THOMAS WILLIAM BURGESS
ARTICLE FROM THE SHEFFIELD STAR 1961
THE FORGOTTEN MAN
OF
THE CHANNEL
MOST schoolboys-and many adults-know that
Captain Matthew Webb was the first man to swim the English Channel. But ask
them who was the second man to accomplish a successful Channel swim and a
puzzled frown will probably cross their brow.
Today Webb is a legendary figure, while
Thomas William Burgess - who became the second man to swim the Channel, when he
crossed from England to France on September 7, 1911-is a forgotten man.
Burgess was responsible for the coaching of
many other successful Channel aspirants. He helped Gertrude Ederle to become
the first woman to swim the Channel, and he also advised Edward Temme, the
first person to swim the Channel in both directions.
It is 50 years ago this week that Burgess
beat the Channel at his twelfth attempt. In the 36 years between Webb’s and
Burgess’s swims there were more than 70 unsuccessful attempts. It was another
12 years before the Channel was beaten for the third time.
RECORD OF ENDURANCE
Burgess swam from St. Margaret's Bay, near
Dover, to Le Chatelet, east of Cap Gris Nez. It took him 22 hours 30 minutes.
Heavily bearded, standing over 6 ft. and weighing 15 stone, he had been making
attempts, year-by-year since 1904.
His unsuccessful swim in 1908 of 23 hours 45
minutes stood as a record of Channel endurance for more than 20 years.
Burgess entered the water almost two hours
after high water. After eight hours in the water-and about halfway across-he
was in trouble.
The tide began to carry him back towards
England. Only his superb strength overcame the tidal drag.
But more trouble was to come off the French
coast. The tide swept him right past Cap Gris Nez and forced him to battle
against strong inshore currents.
Burgess received the congratulations of the
King and the adulation of the entire country. But to-day he is unremembered. He
died in France four years ago.
The
bust of Alfred Burgess still stands in the Sheffield Road Swimming Baths,
Rotherham where people touch his nose for luck. Rotherham Council kindly sent
me these photographs.
ARTICLE FROM
Dover.gov.uk/museum
Thomas W. Burgess 1904 - 1911
The first man to swim the Channel after Webb, some 36 years later. From
Rotherham in Yorkshire, he was 37 when successful, on his 13th try. Left South
Foreland and landed at Le Chatelet. 22 hrs. 35 mins.
He was accompanied by the Walmer boat ‘Elsie’ piloted by H. W. Pearson
plus Wyborn, Flood, Mercer Snr., Mercer Jnr., Fache, Jeffery, Beer and Watson.
Whorwell was the official photographer and Weidman the pacemaker.
He always more motorist's goggles while swimming. In the second Channel
race of 1905 Burgess and 5 other men set off together. As was usual the men
were naked, despite having alongside them Annette Kellerman who was wearing a
costume, which chaffed her so much she soon gave in. Burgess trained a number
of other successful swimmers including Toth, Gertrude Ederle, Temme, Ivy Hawke
and Helmi.
England to France: 8/19/1904 (failed), 28/7/1905 (failed), 9/8/1905
(failed), 24/8/1905 (failed), 26/8/1905 (failed), 18/8/1906 (failed), 30/8/1906
(failed), 14/8/1908 (failed), 17/8/1908 (failed), 21/8/1908 (failed), 8/19/1908
(failed), 6+7/19/1911 (success)
France to England: 13/19/1906 (failed)
Thomas W. Burgess,
second man to swim the English Channel, 1911
ARTICLE
FROM CNN SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
Ederle
celebrates anniversary of swim
Posted: Friday August
03, 2001 9:20
NEW YORK (AP) -- For years, swimmers have
stood on the craggy coastline, looked into the cold foreboding waters of the
English Channel and set off on the solitary journey from one side to the other.
Seventy-five years ago Monday, 19-year-old
Gertrude Ederle surveyed that situation at the edge of Cape Gris-Nez, France,
34 kilometers (21 miles) southwest of Calais, and took on the challenge.
"People said women couldn't swim the
Channel," said Ederle, now 94 and living in a New Jersey nursing home.
"I proved they could."
Ederle had credentials, equipped with three
medals from the 1924 Olympics and 29 U.S. and world records set between 1921
and 1925.
A year before, she had attempted the Channel
swim but was pulled from the water against her will by coach Jabezz Wolffe, 11
kilometers (7 miles) short of her goal to be the first woman to make the trip.
