Downstream by Caitlin Davies

Author:Caitlin Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI

Thomas Burgess was one of seven swimmers, including Annette Kellerman, who in August 1905 attempted to swim the Channel. In 1911 he became the second person to succeed after Captain Matthew Webb.

Kellerman lasted six hours, and although she had to give up on this attempt because of rough seas and seasickness, as well as two further attempts, it stood as a women’s record for many years. ‘I had the endurance but not the brute strength,’ she wrote in 1919. ‘I think no woman has this combination; that’s why I say that none of my sex will ever accomplish that particular stunt.’ But then, of course, in 1926 Gertrude Ederle became the first sportswoman to cross the Channel. She wore silk trunks and ‘a narrow brassiere’ (which she removed once she got going), making her possibly the first sportswoman to swim in what would eventually become the bikini. Kellerman later said she favoured women over men when it came to long distances ‘because we have more patience’, and challenged any man in the world to swim against her at any distance over ten miles.

One British paper praised Kellerman’s ‘powers of physical endurance of mean order, and for a mere girl in the first bloom of womanhood to battle with the waves for six hours is little short of marvellous’. She quickly became a celebrity, and was invited to swim for the Prince of Wales (later George V). But she wasn’t allowed to appear with bare limbs, so she sewed a long pair of stockings on to her suit, thus inventing a prototype of her one-piece costume that would revolutionise the world of swimming for women. Despite her failed Channel attempt, Kellerman then set off for France where in September the same year she competed against seventeen men racing down the Seine, finishing joint third with Burgess, and watched by half a million spectators. She also beat the Austrian swimmer ‘Baroness Isa Cescu’ in a twenty-two-mile Danube River Race from Tulln to Vienna. This was presumably Madame Walburga von Isacescu, whose record Eileen Lee would break in 1916.

Kellerman was as well known for her swims as for what she wore. Aside from wanting to swim the Channel naked, and being made to cover up before appearing in front of the Prince of Wales, in 1907, while about to do a three-mile swim, she was arrested on a Boston beach for wearing her one-piece costume – at a time when most women were still wearing corsets, sleeves and a hat. She was charged with public indecency in what may well have been a cleverly orchestrated publicity stunt. During her court appearance she said it was more criminal for women to have to wear so many clothes in the water; they would never learn to swim and they had a greater chance of drowning. The judge allowed her to wear her suit, if she kept it hidden under a robe until the moment she got into the water. She went on to design the famed ‘Annette Kellerman black one-piece suit’, the first modern swimming costume for women.

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