popular songs, among them Let Me Call You Sweetheart and Sweet Rosie O’Grady, to keep her going. Years later, she remembered: ‘People said women couldn’t swim the channel. I proved they could.â€
When Ederle returned to her native New York, she was greeted by a crowd of two million and a ticker-tape parade. She met president Calvin Coolidge, was paid thousands of dollars to tour in vaudeville shows, starred in a short film, Swim, Girl, Swim, and had a song and a dance step named after her.
Although not in the rank of Charles Lindbergh, who flew the Atlantic the following year, ‘Trudy†Ederle was, for a time, as famous in the United States as such 1920s sports stars as baseballer Babe Ruth, boxer Jack Dempsey and tennis player Bill Tilden.
Before her channel triumph, she had won gold and bronze medals at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, and had set women’s world and US freestyle records for distances from 100m to 800m. In a single afternoon in 1922, she broke seven such records and, between 1921 and 1925, she held 29 amateur national and world titles.
Yet her determination to swim the English Channel — her 1925 attempt was spoiled when her coach broke the rules and touched her when she began coughing — caused her to go completely deaf before she was 40. She had suffered from measles at the age of five, and been warned by doctors against swimming again. Her worsening hearing ruined her chances of marriage, although she received hundreds of proposals during her time as a celebrity.
She was born one of four daughters and two sons to a butcher and his wife. The family owned a summer cottage in New Jersey, and Ederle learned to swim on the Jersey shore. She called herself a water baby, and said that, over the years, she had been ‘happiest between the wavesâ€. In anticipation of her channel crossing, as a teenager she swam 16 miles through dangerous coastal currents.
After her initial fame, public interest began to fade and, in 1933, Ederle slipped on the stairs of her block of flats, injured her back and was in a plaster cast for four years. Doctors told her she would neither walk properly nor swim again, but her determination took over once more and, in 1939, she appeared in a water show at the New York World Fair.
As time passed, she seemed to be best remembered by reporters, who wrote articles commemorating the 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th and 30th anniversaries of her channel swim. She always agreed to interviews, but hated reports that dwelt on her deafness.
During World War II, Ederle worked for an airline at New York’s La Guardia airport, checking flight instruments, and later taught swimming to deaf children. She spent her last years at a Christian health centre near New York. She never married. —