Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World

by Glenn Stout

  One of those people full of discouraging talk was Jabez Wolffe. He showed up in late June, looking for a swimmer to train. Despite the huge number of competitors in Cape Gris-Nez, word had traveled fast since the previous summer, and no one, not even Lillian Cannon, who was still without a trainer, wanted to sign on with Wolffe. He even took up residence in the Hotel du Phare and made regular appearances in the bar. Trudy and Wolffe had brokered a public and, from Trudy's side of things, ghostwritten peace accord, but the two still had little use for each other. Trudy remained wary of her former trainer, and Wolffe wanted nothing more than to coach another swimmer across the water and thereby beat Ederle to her goal. He thought he had been hired by Clarabelle Barrett, who was financing her quest on a shoestring through a series of one-hundred-dollar subscriptions from family friends, but Barrett had yet to show. While he waited he simply added to the poisonous atmosphere in the hotel.

  It didn't help the mood that the first swimmers of the season all failed in excruciating fashion. Frank Perks of England, who had been training in Dover, made the first attempt of the season on July 14. A day or two before the weather had changed abruptly, and now the Channel was experiencing a heat wave. Perks left at nearly midnight, but fourteen and half hours later he was spit back out—the weather had turned stormy and he'd been caught by the tides. Mercedes Gleitze was the next to try—she lasted five hours before being pulled from the water, violently ill; then Helmi and then Perks tried again and failed, as did Colonel Freyburg and several other men. Their stories were monotonously similar. All experienced strong starts before encountering weather conditions that continued to deteriorate until the Channel finally rejected each swimmer outright, each going down like the local tough guy against the carnival kangaroo. In the Hotel du Phare, the word impossible began to be heard. Even if the warm temperatures held, the weather was so unsettled that good conditions rarely lasted for more than a few hours before the wind picked up, then rain and even lightning danced on the horizon. Hardly anyone in Cape Gris-Nez thought the Channel would be crossed in 1926 by anyone, much less a woman.

  Trudy was getting increasingly impatient, and in a dispatch dated July 31 she wrote, "All you hear is talk of the weather, the wind and the tide. It has reached a stage now where I bring a book to the table and when I am not eating I sit with my fingers in my ears, impolitely burying myself. People here are channel crazy and it seems their pesky task and desire is to frighten swimmers."

  Back in the United States, readers of the newspapers were beginning to wonder just when—or if—Trudy would finally enter the Channel waters. After all, she had been in France for nearly two months, and interest in dispatches that focused on what she was eating was beginning to wane.

  With so many female swimmers vying to become the first to cross the Channel, there was a great deal of gamesmanship going on—Mille Gade Corson, like Barrett, was training in Dover yet was planning to begin her swim from Cape Gris-Nez. Away from everyone else, no one knew when she might appear. Each swimmer hoped to get the jump on the others, getting in the water first as soon as conditions were favorable, and no one was planning to announce in advance precisely when that would be.

  The next big splash was made by the enormous Clarabelle Barrett. She'd been training on the cheap in Dover while Jabez Wolffe had b£en waiting in vain in France. On August 2, with little fanfare, she left without him, entering the waters of Shakespeare Beach and slowly lumbering through the water. Although Barrett had learned the American crawl as a member of the WSA and had taught swimming, she was not nearly as fast as Trudy and was in comparatively poor condition. If Barrett succeeded in crossing the Channel it would be because her great size and bulk—she was six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds, with enormous thighs—allowed her to remain in the cold for hours, not because of her athletic prowess.

  For more than twenty hours she plodded through the fogbound waters of the Channel as if she were in some dream, because for most of her journey she could see virtually nothing and depended on her escort boat to keep her on course. Finally, even though she was within two miles of Cape Gris-Nez, she left the water after twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes. She simply didn't swim quickly enough to cut through another tide change. For the final few hours she had been doing little more than swimming in place, caught in the world's largest endless pool.

