BONUS: Gertrude Ederle Ruling The Waves Part 2

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

I'm Alex von Tunselman, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

Last time on History's Heroes, we heard the story of the American swimmer Gertrude Ederley.

In 1926, she became the first woman to swim the English Channel.

If you haven't heard our previous episode, Gertrude Ederley Ruling the Waves, I recommend you go back and listen to that first.

Not only did Ederle have to battle the cold, the salt, the exhaustion, she also had to battle sexism and a coach who was jealous jealous of her and who she believed was trying to sabotage her.

And when she did all of this, she was just 20 years old.

She completed an immense personal challenge and inspired Jenny Landreth, a writer and script editor, to take the plunge into open water swimming.

Furthermore, Jenny wrote the book Swell, a water biography.

Great title.

And I'm delighted to welcome her now.

Hi, Jenny.

Hi, Alex.

And we'll talk some more about Edelie, who you've come to love.

I have, yes.

And where did you first come across her?

I first came across her because I was writing a book about the history of swimming as told through women's experience of it, because she's such a huge figure in that world.

And in terms of what appealed to you about her, obviously it's this incredible achievement, the first woman to swim the channel when she was so young.

Was there something about her personality that jumped out at you?

What I have really loved, particularly, were all the images of her striding across the beach,

shoulders back, chest out, headed for that water.

She would have been really uncomfortable wearing kind of aviator goggles, slathered in disgusting grease, wearing homemade swimming costumes.

And she just looks like a very, very confident young woman.

And I...

love that.

And I mean, I don't think you've swung the channel, have you?

No.

Yet.

Not yet, not ever.

And it's really funny when you're a swimmer.

People always, people who don't really know go, oh, are you going to swim the channel?

It's like, it's a phenomenal achievement to swim the channel.

It's as hard now as it was for Gertrude.

And the rules are pretty much the same.

And the people I know who have done it say that it's as much about the mental challenge as the physical challenge.

So,

yeah, no, that's not for me.

The physical challenge is huge, isn't it?

I mean, it's technically 21 miles, but Ederley probably swam about 35.

Yes.

If you look at, I've tracked friends as they're doing it, and it's not that straight line from Dover to France.

It goes curving because people follow the tides and work with the tides, and good boat people that you have to have as a guide will take you in and out of tides.

It's also a really unattractive body of water.

If you've travelled across it, you think this horrible grey, gloopy, sewagey, jellyfishy, with huge container ships passing you by so there's lots of danger it's it's horrible it's not like swimming 21 miles in a beautiful warm bath somewhere it's just yeah grim so what is it what is it that gets people in that cold water i mean i was a cold water swimmer for about 10 years i didn't learn to swim properly until i was in my mid-40s and i learned in a place which is my kind of spiritual home which is called tooting lido in south london it's the biggest outdoor pool in the country it's beautiful it's lifeguarded so it's not like plunging into the sea where nobody can see you and you could sink below the surface without anybody knowing so it feels quite safe to swim there i just absolutely loved it it kind of it became an addiction but it you know unlike most addictions uh you know which i might have also played with this one was a very healthy happy addiction to have.

It's become hugely trendy and lots of people do it for their mental health.

Because when you're in very cold water, you can only think about the very immediate physical.

If it's raining, if it's windy, if you suddenly see a leaf drift across your path, the little chop on the top, you've got none of the what's going to happen when I go home.

It's just your physical reaction in the here and now.

And that's incredibly freeing if you've got a load of other things whirling around your head just to be in your body.

So yeah, I became really addicted to swimming two, three, four times a week in very cold water.

And then the kind of challenge is to keep going all through the winter and to break the ice and to get in.

And it feels very exhilarating.

It's very enlivening.

It feels amazing.

If we say somebody's at sea or all at sea, that's a pretty strong metaphor, meaning that they're in a chaos and in danger.

Physically, what's it like to be at the mercy of the most powerful force on earth?

I've only ever done it in a very guided way,

But I have had panic attacks in the water.

Because when you're swimming along, you get into the flow and suddenly you imagine something is coming up from underneath.

And that's it.

Your brain is blown and you just need to get out of that water as quickly as you can.

I think

if you asked somebody who

was, for instance, a channel swimmer, and I'm only going anecdotally from people I know who've done it.

