Gertrude Caroline Ederle (October 23, 1905 – November 30, 2003) was an American
competitive swimmerThe aquatic sport of swimming involves competition amongst participants to be the fastest over a given distance under self propulsion.The different events include 25, 50, 100, 200, breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly, the 25, 50, 100, 200, 400, 500, 800, 1000, 1500, and 1650 free and the 100,...
. In 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the
English ChannelThe English Channel is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates England from northern France, and joins the North Sea to the Atlantic. It is about long and varies in width from at its widest, to only in the Strait of Dover...
.
Gertrude was the daughter of a
GermanThe German people are an ethnic group, in the sense of sharing a common German culture, descent, and speaking the German language as a mother tongue. Within Germany, Germans are defined by citizenship , distinguished from people of German ancestry...
immigrant who ran a butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue in
ManhattanManhattan is one of the five boroughs of New York City, located primarily on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the Hudson River.New York County, which has the same boundaries as the Borough of Manhattan , is the most densely populated county in the United States, with a 2008 population of 1,634,795...
. She was known as Trudy as a youth. Her father taught her to swim in Highlands, New Jersey, where the family owned a summer cottage.
Gertrude Caroline Ederle (October 23, 1905 – November 30, 2003) was an American
competitive swimmerThe aquatic sport of swimming involves competition amongst participants to be the fastest over a given distance under self propulsion.The different events include 25, 50, 100, 200, breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly, the 25, 50, 100, 200, 400, 500, 800, 1000, 1500, and 1650 free and the 100,...
. In 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the
English ChannelThe English Channel is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates England from northern France, and joins the North Sea to the Atlantic. It is about long and varies in width from at its widest, to only in the Strait of Dover...
.
Biography
Gertrude was the daughter of a
GermanThe German people are an ethnic group, in the sense of sharing a common German culture, descent, and speaking the German language as a mother tongue. Within Germany, Germans are defined by citizenship , distinguished from people of German ancestry...
immigrant who ran a butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue in
ManhattanManhattan is one of the five boroughs of New York City, located primarily on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the Hudson River.New York County, which has the same boundaries as the Borough of Manhattan , is the most densely populated county in the United States, with a 2008 population of 1,634,795...
. She was known as Trudy as a youth. Her father taught her to swim in Highlands, New Jersey, where the family owned a summer cottage. Among other nicknames, the press sometimes called her
Queen of the WavesQueen of the Waves is a French hymn sung by French fishermen seeking protection from storms.In the United States, it became well-known as a result of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. The nuns of the St. Mary's Orphan Asylum had the orphans sing this song in order to calm them...
.
She trained at the Women's Swimming Association, which produced such competitors as
Eleanor HolmEleanor G. Holm was an American swimmer. An Olympic champion, she is best known for having been suspended from the 1936 Summer Olympics team, after she had attended a cocktail party on the transatlantic cruise ship taking her to Germany...
and
Esther WilliamsEsther Jane Williams is a retired American competitive swimmer and MGM movie star, notable for her musical films that featured elaborate performances with swimming and diving.-Early years:...
. She joined the club when she was only thirteen. From this time Gertrude began to break and establish more
amateurAn amateur is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without formal training or pay. An amateur receives little or irregular income from their activities, and differs from a professional who makes a living from the pursuit and typically has some formal...
records than any other woman in the world.
At the
1924 Summer OlympicsThe 1924 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the VIII Olympiad, were an international multi-sport event which was celebrated in 1924 in Paris, France...
, she won a gold medal as a part of the US 400-meter
freestyleFreestyle is an unregulated swimming style used in swimming competitions according to the rules of FINA. The front crawl stroke is almost universally used during a freestyle race, as this style is generally the fastest...
relay team and bronze medals for finishing third in the 100-meter and 400-meter freestyle races. She had been favored to win a gold medal in all three events and was bitterly disappointed in the outcome.
In 1925, Ederle swam a 21-mile crossing across
Lower New York BayLower New York Bay is the section of New York Bay outside of The Narrows that flows directly into the Atlantic Ocean via Hudson Canyon, an underwater channel that flows southeast from Lower New York Bay for hundreds of miles into the Atlantic Ocean....
, from
ManhattanManhattan is one of the five boroughs of New York City, located primarily on Manhattan Island at the mouth of the Hudson River.New York County, which has the same boundaries as the Borough of Manhattan , is the most densely populated county in the United States, with a 2008 population of 1,634,795...
to Sandy Hook, taking over seven hours. Later that year, the Women's Swimming Association sponsored her first attempt at swimming the Channel, but she was disqualified when her trainer, Jabez Wolffe, had another swimmer recove her from the water. Trudy bitterly disagreed with that decision.
thumb
Her successful cross-channel swim began one year later at Cap Gris-Nez in France at 07:05 on the morning of August 6, 1926. Fourteen hours and 30 minutes later, she came ashore at
KingsdownKingsdown is a village immediately to the south of Walmer, itself south of Deal, on the English Channel coast of Kent. There is also a West Kingsdown in Kent. There is a butcher shop, a hairdresser, a newsagent and a post office on the main Upper Street...
,
KentKent , originally Cantia, is a county in southeast England, and is one of the home counties. It borders East Sussex, Surrey and Greater London and has a defined boundary with Essex in the middle of the River Thames estuary. The ceremonial county boundaries of Kent include the shire county of Kent...
, England. Her record stood until
Florence ChadwickFlorence May Chadwick was an American swimmer who was the first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions...
swam the channel in 1950 in 13 hours and 20 minutes.