It made her more determined, obsessed by that body of water.
At its narrowest, the channel measures about
34 kilometers (21 miles). In summer, the temperature of the churning seaway
rarely gets higher than 16 degrees C (60 F). There are jellyfish, Portuguese
men-of-war and even the occasional shark waiting in the water, none of them
particularly happy about sharing their environment.
Another problem for Ederle were her goggles,
which were not waterproof. Months later, she and her sister, Margaret,
discovered that by applying melted candle wax they could make them airtight.
Ederle returned the next summer determined
to conquer the Channel. She was accompanied by her father, sister and a new
coach, Thomas Burgess, one of the five swimmers who had completed the
trip, a man familiar with the task.
In the days before the attempt, Ederle
walked the French shoreline with her father. "Don't let anybody take me
out of the water unless I ask," she said to him. "Promise me."
Promises were not taken lightly in the
Ederle family. So when her father agreed, the swimmer felt comfortable that
this challenge was going to be between her and the water, with no one
interfering.
On Aug. 6, 1926, her body covered in
lanolin, petroleum, olive oil and lard to protect it from the water, Ederle set
off on her crossing at just after 7 a.m. Buffeted by 6-meter (20-foot) waves,
her trademark red swim cap bobbing above the water, she fought the stormy seas
tirelessly.
Burgess, who knew the geography of the Channel and how the tides could change
suddenly, tried to guide her to a calmer route. "Slow down!" he
called to her.
This was a problem for Ederle. "I couldn't
go slower," she said.
Her solution was unique. She sang as she
swam, timing her strokes to popular tunes of the day.
The water fought her every bit of the way.
At one point, her left leg grew numb and she had trouble kicking. Burgess
urged her to give up.
"Come out! Come out!" he shouted
at her.
"What for?" she shouted back.
Those two words would become her trademark.
The reward for this trip was to be a bright
red Buick roadster. Her supporters followed Ederle on a tugboat equipped with a
blackboard. To encourage her, they would sketch parts of the car, a dashboard
here, a fender there.
When Ederle went into the water, just five
swimmers had successfully managed that treacherous crossing, none of them
women. The fastest had been Enrique Tiraboschi, who made it in 16 hours, 33
minutes.
She would do it nearly two hours faster than
that, timed in 14 hours, 39 minutes, according to the Channel Swimming
Association records, on a day when the seas were so rough that steamship
crossings were canceled.
When she reached Kingsdown, England, that
night, she was greeted by a crowd of people holding flares to light her way. It
was a monumental accomplishment, an exclamation point for the Golden Age of
Sports.
And all at once, it became the time of Gertrude
Ederle, a humble New York teen-ager who suddenly became a star.
She sailed home from England and as her ship
reached New York harbor, she was summoned from her cabin to meet the captain.
When Ederle arrived on the deck, there were planes circling the ocean liner,
dropping bouquets of flowers.
That was followed by a ticker-tape parade up
Broadway with crowds shouting, "Hello, Miss What-For!" a reminder of
her determination in the water.
"It was the most wonderful day,"
she said.
Ederle will mark the 75th anniversary of her
historic swim quietly with friends and family.
Most of her awards and memorabilia including
her swimsuit and those waterproof goggles are in the Swimming Hall of Fame.
There is one poignant reminder of her life in her room, though.
Above her bed hangs a single picture: a
panoramic ocean scene.
ARTICLE
FROM Doversolo.com
Gertrude
Ederle
Swimmer
Gertrude Ederle/Determination Helped Her Make A Record-Breaking English Channel
Swim
By Susan Vanghn, Investor's Business Daily,
May 24, 2000
Gertrude Ederle sobbed bitterly as her
swimming coach, Jabez Wolffe, pulled her out of the freezing waters of the
English Channel on August 18, 1925.
Had the 19-year-old Ederle, a New York
resident, been able to make just seven more miles, she'd have become the first
woman to have completed the grueling 21-mile swim from France to England.
But Wolffe, who had tried more than 20 times
to conquer the Channel himself, believed Ederle was too nauseated to continue.
His grabbing her disqualified her instantly. Ederle 's long-held dream was
lost. The sponsorship money raised by the New York Women's Swimming Association
had been spent in vain. And the callous international press, which had
boisterously asserted that no female could swim the Channel, gloated saucily.