When you're your head down, you're swimming along, your brain's ticking over, you're singing a song, you're remembering X, Y, or Z, and suddenly something brushes your arm.

That's terrifying because instantly it might just be a leaf or a barucha plaster or something, but suddenly you've a whole other set of possibilities.

We've all watched too many horror movies, we've all watched, you know, we're all, our imaginations are hyper-alert.

So suddenly that can be the most terrifying thing.

And I also feel it's entirely appropriate to be very respectful of the power of the sea because you could go like that.

You know,

people have been lost on channel swims in the last two years, three years.

People can go in a heartbeat.

So it's entirely appropriate to be respectful of the medium that you're playing in.

You're talking to somebody who watched Jaws when she was far too young and refused to go to the the lavatory unassisted at the age of five in case a shark came up the U-bend.

You watched it at age five.

Yeah, my parents were very liberal about certificates.

Wow.

And I really like sharks.

Wow, that's five is.

Yeah, they shouldn't have done that.

Yeah, they shouldn't have.

It wasn't a very good idea.

I don't advocate doing that.

No.

No.

You're also, when you're swimming in something like the sea, I mean, even a body of water like the English Channel, which of course isn't the Atlantic, it's not the open ocean, but it's kind of huge, right?

I mean, if you zoomed out, a little person there really in the middle of nowhere.

Well, it's not the Atlantic Ocean, but it might as well be, because if you did zoom out, you would still see, when your head's low, you can't see France and Dover.

So you do feel like you're...

in the middle of nowhere.

And I'm going from what I imagine.

I have never been in the middle of the English Channel.

But I have been out swimming on a coastal swim with four or five other people on a very choppy day with with guideboats less than 100 meters away.

But as soon as the chop comes up and down, you've lost people.

And you think,

I'm here alone.

They've gone without me.

So, yeah, you can feel within a heartbeat a very insignificant little dot because you can lose sight of people extremely quickly.

You know, when people are doing those swims,

it's why you have a guideboat and you have people watching you the whole time because you two or three strokes off to the left of the guide and you lose sight of people.

People are swimming at night.

Yes, Alex, at night, pitch dark, pitch dark water.

The most terrifying thing.

Two or three strokes off in the wrong direction.

Very easy to do.

Very easy to do.

And you're gone.

And then what?

Oh, let's just not even go there.

I'm frightening myself sitting here in this studio.

My admiration for Gertrude just grows and grows.

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Now, in the 1920s, things were changing pretty fast for women in America and Britain.

These pictures of Edelie in her swimsuit, and it was a two-piece, which was unusual that was made by her sister.

It's practical because she would have suffered from chafing, even if she'd been covered with grease.

Because anywhere where your costume will touch your skin, if you're swimming in salty water, you can get horrible burns, which really, I mean, I've had it on a very, very minor level with my own little swimming attempts.

If you get a little, you know, burn from your rubber cap from swimming, uh, it can it can be really painful.

So that was what that costume was all about, to stop any chafing for her.

It's a big change, isn't it?

Ed Woodyan times, you have women with these long, heavy skirts and high collars and all these clothes that are basically meant to restrict your movement.

And suddenly, in the 1920s, you've got hemlines going up, corsets are in the bin, that's all gone.

Do you think there's a coincidence in the fact that coincides with these women wanting to swim or is that part of this kind of divesting of these old clothes?

I think the two things happened concurrently.

I think probably women have always wanted to swim because men have always swum.

One of the things that used to happen is that men would sew weights into the bottom of women's swimming gowns so that they wouldn't rise up in the water.

But still women were swimming, even wearing the most ridiculous pompadour kind of outfits.

I kind of call them swimming suffragettes, the women who made these steps towards freedom.

Fashions generally were showing that women had a shape, society was becoming freer, women were having leisure time.

But at the same time, in America, the police on the beaches would be measuring the length of women's costumes because if they were too short, they would be arrested and taken off the beach.

So,

yeah, I mean, it's a really wild thing.

And it must have been quite shocking.

You know, if you think about even the sort of 1910s, if a woman had walked out in this outfit that Edelie was wearing, which is kind of like gym shorts and a crop top, as we would see it today, I'm sure they wouldn't have called it that then.

You know, you can't imagine a woman 10 or 15 years earlier wearing that outfit.

