Leap In

by Alexandra Heminsley

  By being charming, determined and specific, De Arte Natandi did eventually achieve its goal. Interest in swimming was revived during the Renaissance period, particularly given the era’s respect for classical culture and the countless water exploits of the Greeks and Romans.

  In 1724, Benjamin Franklin visited the UK to spread the word about the sport, putting on demonstrations and lessons in the River Thames. At the startling age of eleven, he had even invented the swim fin, explaining years later, in 1773, that his prototypes resembled ‘painter’s pallets’, and describing his use of them in helping his stroke: ‘In swimming I pushed the edges of these forward, and I struck the water with their flat surfaces as I drew them back. I remember I swam faster by means of these pallets, but they fatigued my wrists.’ He even tried them on his feet before realising that the ankle kick required for breaststroke made them useless.

  For centuries, breaststroke had continued to be the stroke most swimmers are recorded as having used. It was how Lord Byron made his famous heroic crossing of the Hellespont in 1810; it was what the splendidly top-hatted gentlemen of the UK’s oldest swimming club were using (in the sea I now call my own) when they founded Brighton Swimming Club; and it was how in 1875 Matthew Webb made the first Channel crossing from England to France. There is occasional mention of side-stroke, described by Robert Patrick Watson (nineteenth-century journalist and one of Webb’s informal swimming coaches) as ‘the most beautiful and graceful means of transit through the water’. Despite its loveliness, though, it never really gained widespread popularity.

  Side-stroke’s relative obscurity makes sense given the feats that were being accomplished with breaststroke. The latter seemed obvious, instinctive – you could both see and breathe – and there were all manner of inventions and contraptions being created to train the swimmer out of the water. Moreover, the great Victorian building programme of creating swimming baths up and down the UK catered for everyone who wanted to practise the sport.

  Meanwhile, overseas discoveries began to reveal the ways that indigenous peoples further afield were swimming. By 1844, the US painter George Catlin was describing a new stroke that involved doing something previously unheard of with the arms. Catlin was an author, painter and traveller who specialised in the unexplored American West and its native American Indian people. He visited several indigenous tribes, including the Mandan, the Ojibwa and the Iowa, painting striking portraits of the leaders in their full regalia.

  The portraits were widely acclaimed, with the poet Charles Baudelaire asserting that Catlin had ‘brought back alive the proud and free characters of these chiefs, both their nobility and manliness’. It seems his observations of the Mandan in particular were not merely restricted to static portrait style, because in journals published in the 1840s, he described seeing them swimming: ‘The Indian, instead of parting his hands simultaneously under the chin, and making the stroke outward … throws his body alternately upon the left and the right side, raising one arm entirely above the water and reaching as far forward as he can, to dip it, while his whole weight and force are spent upon the one passing under him, like a paddle propelling him along.’

  Here we have the first seeds of front crawl being sown; later that year, Catlin took things to the next level. He had teamed up with a Canadian entrepreneur to bring a group of Ojibwa Indians to the UK on a sort of tour for audiences of enquiring urbanites. These were the days when curious Victorians thought little of staring at unfamiliar ‘savages’ as a semi-educational pastime, and the Spectator’s reviewer is both fascinated and appalled by the trip. The article of March 1844 describes the Indians being paraded all around London, particularly at Catlin’s exhibition of portraits in Piccadilly’s prestigious Egyptian Hall, and even performing a war dance for Queen Victoria herself (to the reviewer’s utter horror).

  What cemented the strange trip’s place in the history books was an invitation to the visitors from the British Swimming Society to take part in a race, promising the fastest Indian a silver medal. So in April 1844, the Ojibwa Indians arrived on horseback at the High Holborn baths – which had been pre-heated to extra-warm temperatures for them on the advice of their doctor. The crowds were spellbound, not just by the sight of the stripped Indians swimming at speeds faster than they were used to, but also by the style in which they were doing it.