Hundreds had attempted the arduous Channel
swim before Ederle. Only five men had made it all the way. What Mount Everest
was to climbers, the English Channel was to long-distance swimmers. Its cold
waters were subject to powerful currents, wind and fog. It brimmed with
jellyfish and Portuguese men-of-war and occasionally was visited by sharks.
If this weren't enough, the Channel was the
world's busiest shipping land, so swimmers had to watch out for giant
freighters that might suddenly overtake them.
After Ederle's aborted Channel swim, she
returned to America shaken but not defeated. She spent the next few months
plotting a new attempt. How could she raise enough money when sponsors would be
reluctant to support a second attempt? Most important, what, if anything, could
she do differently to turn her failure into success?
- Ederle hired Thomas Burgess as her new swimming coach. He
was one of the five men who'd made it across the Channel, although it took
him 14 tries. She realized that Burgess's 'victory gave him an
understanding that only four other swimmers in the world possessed.
2. Yet even with Burgess'expert
guidance, Ederle knew she'd have to build mental toughness for her rematch
against the sea. She needed to eliminate defeating memories of her last swim
and muster as much encouragement as she could from family, friends and
supporters.
The young swimmer also planned a bold
departure from tradition -- one that startled and amused sports writers.
Although all five men who'd successfully swum the channel employed the
breaststroke, Ederle had decided to try a new stroke called the crawl.
Lastly, there was the question of money. The
Chicago Tribune syndicate offered to finance Ederle's second attempt to return
for an exclusive story. But if Ederle (who'd won three medals in the 1924
Olympics) accepted the paper's offer, she'd lose her amateur status and not be
able to compete in the Olympics -- or any other amateur competition -- again.
3. Ederle decided to go for it. On August 6,
1926, she put on an outfit designed for her by her most faithful supporter --
her older sister, Margaret -- consisting of a red bathing cap, two-piece
bathing suit and goggles. Slathering herself with lanolin, petrolatum, olive
oil and lard to protect against jellyfish and cold, Ederle encountered the
61-degree water at Cape GrisNez, France, at about 7 a.m. London bookies had set
a 5-1 odds against her.
On the tug Alsace were Ederle's father and
sister, her new coach and a gaggle of supporters. Photographers and journalist
followed on a second boat.
To keep her spirits up and stay focused on
her goal -- which could take hours to achieve -- Ederle used humor. When she
found herself anxious or stroking too fast, she sang "Let Me Call You
Sweetheart" and set her strokes to the song's waltzing beat. When the
weather turned fierce and 20-foot swells began to batter her, she combated her
fears by listening to reporters' off-key renditions of "Yes We Have No
Bananas" and "East Side, West Side."
4. Hours into the swim, Ederle's left leg
grew numb, an she had trouble kicking. The sea swells and currents had become
so powerful that, for every yard she progressed, she was pushed back two. Both
her father and coach leaned over the boat and pleaded with her: "You must
come out."
But this time, Ederle remained in control.
"No, no," she shouted back." "What for?" And she kept
swimming. She decided she would finish the swim or drown.
At 9:40 p.m., after more than 14 hours,
Ederle reached the shores of Kingsdown, England, where hundreds of people
holding flares had gathered to cheer her. Ederle had beaten the men's record by
more than two hours. Her record would stand for 24 years.
Later, experts estimated that, because of
the rough waters, Ederle had swum 35 miles to cross the Channel's 21-mile
width, notes David Adler in "America's Champion Swimmer: Gertrude
Ederle."
Her victory had momentous repercussions.
Citing her as their inspiration, more than 60,000 women earned American Red
Cross swimming certificates during the 1920s.
Ederle developed her "don't quit"
philosophy as a child after a near-fatal drowning accident. While visiting her
grandmother in Germany, 8-year-old Ederle tumbled into a pond and had to be
rescued. The mishap frightened her terribly, but also motivated her to learn to
swim. Her father tethered Ederle to a rope, and shouted encouragement as she
awkwardly attempted to dog paddle in a river near the family's New Jersey
summer cottage.
With her father's encouragement, Ederle soon
mastered swimming. She practiced diligently, and in a few months could outswim
her peers. Once, after she'd joined the Women's Swimming Association in New
York, a competing swimmer mocked the way Ederle was practicing a new stroke.
Ederle refused to change her technique or feel the criticism's sting. She just
practiced harder -- and used the new stroke to beat the girl.
Her strategy helped her set 29 U.S. and
world swimming records.
"When somebody tells me I cannot do
something, that's when I do it," the 93-year-old Ederle recently told a
New Jersey newspaper reporter at her nursing home in Wyckoff, N.J. where
swimming certificates and old photos line the walls of her room.
