Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World (31 page)

As July turned into August the swimmers began jockeying for position to make their crossing. The summer had been unusually hot, and the waters of the Channel were warmer than usual, sometimes as warm as sixty-four or sixty-five degrees, but that didn't necessarily make the trip any easier—warm water did not necessarily mean calm seas. Each time a swimmer entered the Channel the other swimmers paid close attention, eager to learn from their experience and hoping their encounter with the Channel was not so horrible as to destroy their confidence and cause them to second guess their own efforts.

Taking advantage of a favorable tide, Jeanne Sion left from France on the morning of August 4 and swam strongly, if not terribly fast, for the better part of the day. As dusk approached, she was only one and one-quarter miles from the English coast when the tide turned and forced her from the water after some thirteen and a half hours. As she made her return to France her boat passed Colonel Freyburg, who had entered the water twelve hours after Sion. He swam through the dark and the next morning was within a quarter mile of the white cliffs of Dover, near enough to hear the crowds onshore cheering him on. One member of his party, noting that the tide was beginning to change, told a reporter, "If he can get over the next 200 yards in fifteen minutes, he'll make it."

But those two hundred yards might as well have been two hundred miles. The tide turned, and Freyburg was simply not a strong enough swimmer to go against it, yet he refused to quit. For the next two hours, despite his best effort, he was slowly but surely swept back toward France, losing more than a mile before he finally lost his bearings and, delirious, began swimming back toward France. When he was pulled from the sea he had spent nearly seventeen hours in the water.

Trudy was not put off by these failures, and the other swimmers, amazed at her speed, boosted her self-confidence when they told her they believed she would succeed. While Trudy waited for the go-ahead from Wolffe, she continued training.

In some areas Trudy did take Wolffe's advice. She took part in several "dress rehearsals" of the swim that mimicked the conditions she'd soon face for real. During these practices Trudy wore the one-piece unitard she expected to use during the swim and donned her bathing cap and goggles, which were attached to her face with latex in an attempt to create a waterproof seal. Wolffe and Trudy experimented with various types of grease and oils to cover her body, not only so she could get accustomed to the feel, but to the smell, as she tried various combinations of olive oil, petroleum jelly, lanolin, and porpoise fat to reduce chafing and help her to retain her body heat. Wolffe, who still expected that she would spend as much as twenty hours in the water, also wanted to make sure Trudy grew accustomed to swimming in the dark. He recommended that she begin her swim before sunrise so her time in the darkness would take place while she was still fresh. Wolffe not only trailed her in a rowboat, as he would during her real attempt, but even had an accompanying tugboat shadow her so she would grow accustomed to the sound of its engines and its effect on the surf.

In any Channel crossing, due to the strain and the cold Channel waters, swimmers must take nourishment. Although Trudy had neither eaten nor drunk during the Sandy Hook swim, the journey across the Channel would be at least twice as long and in cold water, Channel swimmers can burn more than twenty thousand calories. According to the then unwritten but widely accepted rules of Channel crossing, if a swimmer was touched, even accidentally, by another human being while in the water, or sought support on a floating object, such as a boat, the swim was invalid. As a result, finding a way to eat and drink in the water posed quite a challenge, as did getting accustomed to eating and drinking while battling seasickness and the accidental ingestion of seawater. Wolffe practiced passing food and drink to Trudy from the rowboat, sometimes by hand, and sometimes by means of a long pole to cut down on the chance of an accidental touch. He made himself responsible for selecting her food and drink, convincing Trudy and Viets that he knew what would be palatable in mid-Channel.

Trudy's dress rehearsals were near perfect. During one swim she spent three hours in the water, and even though she battled an adverse tide for the first sixty minutes, she still swam nine miles from shore and her pace of twenty-six strokes per minute never varied. Observers, including the tug captain Joseph Corthes, who had captained many crossings, were stunned not only at her pace but with the ease with which she moved through the water. He called her "marvelous," and offered that he believed she would beat Tirabocchi's mark "by several hours."