  Barrett failed, but she had made it to within two miles, near enough to break the logjam of swimmers onshore and for Ederle and Burgess to both worry and gain confidence. If nothing else, Barrett's swim indicated that the water had finally warmed to a point that a swimmer could stand it for an extended period of time. Her near success also made them anxious—no one thought she'd come so close—but if Barrett could come within two miles of success, Trudy, Burgess, and Trudy's father were all confident that Trudy would make it all the way across.

  On August 5 the moon reached its last quarter, signaling the peak of a neap tide, when the tidal fluctuation was at its lowest point and the period of slack water at its greatest. Earlier Burgess had occasionally intimated that he might have Trudy make her swim when the moon was full or new, during a spring tide, because she was such a strong swimmer that the increased current would work to her advantage, but few observers believed him. Still, the gambit may have worked. As August 5 approached, no other swimmer seemed to be preparing to take on the Channel, choosing instead to wait another two weeks when the water would be a bit warmer.

  There was just one problem. Ever since arriving at Cape Gris-Nez, Trudy had been struggling with her goggles. No matter what she did or how tightly she strapped them to her face, they still leaked, and Trudy found the Channel waters burned her eyes "like acid."

  In 1925 her goggles, which featured two lenses, had given her all sorts of trouble and been more of an impediment than a help. So before she left New York in 1926 she went to an optical company on Fifth Avenue and gave them her own design for a set of goggles consisting of a single piece of glass that went over both eyes, giving her a single view of the water. Thinking in practical terms, Trudy thought that if she could avoid having the goggles around her nose she might prevent them from leaking.

  The optical company fashioned the goggles to her standard using a single piece of amber-colored glass set in metal and leather with a strap holding them tight to her head, but it told her bluntly, "We cannot guarantee they'll be waterproof."

  During her time at Cape Gris-Nez that disclaimer had been proven correct. The seal simply would not keep water out. Trudy and Meg experimented with all kinds of methods to try to seal the goggles, adding extra chamois to help them seal around her face, and paint along the edge of the metal frame, but every time they got the mask to seal to her face, it leaked around the lens. The goggles weren't much of an issue during training—she could stand the leaks and salt water for a few hours, but the longer she stayed in Cape Gris-Nez the more she worried about using her goggles during the swim itself, later saying, "I had a real mental block about swimming with leaky goggles." The last thing she needed while swimming the Channel was to repeatedly stop and empty water from her eyepiece.

  On August 4 Burgess gave her the word. If the weather held he wanted her to make the swim on Friday, August 6. Training was over. Trudy had two days to prepare herself for the ordeal ahead.

  That night in the hotel, as she sat with Meg and ate dinner under the flickering candlelight in the hotel's dining room, she again started to obsess over the condition of her goggles. Then her eyes focused on a candle at the dinner table. She watched a drop of hot wax slowly drip down the side of the candle, then stop as it cooled.

  "Gee, Meg," she said, "maybe we should melt a candle on the inside of the goggles," and the two girls discussed how that might work. The next morning Burgess sought Trudy out and made it official. "If the weather holds like this," he told her, "you're going tomorrow." There was no time to wait. The girls scoured the hotel for some more candles, then went back to their room where they melted the candles
down to wax and carefully applied it around the edges of the amber glass.

  Trudy then went down to the water, put the goggles on and dove into the water, swimming up the coast then back. With each stroke of her arms she began to feel more confident, certain, and relaxed.

  When she came out of the water she was overjoyed. "Meg," she called out to her sister, "Meg, I think we have them waterproof!" To the superstitious young woman, the goggles were a sign.

  Trudy was ready, but in London the editorial writer of the London Daily News was still unimpressed with female athletes. He was in the midst of writing an editorial that would appear the next day. "Even the most uncompromising champion of the rights of women," he wrote, "must admit that in contests of physical skill, speed and endurance they must forever remain the weaker sex."

  22. What For?

  TRUDY SPENT THE DAY before the most important day of her life quietly, saving her strength, and staying in her room with Meg and Julia and away from the crowd at the hotel who discussed her chances of crossing the Channel as if she were a racehorse. Late in the afternoon, as a dim sun tried to burn through the low clouds and haze, she took a walk along the beach with Meg and her father. As the three made small talk and joked about the red roadster Trudy hoped would be waiting for her on the other side, Trudy turned to look at the sea, searching for England on the horizon.