  The Times of 10 April 1844 describes their stroke as ‘totally un-European. They lash the water violently with their arms, like the sails of a windmill, and beat downwards with their feet, blowing with force, and fanning grotesque antics. They then dived from one end of the bath to the other with the rapidity of an arrow, and almost as straight tension of limb.’ Mesmerising though it was, this revolutionary arm style was not taken up by Londoners with any great haste. The mixed reviews of the Ojibwa’s visit seem to have left Victorian England dismissing the stroke as barbaric, and it wasn’t for another thirty years that someone else had a go at doing the same thing.

  That someone was John Arthur Trudgen. He was born in Poplar, London, in 1852, but lived in Argentina from the age of eleven on account of his father’s job with an enterprising engineering company based on the Isle of Dogs. Trudgen grew up unselfconsciously swimming with native South American children, all of whom easily and comfortably used the overarm stroke that had so confused the folk of London twenty years earlier. When he returned to England, he worked on the stroke, refining it quietly.

  Britain was now a nation in the grip of swimming fever, with swimming clubs and championships sprouting all over the country. Schools had been including sport as part of their curriculum, and competitive swimming was ingrained in the system. Out of term, the advent of ‘leisure time’ meant that workers and their families were taking seaside holidays and relaxing in outdoor pools in beautiful locations up and down Britain.

  By 1873, Trudgen was ready to debut his new-fangled stroke in competition, and entered a championship at the Lambeth Baths. His performance caused a sensation, with the Swimming Record of the time noting that he ‘swam with both arms entirely out of the water, an action peculiar to Indians. His time was very fast, particularly for one who appears to know but little of swimming.’ By 1875, he was winning English championship races, despite still using breaststroke legs. But sadly for him, his achievements went unnoticed, as that same year, Matthew Webb completed the first Channel crossing. Distance had won out over style in the imaginations of the Victorians, and it was Webb who dominated the headlines. Despite the new stroke starting to quietly catch on, Trudgen was largely forgotten for many years, returning to work as a machinist back home on the Isle of Dogs before dying in 1902.

  Also in 1902, the Australian Richmond ‘Dick’ Cavill entered and won a hundred-yard race using a new style that he claimed had been inspired by Solomon Islander Alick Wickham. By using Trudgen’s Ojibwa/Argentinian-inspired arm stroke, and adding the ‘Australian kick’ – moving the leg from knee to ankle up and down in the water – front crawl was finally born. (For years it was referred to as ‘Australian crawl’, or ‘American crawl’, presumably depending on who was discussing it, before ‘front crawl’ was eventually settled on.)

  I had been taking swimming lessons for six months before I discovered that front crawl had only been invented barely one hundred years previously. The ease and confidence with which everyone seemed to be doing it had always suggested to me that it was some sort of instinct that sporty people simply possessed, and that I was either mentally or physically lacking for not having a natural understanding of how it worked. I was very wrong. And I was very, very relieved when I discovered the truth: yes, we are born with an instinct to play, to move, to relax in the water, but no, we are not born with a perfect front-crawl style. It is as natural to us to swim front crawl as it is to ride a bicycle – i.e., not natural at all.

  Sure, once you have mastered riding a bike, you simply can’t understand what on earth the fuss was about, but until you have tried, fallen repeatedly and finally succeeded, it all seems un
imaginably complicated. Front crawl is the watery equivalent of this process. It has evolved from a combination of hundreds of years of travel, curiosity, competitiveness and a desire to move as efficiently as possible, but it is not the work of mere instinct. And anyone who suggests otherwise, or that it should be a doddle to pick up, is a fool.

  You will notice that this potted history of swimming has so far made little mention of women. This is not, I suspect, because no women were swimming until the twentieth century, but rather because women’s stories are often written as sidebars to the main event. While the gents were heroically performing feats and inventing new strokes and contraptions, women were more usually seen as curiosities performing spectacles instead of the magnificent athletes they so often were – and they were often doing it while being held back by significant restrictions.