Gertrude possessed a contract from both the
New York Daily NewsThe Daily News of New York City is the fifth most-widely circulated daily newspaper in the United States with a daily circulation of 632,595, as of June 13, 2009. The first U.S. daily printed in tabloid form, it was founded in 1919, and as of 2007 is owned and run by Mortimer Zuckerman...
and
Chicago TribuneThe Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company...
when she attempted the Channel swim a second time. The money she received paid her expenses and provided her with a modest salary. It also gave her a bonus in exchange for exclusive rights to her personal story. The Journal News and the
Chicago TribuneThe Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company...
got the jump on every other newspaper in America. Another American swimmer in France in 1926 to try and swim the Channel was Lillian Cannon from Baltimore. She was also sponsored by a newspaper, the Baltimore Post, which tried to create a rivalry between her and Ederle in the weeks spent training off the French coast. In addition to Cannon, several other swimmers, including two other American women - Clarabelle Barrett and Mille Gade - were training in England with the goal of becoming the first woman to swim the Channel. Barrett and Cannon were unsuccessful but three weeks after Ederle's feat, Gade crossed in a time that was 50 minutes slower than Ederle.
The people alongside Ederle aboard the tug on August 6, 1926 included her father and one of her sisters, Margaret, and Julie Harpman, wife of
Westbrook PeglerFrancis James Westbrook Pegler was an American journalist and writer. Known as a fierce opponent of both fascism and communism, he later was a spokesman for the John Birch Society. Pegler, a Roman Catholic, was married to Julia Harpman Pegler, a onetime New York Daily News crime reporter who came...
and a writer for the New York Daily News, the paper that sponsored Ederle's swim. Harpman refused to allow any other reporters on the tug - in order to protect her 'scoop' - and as a result a second tug was hired by the disgruntled reporters. On several occasions during the swim this tug deliberately came in close to Ederle in the hope she would touch it and thereby be disqualified. Fortunately, Ederle didn't, but the incident caused much bitterness subsequently. It also led to accusations in the British press, that the two tugs had in fact sheltered Ederle from the bad weather and thus made her swim 'easier'.
During her twelfth hour at sea, Gertrude had become so bothered by unfavorable winds that someone on board, called to her
Gertie, you must come out! The exhausted swimmer lifted her head from the choppy waters and replied,
What for?
Only five men had been able to swim the English Channel before Ederle. The best time had been 16 hours, 33 minutes by an Italian-born
ArgentineArgentina, officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America, constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires. It is the eighth largest country in the world by land area and the largest among Spanish-speaking nations, though Mexico,...
, Enrique Tiraboschi. Ederle walked up the beach at Dover, England after 14 hours and 39 minutes. The first person to greet her was a British
immigrationImmigration is the arrival of new individuals into a habitat or population. It is a biological concept and is important in population ecology, differentiated from emigration and migration.-As a political term:...
officer who requested a
passportA passport is a document, issued by a national government, which certifies, for the purpose of international travel, the identity and nationality of its holder. The elements of identity are name, date of birth, sex, and place of birth...
from "the bleary-eyed, waterlogged teenager."
When Ederle returned home, she was greeted with a
ticker-tape paradeA ticker-tape parade is a parade event held in a downtown urban setting, allowing the jettison of large amounts of shredded paper products from nearby office buildings onto the parade route, creating a celebratory effect by the snowstorm-like flurry....
in New York City. She went on to play herself in a movie (
Swim Girl, Swim) and tour the
vaudevilleVaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
circuit, including
Billy Rose's AquacadeBilly Rose's Aquacade was a music, dance and swimming show produced by Billy Rose at the Great Lakes Exposition in 1937.Later Aquacade moved to the 1939 New York World's Fair where it was the most successful production of the fair . The Art Deco 11,000 seat amphitheatre was designed by architects...
. She met President
CoolidgeJohn Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was the 30th President of the United States . A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state. His actions during the Boston Police Strike of 1919 thrust him into the...
and had a song and a dance step named for her. Unfortunately, her manager, through a combination of incompetence and duplicity, mishandled her showbiz career and Ederle failed to reap the rewards she deserved. A fall down the steps of her apartment building in 1933 twisted her spine and left her bedridden for several years, but in 1939 she recovered well enough to appear at the New York World's Fair. She was inducted into the
International Swimming Hall of FameThe International Swimming Hall of Fame is a hall of fame devoted to the aquatic sports located in Fort Lauderale, Florida, United States...
in 1965.
Ederle had poor hearing since childhood due to
measlesMeasles is an infection of the respiratory system caused by a virus, specifically a paramyxovirus of the genus Morbillivirus. Morbilliviruses, like other paramyxoviruses, are enveloped, single-stranded, negative-sense RNA viruses...
, and by the 1940s she was completely deaf. She spent much of the rest of her life teaching swimming to deaf children. She never married and died on November 30, 2003 in
Wyckoff, New JerseyWyckoff is a township in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2000 Census, the township population was 16,508. It is a primarily white, upper-middle class community outside New York City. Nationwide, Wyckoff ranks 53rd in 100 highest-income places in the United States...
, at the age of 98. She was interred in the
Woodlawn CemeteryLocated in The Bronx, Woodlawn Cemetery is one of the largest cemeteries in New York City. It opened as a rural cemetery in 1863, out in "the country", in what was then southern Westchester County, which was annexed to New York City in 1874...
in
the Bronx