  She was ready. Back in her room at the hotel her bathing suit and goggles were already laid out for her. When they finished the walk, her father and Meg prepared to leave. They would spend the night in Boulogne and help prepare the escort tug, the Alsace, and then rise early and sail back to Cape Gris-Nez before sunrise. Burgess wanted Trudy to start her swim just before 7:00 A.M. She would wake at dawn.

  As her father and sister prepared to board their car for Boulogne, Meg carrying the gramophone and Trudy's precious collection of records, Trudy had a few final words for her father. While Meg would return to shore the following morning, Trudy would not see Henry Ederle again until the next day, aboard the Alsace. "Remember," she said to her father after a quick embrace, "Don't let anyone take me out of the water."

  Before she retired she poked her head into the hotel bar where Bill Burgess and some journalists and locals were all gathered, toasting the effort to come, and she bid everyone a quick goodnight. A few hours before, Burgess had received the latest weather report form the Meteorological Office in Bracknell, in the south of England. It was brief and to the point.

  "For the 24 Hours commencing 1500 GMT Thurs. 5th August 1926," read the report, "light indefinite winds, fine, visibility mainly good, warmer." If the forecast held, the weather would be nearly perfect, the air temperature a few degrees warmer than the waters of the Channel, which varied from sixty-three or sixty-four degrees along the coast to sixty-one farther out, where the water was deeper. A bit of haze would keep the glare down, and the light, variable breeze would keep the seas calm.

  No rain was in the forecast, a report that delighted Burgess but one that Trudy found a little wanting. As she had told Julia Harpman, she had never lost a race when it rained.

  Before Trudy retired for the night, her ghostwriter sat with her a while. Trudy chattered away as Harpman let her talk and burn off the nervous energy as Trudy did her best to bolster her own self-confidence.

  She was a true believer, in herself, in the concept of sportsmanship she'd learned from the WSA, and in the patriotism she had felt during the Olympics and after. She knew this swim was not just important to her, but to everyone—her father and mother, her country, her friends in the WSA, and women everywhere. It was as if she were just a vessel being pushed along in the current, carrying all those dreams to the opposite shore.

  But when she thought about all that, it began to make the swim seem a little overwhelming, even impossible. Personally, she tried to keep any self-doubt at bay simply by thinking about that promised red roadster, one she hoped to find at the bottom of a rainbow across the Channel. That was it. In her mind she was not swimming for anything but the car, which made the whole swim seem smaller, as if she were in competition for a medal or a trophy instead of everything else. The more she thought about that, and the detailed logistics of the swim, the calmer and more confident it made her feel. Everything was in place—her new suit, her goggles, her father and sister on the boat, her trainer, everything. All she had to do was swim, and if there was one thing Trudy knew she could do, it was that.

  '"England or drown' is my motto," she brashly told Harpman before turning in for the night at 11:00 P.M. "I could never face the people at home again unless I had got across."

  Cape Gris-Nez (France) Aug 5. (AP)—Miss Gertrude Ederle of New York will start shortly before 7 o'clock tomorrow morning on her attempt to swim the English Channel. She will take to the water at Gris-Nez Beach.

  It was a short night for Meg and Trudy's father in Boulogne. They boarded the Alsace well before dawn, and by the time the sky at Gris-Nez began to brighten at 4:30 A.M. "summer time" in France, the French equivalent of daylight saving time, Joe Corthes had already put the anchor of the Alsace down several hundred yards offshore. Meg was ferried ashore and the rowboat, which would carry her, Burgess, and several others back to the boat, was pulled up on the beach past the high-tide mark.

  Meg was met by a car, which took her to the hotel, where she met Burgess and woke Trudy. The swimmer blinked her eyes open and asked her sister simply, "Do we go?" Meg nodded yes. Trudy bounced downstairs in her pajamas to the dining room for breakfast—coffee, a bowl of cornflakes, a half a chicken, and over Burgess's protestations, a peach for dessert—and then sat by the kitchen stove with Meg and tried to ward off the morning chill.