  In 1875 – the same year that Webb completed that first Channel crossing and Trudgen won his first race with front crawl – Agnes Beckwith, the daughter of a swimming professor, swam the Thames from London Bridge to Greenwich in one hour and seven minutes. She was fourteen years old. Ten days later, fifteen-year-old Emily Parker swam from London Bridge to Blackwall. Beckwith in particular was a pioneer of women’s swimming, taking on all sorts of feats throughout her career – from swimming twenty miles down the Thames to swimming for a hundred hours in six days and spending thirty hours straight treading water in a tank at the Royal Aquarium.

  She wisely made the point that swimming wasn’t just good for maintaining the figure, but was also beneficial for general health, explaining that, ‘Many ladies, indeed, take the pastime up solely as a means of obtaining a presentable physique, for it improves the chest and arms wonderfully. But, besides making muscle, the sport promotes the circulation, and on this account it has been found excellent for the woman of bad complexion, as a concomitant giving also a healthy appetite.’

  Nevertheless, she was expected to undertake her adventures in heavy Victorian bathing suits – even doing her water tank feat in black silk trimmed with crimson. Meanwhile, in the US, modesty laws around the same time decreed that women (and the children who were, of course, with them) wear heavy layered outfits, which were impossible to swim in and increased the risk of drowning. Even when a national programme to teach people to swim was introduced, as late as the 1920s beaches were being patrolled by police charged with maintaining public decorum. In 1921, the formidable-sounding 39-year-old author Louise Rosine was arrested in Atlantic City for having bare knees on display and taking a swing at the arresting officer. She declared to the New York Times, ‘The city has no right to tell me how I shall wear my clothes. It is none of their darn business. I will go to jail first.’

  And so it has been that for over a hundred years, women on both sides of the Atlantic have been using swimming not just as a means of hitting the record books (like Gertrude Erdele, who in 1926 became the first woman to cross the Channel, and Mariam Saleh Binladen, a dentist from Saudi Arabia, who in 2016 was the first woman to swim the 101-mile length of the River Thames), but as a way of declaring ownership over their own bodies, and indeed using them to make a political point.

  In 1920, Charlotte Epstein founded the Women’s Swimming Association in New York, going on to persuade the Amateur Athletic Union to allow women to compete, and coaching many women to glory in the Olympics. A significant part of her legacy was her organisation of ‘suffrage swims’, raising money for the suffragettes’ fight for votes for women.

  The same year that Louise Rosine was arrested in Atlantic City, British swimmer Lily Smith announced that she was training to make the crossing to France with a very explicit mission in mind: ‘I am going to swim the Channel in order to demonstrate that woman is the physical equal of man. I am going to put a stop forever to this twaddle about the weaker sex. Yes, I am a firm believer in woman’s suffrage.’

  In 2016, Mariam Binladen said, ‘I wanted to show that a young woman from Saudi Arabia can achieve a lifelong ambition, whilst at the same time raise awareness of bigger causes, particularly the plight of thousands of suffering Syrian orphan refugees. I also want to encourage more women from around the world to participate in sport and show them that anything is possible.’

  Lily Smith may not have managed to complete her Channel swim, but her larger goal was accomplished at least in part. Today, open-water swims and marathon swims are not generally gender-segregated, and it is largely accepted that in this sport at least, men and women are equals. Indeed, some of today’s distance swimming records are held by women rather than men.

  Women fought for outfits that gave them the freedom to swim because the alternatives were literally killing them. They campaigned to have the right to move unencumbered in the water by layer after layer of stiff Victorian fabric; they faced arrest to be allowed to get their knees out and feel the water around their legs; they risked death to prove that they could swim as well as men could.

  Today, when I stare at those Amazonian women dancing in the water on the side of that vase made nearly three thousand years ago, I think of the women who drowned in crinolines lest a Victorian gentleman be forced to witness the horror of the sight of a female ankle. But I also think of today’s pressure to look ‘acceptable’ for swimming in public. Today women are no longer drowning in crinolines. Instead, surrounded by swimwear images designed with little thought given to the range of women who want to swim, there are women who go to bed hungry, who go to the bathroom to vomit after lunch, who go online for diet pills that kill them from the inside out … lest a modern gentleman be forced to witness the horror of the sight of a little excess flesh.