Trudy did find one of Wolffe's suggestions utterly baffling, at least at first. For each of Wolffe's many attempts, he tried to swim to the accompaniment of a bagpiper on his support boat playing familiar tunes, helping him battle boredom and maintain the proper pace. He wanted Trudy to do the same. "If I have anything to say about the musical program," he said, "we will have several bagpipers so that they can work in relays, a fresh man to take up the tune as fast as the piper is exhausted," adding that he had the bagpiper play different tunes during meals and when he needed extra motivation requested his favorite tune, "I Love a Lassie."

Trudy, however, shuddered at the thought of swimming to bagpipers for the better part of a day and countered by asking if it might be possible to listen to a radio on deck of the tug instead. But Wolffe vetoed the idea, explaining that it would be impossible to ensure that the radio would broadcast music in the precise rhythm required. Once again, Wolffe and Trudy were at a stand-off.

The solution to the quandary was provided by the French swimmer Jeanne Sion. Sion told Trudy that "music is as essential to a channel swimmer as food," and suggested that she swim to music she enjoyed, as Sion had, and hire a band, recommending that she get one that included a cornet, a clarinet, a trombone, and a concertina. Trudy, a true fan of popular music, liked that idea, saying she wanted to make sure they band played "real American jazz—hard boiled music. Nothing in a minor chord for me."

While that solved one issue, it still did not mean that Trudy and Jabez Wolffe were rowing together in the same boat. Wolffe had previously told some observers, like Alec Rutherford, an English sportswriter who was widely considered to be an expert on Channel swimming, that "if conditions are favorable ... I firmly believe that Miss Ederle will succeed, and if she does I think she will lower the record," and he made tentative plans for Trudy to make an attempt on August 7. On that day, however, Trudy had a touch of the flu, and the swim had to be put off until August 17, the next date the tides would be favorable. Wolffe was clearly miffed—he acted as if he thought she'd faked her illness and now changed his tune, telling a reporter, "I do not expect her to succeed ... She refuses to train and plays the ukulele all day...[and] she is too fast a swimmer for such a great distance. If she swims fast she will collapse, and she cannot swim slowly because her feet have a trick of hanging down when she is swimming slowly."

It almost appeared as if Wolffe didn't
want
her to succeed. Ederle's presence in France had captured the interest of the press on both sides of the Channel—never before had so much press attention been foisted on the Channel swimmers and their coaches. Wolffe not only enjoyed the attention, but as a result he now regularly fielded inquiries from other Channel swimmers—including some women—who were interested in hiring him in the event Ederle either failed completely or failed to better Tirabocchi's mark. However, if Trudy succeeded, few of these swimmers were likely to continue their quest, providing Wolffe with a financial incentive for her to fail. And if she did fail, Wolffe would likely be hired in the summer of 1926 by even more swimmers eager to swim the Channel.

There was also the matter of wagers. Insurance bookmakers in London started out giving odds of 1 to 10 against Ederle making it across, but in recent, days, due in part to Wolffe's original pronouncement that "Miss Ederle will succeed," the odds changed precipitously. Now the odds were only 1 in 4 against Trudy. While there is no direct evidence that Wolffe had placed a bet or was trying to manipulate the odds, his contradictory statements are suspicious.

Then again, it just may have been Trudy's sex that turned the old Scotsman against her. It galled Wolffe, who had tried and failed so many times in the Channel waters, to see Trudy, a woman, and a far better swimmer than he could ever dream of being, cut through the water at a speed he found both astonishing and—this is what really got to him—almost effortless, surrounded on land by reporters and supporters who treated her with a measure of respect and deference that was no longer his. Wolffe continued to complain to reporters that she hadn't followed his training methods and then added bitterly, "I have told her that this marathon swim is different from anything she has tried. But what man can argue successfully with a woman?"

While Trudy recuperated, Lillian Harrison made another attempt to swim the Channel, but when she was approximately halfway across she passed out from the cold water. Fortunately for her, at the time she was being paced by Ishaq Helmi, who managed to grab hold of her and keep her afloat until she could be pulled back on the boat.