  Soon after sunrise, at 5:37, the white cliffs of Dover slowly appeared through the morning haze. There was already a crowd of several dozen journalists and curious onlookers gathered on the beach, and every few moments another two or three or four arrived, making small talk, glancing at the sky, and looking out to sea. Another rowboat was lowered from the Alsace and began to make its way to the beach, and a little dog jumped from the tug and swam behind, drawing laughs from the crowd as the Channel seemed no match for the energetic pup, which beat the boat to the beach. The day was clear to start, but hazy, and as the sun glowed red on the horizon there was some cause for concern. The old sailor's adage was in the air again—"Red sky at morning, sailors take warning." The sky itself was not red, but the sun was. Burgess hoped it would soon lose its color, and that the weather report would hold.

  He had arranged for Trudy to make her final preparations to swim the Channel at the Hotel du Sirene, on the beach, but before she left the Hotel du Phare, Meg applied the first coating of olive oil to Trudy's body as Burgess hovered outside her door and admonished her to hurry up. Then Trudy donned her innovative, two-piece suit—the WSA logo and an American flag patch sewn onto the front of her brassiere—her red bathing cap, and a robe. It was 6:45 A.M. AS soon as she was dressed they all hopped back into taxis and private cars and made their way to the beach, where Trudy, Meg, and Burgess went into the garage of the hotel and applied still more grease to her body, this time a darker, tarry substance that left Trudy looking and smelling like she had just left Burgess's garage back in Paris. Before Trudy began her short walk to the beach from the hotel, Meg helped her pull her goggles on over her head and pulled the strap tight.

  Then Trudy strode purposefully to the beach, where the crowd now numbered nearly a hundred people, like she was out for a morning constitutional. She walked briskly, taking deep breaths, and carefully adjusted the goggles to her face, taking care not to smear grease over the glass surface. As the crowd gathered around, Burgess stood barefoot in the sand, his sleeves and pant legs rolled up, a plaid driver's cap perched on his head. He opened a can of lanolin and applied yet another layer of grease on Trudy's body, rubbing the thick substance up and down Trudy's legs, around her neck and under her arms, everywhere and anywhere he thought might be susceptible to chafing. The newsmen called gre
etings to Trudy, and she responded with good-natured humor. "I'll make it this time," she predicted. Then, looking at her hands, she held her arms wide and with a huge smile on her face she held her fingers, heavy with grease, apart and quipped, "I feel just like a grease ball!" At the prodding of a cameraman, Lillian Cannon, wearing a full-length coat to ward off the morning chill, stepped from the crowd and gingerly shook Trudy's hand and wished her good luck. As a newsreel cameraman captured the scene, the little dog that had swum ashore from the boat stuck its nose in the can of grease and slurped down great gobs of lanolin, drawing laughs from those on the shore.

  For some, that was all they found amusing. Most of the forty journalists or so on the beach, roughly equal in number from the United States, England, and France, had assumed they'd be able to board the Alsace and accompany Trudy on her journey—that had been the custom when others tried to swim the Channel, and no one had indicated that wouldn't be the case this time. But the Tribune-News syndicate was protective of its story. It had paid for the boat, and only Julia Harpman and a few others—the photographer Arthur Sorenson, John Hayward, a journalist from the British newspaper the Daily Sketch, who would serve as the official observer, Meg, Helmi, Henry Ederle, and a few crew members were authorized to board the ship. The rest were left, quite literally, high and dry. Unless another boat could hastily be hired, they would all have some explaining to do to their editors and would witness only the start of the swim.

  By the time Burgess finished coating Trudy with grease it was already just after 7:00 A.M., and the trainer was anxious to get going. He had plotted her course to take advantage of his knowledge of the tides, and every minute mattered.

  No other swimmer had ever tried the course Burgess intended to have Trudy follow, but he was absolutely convinced that after nearly three decades of observation of the Channel, and untold hours spent in its waters, he had finally figured out the best way across. A year before, as was customary, Trudy had clambered into the waters from the rocks at the base of Cape Gris-Nez itself, the nearest point to Dover, a starting point that seemed to make common sense. If a swimmer left at the right time, after only a few strokes he or she was able to take advantage of the current.