  When you tug at your swimsuit, wondering if your bikini body might pass muster, give a moment’s thanks for the liberty we do have in the water today. Bear in mind the women who fought for the freedom of movement we have beneath the surface. Give a little thought to Louise Rosine and her night in jail. And remember what the record books now show: when we are free to wear what lets us be our best and do our best, regardless of whether we look our best, we can be the best.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Basics of Front Crawl

  It would be optimistic, indeed impractical, to suggest that you can learn to swim from reading a book alone. Realistically, a handful of lessons would absolutely be the best course of action to take – whether you plan on learning to swim from scratch or want to get to grips with front crawl as a new discipline. You do not need to sign up for endless hours of tuition, but you do need to commit to a realistic amount of time spent practising in the pool. As with running, your body needs to warm up, so the first three panicky lengths will never be representative of what you’re capable of if you can persuade yourself to stay in the water for thirty. So to help you enter the water those first few times feeling a little calmer, here’s a brief run-down of the basics of front crawl and how it is generally taught,

  The most important thing you need to remember is that there is no perfect swimming style: front crawl in particular is still a stroke in evolution. There are, however, some basic core truths that can make the whole process significantly easier. As we now know, front crawl is a relatively new stroke, and there will always be a guru coming round the corner ready to revolutionise as much as confuse. Added to that, there are also those who are not afraid to chip in with their own advice, based on how they were taught back in the 1950s or 1960s. Perhaps this is where my extraordinary conviction that my elbows should never bend came from.

  There are currently two dominant schools of teaching: Swim Smooth and Total Immersion. The ASA, our national body in the UK, teaches what is largely a Swim Smooth-type methodology, but both Swim Smooth and Total Immersion have books, DVDs, online videos, courses and coaches all over the country and beyond.

  Swim Smooth is an Australia-based organisation, founded by Paul Newsome, a UK-born triathlete turned swimming coach. Its coaching method is simple and pragmatic, committed to a philosophy of ‘coaching the swimmer, not the stroke’. It divides swimmers into v
arious types according to their natural physical attributes, such as height, strength, gender and natural buoyancy, also taking account of their emotional relationship with swimming, and then works within those criteria. For example, the ‘Arnie’ type is a competitive swimmer who sees swimming as little more than a ‘necessary event for triathlon’, and who will often hold their breath while swimming as they’re approaching it as more of a sprint. Whereas a ‘Bambino’ is an anxious new swimmer whose goals are more focused on health, and who consequently has little feel for the stroke or rhythm in the water.

  Basing a teaching approach on the idea that we all have different bodies, motivations, anxieties and histories strikes me as eminently sensible. This philosophy that there is no one perfect style works particularly for open water, where the biggest advantage you can have is adaptability and capacity for change according to circumstances. Having sat on the beach minding bags and watching my friends, or on the boat in Greece as the other swimmers fought strong currents and my eyes streamed with salt water, I have seen first hand how different we all look. I’ve seen swimmers who slip through the water like anchovies, and those who sturdily plough through it like tug boats. I have learned not to judge what anyone’s relationship with the water might be. This open-minded approach to each and every swimmer’s assets is Swim Smooth’s greatest advantage.

  Total Immersion is more comparable to the idea of barefoot running – it’s a holistic, almost hippyish philosophy, focusing more on the experience than the outcome. Its founder, Terry Laughlin, is a charismatic US-based swimming coach, whose teaching method concentrates on moving through the water as efficiently as possible, focusing on balance and streamlining rather than a hardcore regime of fitness and strength training. His mantra is that ‘every lap I swim feels blissful’ (I told you it could border on the hippyish), and he refers to Total Immersion swimming as ‘fishlike swimming’. These are fanciful ways of putting his actually entirely sensible philosophy to his students: he simply believes that if we can learn to position ourselves as well and efficiently as possible in the water, we won’t have to expend as much energy on shoving it out of the way when we want to move through it. In short, if we can make ourselves as sleek, pointy and fish-shaped as possible, we will be able to focus on feeling graceful, beautiful and relaxed in the water, instead of churning, kicking and pulling our way through it.