If we think about women in the 1920s, this silhouette is very slim.

It's very different, of course, from an Erbordian silhouette, but it is still very slender, willowy.

And she's a big, stocky woman, isn't she?

She's not a delicate flower.

She's not.

And she wears it extremely well and also

in those photos she's surrounded by men there's very few other women ever seen in any of those photos and if there are they're all fully dressed and all the men are fully dressed so suddenly to see her

wearing this funny thing among all these men She stands out because they're all in suits and bowler hats and ties and it's so bizarre.

And there's her in this tiny little outfit.

But she doesn't look vulnerable which is what you might expect and yeah you're right she's not a tiny little sylph of a girl she's a stocky bird and actually being slightly bigger really helps because you have more body fat women do tend to be faster swimming the channel than men one of the reasons I love swimming is because when you look at a bunch of runners you can pretty much tell who's going to be a great runner and who's not you know they tend to be of a physical type but when you look at swimmers

you've got no idea who's going to be a really great long-distance swimmer.

You can't tell.

So, yeah, it worked.

I mean, she would have been very cold, wouldn't she?

Yes, hypothermia is definitely a thing.

And people who swim the channel now, there's a very strict regime about training that they start around April or May and will do six or seven hours swimming, being observed by official channel federation pilots and guides.

So you have to have achieved a certain length of time in the cold water before you're allowed to swim.

I've got friends who've made channel attempts and been pulled out of the water because they were literally unconscious with hypothermia.

So it's a very real and very dangerous thing.

This issue of being pulled out of the water leads us on quite nicely to talking about Edelie's first channel attempt in August 1925.

She believed she was deliberately thwarted by her coach at the time, Jacob Jabez-Wolf, who demanded she was pulled from the water just before she finished.

What was going on there, do you think?

Well, I suspect he possibly hated her and perhaps, and we don't really know, perhaps saw that she was going to achieve something that he, in all his many attempts, had failed to achieve.

So thought he could, either thought he could hitch his wagon or thought he would sabotage.

And I wouldn't come down either side, but I know that he yeah, he made it as difficult for her as possible.

he scuppered the first one by getting somebody to touch her and those rules are still the same in channel swimming today that nullifies your swim I guess if you've tried to do something 22 times I think he'd tried which suggests that there'd probably been other times too and here comes this young woman going well I'm gonna give it a go I mean that would produce complex feelings for the most evolved of men and I suspect he was not the most evolved of men

And we know the lengths she went to to achieve her goal in her preparation for the second attempt.

I like to think of it as the rocky montage training scene, you know, telling her dad no one was allowed to pull her out, hiring a new coach, designing a new Cossie with her sister.

Eddie, in her first attempt, didn't really have control over the circumstances around her.

And in the second attempt, she changed those circumstances.

Why do you think she did that?

I think that's a really interesting question.

And I think if you're a swimmer, you know why she did it.

It's like if you're a mountaineer, you know why people want to climb Everest.

But for the rest of us, we go, well,

but why?

And I think

for somebody like her, no woman had done it.

In fact, Annette Kellerman had said, if I can't do it, no woman can.

That's Annette Kelleman, the record-breaking Australian swimmer.

So there was a little bit of a race.

to see who was going to be the first woman, because that woman was going to be in the history books.

But I think the question still remains about doing the channel now.

Why?

And I think often it's because it's there.

And for her, it had a very specific first woman story, you know.

Edelie had hearing problems.

She'd had measles as a child and lost some hearing, and that got worse during her later life as well.

This disability isn't part of daily life for either you or me, but do you think swimming might have been kind of an escape for her?

We don't know terribly much about her thoughts and feelings because nobody really talked about thoughts and feelings at that point.

So you have to glean and read into the very little that you do have.

And I think possibly that question might be better directed at somebody with that same disability.

But I would imagine that, you know, in the 1920s being different in any way, people were not visible in the same way that they would be now.

So to have something that you were really good at

must have made a huge difference to her.

And to achieve something like this, you have to be incredibly single-minded, don't you?

Yes, you do.

And I think you have to be as single-minded now as Gertrude would have been then, because the challenge remains the same.

You're going to be swimming for a very long time.

You have to know

you have to know yourself inside out.

You have to have trained and trained and trained in cold water over long distance with the people who are going to be on the boat supporting you.