"Oh, it was a good life," Ederle
said. "I was very happy when I was swimming. I could have gone on and
on."
A Mighty Big Splash
By Denise Grady/The New York Times Book
Review
In August 1926, fighting rain, high winds
and 20-foot waves, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English
Channel, Ederle, just 19, already held three Olympic medals and had set 29
American and world records. Her time for the channel, 14 hours 31 minutes, beat
the men's record by nearly two hours and remained the women's record for 35
years.
David A. Adler's America's Champion
Swimmer: Gertrude Ederle (Gulliver Books/Harcourt, $16; ages 5 to 9), illustrated
with richly colored acrylic paintings by Terry Widener, captures the highlights
of Ederle's life in evocative images and telling details that will appeal to
children. Widener's stylized, muscular figures, reminiscent of the American
Scene art of Ederle's era, gain charm with each reading even though he paints
Ederle with thunder thighs and dainty shoulders that are surely the reverse of
a swimmer's proportions.
In a method not described in any Red Cross
manual, Ederle's father taught her to swim when she was 7 or 8 by tossing her
into a river with a rope about her waist and ordering her to paddle. Within a
few years she was winning medals. At the finish of her storm-tossed channel
swim, thousands of people gathered on the coast in Kingsdown, England, to guide
her ashore with flares and bonfires.
What power Ederle had; what a joy it must
have been to see her in the water.
This book, though engaging, does not quite
bring her to life. The prose falls flat, or veers off into the language of a
juvenile feminist tract. Ederle's own voice is missing. Adler looks at her from
a distance, as if she were a historic figure, even though she is still alive,
and in January, at 93, was well enough to be interviewed by a reporter.
Older children will appreciate the details
included in the author's notes at the end of the book: Ederle might have
crossed the channel four hours faster had the weather been clear, and she lost
much of her hearing after her swim.
Her determination served her well seven
years later when she fell, injuring her spine, and was not expected to walk
again. She recovered after spending more than four years in a cast, and went on
to become a dress designer and a swimming teacher for deaf children.
|
OSM Back flick |
7 August 1926
Cape Gris-Nez, France
Gertrude Ederle (far
right, in the goggles) is bid farewell by fellow US swimmer Lillian Cannon
before attempting to become the first women to swim the English Channel.
Setting off from Cape Gris-Nez, France, at 7.08am, Ederle successfully arrived
in Kingsdown, England some 14hr 39min later, becoming an American hero in the
process.
LILLIAN
CANNON
Little is known about Lillian Cannon other than
that she used to swim for the United States in the 1920s and 30s, and that the
dog in the picture is her pet dog, the splendidly named Champion Chesacroft
Drake.
GERTRUDEEDERLE
Born in New York City on 23 October, 1906,
Ederle will always be remembered as being the first woman to swim the English
Channel.
Only five men had completed the challenging
swim when she set off from Cape Gris-Nez in 1926. Ederle herself had been
unsuccessful the previous year, having to be pulled from the freezing sea,
exhausted, just seven miles from the English coast.
It started badly. Shortly after setting off
she was hampered by a spell of atrocious weather, as strong winds and heavy
rain drove her wildly off course. Indeed, conditions were so bad that by the
time she finished, Ederle had been forced to swim 35 miles in covering the
21-mile distance.
'People said women couldn't swim the
Channel but I proved they could,' Ederle said afterwards. Not only that, but in
doing so she broke the existing time record by more than two hours. When she
returned to New York City, Ederle was heralded by a tickertape reception,
attended by two million people, who lined the streets of lower Broadway to
cheer her homecoming.
The Mayor of New York at the time, James J.
Walker, lyrically compared her feat with Moses parting the Red Sea and Caesar
crossing the Rubicon.
It was a triumph that did not come without
consequence however, as Ederle's hearing was seriously damaged and she went
partially deaf within two years.
The cross-channel swim was far from
Ederle's only achievement. She also won three medals at the 1924 Paris
Olympics, including gold in the 4x100m relay, broke several world records, and
was voted number 42 in Sports Illustrated's 100 greatest female athletes of the
last century. After spending much of her later life teaching deaf children to
swim in New York City, Ederle now lives in nursing home in Wyckoff, New Jersey.
Swimming certificates and old photos line the walls of her room. She is 96.
From THE OBSERVER SPORTS MONTHLY AUGUST
2002