That was enough for Harrison. When she recovered she said, "I've had my fling at this old channel; I'm going to turn it over to Gertrude Ederle now to see what she can do." Harrison never tried to swim the Channel again.

Ederle's illness kept her out of the water until August 12, when she resumed training, but she appeared no worse for wear. Wolffe, however, was at the end of his rope and now complained to reporters about interference from Trudy's chaperone, Elsie Viets. Just one day before Trudy was scheduled to enter the water, on August 16, he became so incensed that he stalked off and tried to board the ferry from Boulogne back to England, only to be hauled off the ship by some friends who urged him to reconsider. He chose to remain, but he still wasn't happy.

In fact, Wolffe seemed determined to undermine Trudy's confidence even further, for later that day Wolffe chose to sound an alarm. Two fishermen from Boulogne came back into port with two sharks they'd caught in the Channel, which they hung from huge hooks on the dock so the entire town could see the fearsome creatures on display.

Although biologists have determined that the Channel is, in fact, the occasional home of several shark species, including the thrasher shark, blue shark, basking shark, and, on rare occasions, even the great white, attacks are virtually unknown. Most shark sightings in the Channel were, in reality, of porpoises, and at the time some Channel residents used the terms interchangeably.

Trudy had little reaction to the news—this was the first she had heard of sharks from Wolffe, and other swimmers had told her there was nothing to be concerned about; of the many hazards that swimmers face in the Channel, shark attacks are among the most remote. But still, even entertaining the thought before attempting to swim the Channel, which required everything a person had, was a distraction, and the fact that Wolffe was bringing it up hardly made her feel better about him. If success was the goal, giving Trudy any reason to doubt both herself and the wisdom of her effort served no useful purpose whatsoever.

That is why it is strange that Jabez Wolffe chose not only to tell Trudy about the sharks, describing them in all their toothsome glory, but even added that he himself had been forced to cut short a Channel swim due to a shark attack, which was news even to those who had known Wolffe a long time. Less than twenty-four hours before she would test herself in the Channel waters for the first time, Trudy had to worry about not only the sharks in the water, but also, perhaps, the shark who was serving as her own trainer.

I
F TRUDY WAS TROUBLED
by visions of sharks and blood in the water the night before beginning her swim, she didn't let on. At 6:00 on the evening of August 16, after a dinner of her favorite meal, beefsteak—no horsemeat on this trip—Trudy retired early.

Ten hours later, Elsie Viets shook her awake. Trudy opened her eyes and her first words were "How I wish tomorrow was today." She knew that this day might well prove to be the most difficult and challenging of her young life.

Trudy dressed quickly, already thinking of the swim. As she stood up from a light breakfast of apple fritters and weak tea, she told Viets, "
I
'm ready for it. Bring on your old Channel." The women made their way to the dock in Boulogne, where the tug
La Morinie
sat waiting to bring her to Cape Gris-Nez and then follow her on her journey. Just as she began to board the vessel Viets noticed that Trudy had put her skirt on inside out and asked if she wanted to return to her room and change, but Trudy laughed it off saying, "I feel it will bring me good luck." Carrying a large American flag, she crossed the gangplank and immediately asked that it be raised.

Nearly a hundred people were milling about the dock in the dark waiting to board the boat, including cameramen, press correspondents—among them the American Minott Saunders, the Englishman Alec Rutherford, and Sydney Williams of the English-language
Paris Tribune—
assorted crew, well-wishers, and friends. The scene more resembled the controlled chaos of a departing cruise ship than the departure of a Channel swimmer. Just after 5:00
A.M.,
the tug pulled away from the dock for the short trip up the coast to Cape Gris-Nez.

Never before in the history of Channel swimming had a swimmer received so much attention and support. Not only was the band on board the tug, but the WSA had sent over a gramophone, just in case. The tug was equipped with advanced wireless and radio equipment to send bulletins back to shore, and no less than four motorboats had been hired by journalists to ferry written dispatches back to land from mid-Channel to provide almost a minute-by-minute account of Trudy's swim. If all that somehow failed to keep the world informed, Jabez Wolffe had even insisted that the boat be equipped with carrier pigeons.