You have to have tried what you want to eat and drink as you go along because people will try different things, and some things will make them throw up, and some things won't.

And, you know, so it's really a trial and error in that regard.

It's a really properly

focused set of things.

You can't just kind of decide tomorrow, oh, do you know, I think I might give that channel a go.

Come on, let's set out and move down there.

You know, you train for people train for months, if not years.

And it's a very specific kind of person who gets it done.

I'm thinking about how Gertrude Ederley would have felt in that situation, she's in the English channel.

Now, she did have a boat, a support crew, and so on going on.

But still, how would that have been?

What would it have been like?

I imagine it would have been equally as terrifying.

Partly because it was...

unknown, you know, there was not that many people to have swum the channel.

So it's not like a really,

really trodden path.

And I think

the only thing I think that might have saved her was that she was really young and maybe had a kind of self-belief that thought, I'm going to do this, I can do this.

And maybe

there was never a doubt in her mind that she wouldn't complete it because she'd done it once and not succeeded.

I try not to use the word failure because it doesn't feel like a failure on any level to me, but she'd done it, tried it once and not succeeded.

So maybe, maybe this second time, she just had such fervent self-belief that all the little gremlins weren't allowed in.

And she had a coach she got on with this second time, the time of success.

So there would have been comforting voices around.

There was no jazz bands playing, no nonsense anywhere near her the second time.

I imagine it would have been more peaceful, more focused.

She'd have known what she wanted to drink or eat halfway, you know, she'd have done all of that testing.

So maybe youth,

the optimism of youth and the self-belief of sporty people, because they operate in a different way to mere mortals like I,

maybe that would have just carried her through in a really confident way.

But, you know, over 14 hours, 16 hours, there'd have been really, there'd have been dark hours in the middle of the water.

It's a really long time, isn't it?

And that's a really long time.

I mean, she was swimming in August, so it would have been a long day, but there would have been some hours, literally dark hours, as well as potentially mentally dark hours.

So, yeah, challenging.

If you're doing it now, and if you're doing it then, I don't think I just don't think it's a thing you can mess around with.

You're going to be swimming potentially for 30 hours in the water, and the minute somebody touches you, it's gone, your life dream gone.

So, you have got to be completely one track.

You have to take it incredibly seriously because it's a really serious thing to do.

And there's no way

that people would mess with it then or mess with it now.

And for her, she'd got the double whammy of first woman, first woman.

The pressure was on.

So let's talk a bit about Ederle as a hero.

We talk a lot behind the scenes on this show about what makes someone a hero, what it is.

Of course, if they've done something huge to help humanity, then that's quite obvious.

But in the case of someone like Trudy Ederley, What do you think makes her a hero?

Is it something more interior?

I think it's both things because she did do something to help humanity.

It's just only half of humanity.

But I think that's really valid.

I think seeing somebody, particularly a really young woman, striding out there, taking a space that should not have been hers, was not granted to her easily, that she really, really had to fight for, is a very, very visceral exploration of what is possible.

Heroes generally tend to do things that are selfless and with no thought about their own safety or well-being.

It's just a purely altruistic act.

So to have somebody like Gertrude, that whole issue of what's she done that's selfless when actually she was doing this entirely as her own personal challenge.

But I think if you do something like that and influence women and continue to influence women in the decades after, then you really do deserve to be called a hero, whether or not you did it for that reason.

I mean, I do feel that I call her my hero because of her setting the course for countless women who came after her.

Jenny Landreth, thank you so much for joining me to discuss the magnificent Gertrude Eddie, first woman to swim the English Channel.

Thank you for having me.

Next time on History's Heroes, Penning a Children's Story helps a young man find his place in the world.

The fairy tale life of Hans Christian Anderson.

Hello, Russell Kane here.

I used to love British history, be proud of it.

Henry VIII, Queen Victoria, massive fan of stand-up comedians, obviously Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor.

That has become much more challenging, for I am the host of BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius, the show where we take heroes and villains from history and try to work out were they evil or genius?

Do not catch up on BBC Sounds by searching Evil Genius if you don't want to see your heroes destroyed.

But if, like me, you quite enjoy it, have a little search.

Listen to Evil Genius with me, Russell Kane.

Go to BBC Sounds and have your world destroyed.

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best store.

We demand to be seen.

seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be qualified.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.