Gertrude Caroline Ederle (October 23, 1905[1] – November 30, 2003) was an American competition swimmer, Olympic champion, and world record-holder in five events. On August 6, 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel.[2] Among other nicknames, the press sometimes called her "Queen of the Waves".[3][4]
Amateur career
Ederle grew up in Manhattan where her father ran a butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue, and learned to swim in Highlands, New Jersey.[5][page needed] Ederle later trained at the Women's Swimming Association (WSA). Ederle joined the club when she was only twelve and immediately took to learning the American crawl, developed at the WSA by Louis Handley. The same year, she set her first world record in the 880-yard freestyle, becoming the youngest world record holder in swimming. She set eight more world records after that, seven of them in 1922 at Brighton Beach.[6] In total, Ederle held 29 US national and world records from 1921 until 1925.[7]
In 1925, Ederle turned professional. The same year she swam the 22 miles (35 km) from Battery Park to Sandy Hook in 7 hours and 11 minutes, a record time which stood for 81 years before being broken by Australian swimmer Tammy van Wisse.[9] Ederle's nephew Bob later described his aunt's swim as a "midnight frolic" and a "warm-up" for her later swim across the English Channel.[9][10]
English Channel crossing
In 1925, the Women's Swimming Association sponsored Helen Wainwright and Ederle for an attempt at swimming across the English Channel. Helen Wainwright cancelled due to an injury, so Ederle decided to go to France on her own. She trained with Jabez Wolffe, a swimmer who had attempted to swim the English Channel 22 times.[11] On August 18, 1925, Ederle made her first attempt at swimming the Channel whereupon she was disqualified when Wolffe ordered another swimmer (who was keeping her company in the water), Ishak Helmy, to recover her from the water. She bitterly disagreed with Wolffe's decision and it was speculated that he did not want Ederle to succeed.[5][page needed]
She returned to New York and began training with coach Bill Burgess who had successfully swum the Channel in 1911. Ederle also received a contract from both the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune which paid her expenses and provided her with a modest salary. Approximately one year after her first attempt, she was successful in swimming the Channel. She started at Cap Gris-Nez in France at 07:08 am on August 6, 1926, and came ashore at Kingsdown, Kent, 14 hours and 34 minutes later. The first person to greet her was a British immigration officer who requested a passport from "the bleary-eyed, waterlogged teenager".[12] Her record stood until Florence Chadwick swam the Channel in 1950 in 13 hours and 23 minutes.[5][page needed]
Prior to Ederle, only five men had completed the swim across the English Channel, with the best time of 16 hours, 33 minutes by Enrique Tirabocchi.[13]
When Ederle returned home, she was greeted with a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan, with more than two million people along the parade route.[5][page needed]
Later career
She made an arrangement with Edward L. Hyman to make a personal appearance at the Brooklyn Mark Strand Theatre, and she was paid a far greater amount than they had ever paid an individual performer.[14] Subsequently, she went on to play herself in a movie (Swim Girl, Swim starring Bebe Daniels) and tour the vaudeville circuit, including later Billy Rose's Aquacade. She met President Coolidge and had a song and a dance step named for her. Her manager, Dudley Field Malone, was not able to capitalize on her renown, so Ederle's career in vaudeville was not a huge financial success. The Great Depression also diminished her financial rewards. A fall down the steps of her apartment building in 1933 twisted her spine and left her bedridden for several years, but she recovered well enough to appear at the 1939 New York World's Fair.[5][page needed]
Death
The grave of Gertrude Ederle
Ederle had poor hearing since childhood due to measles, and by the 1940s she was almost completely deaf. Aside from her time in vaudeville, she taught swimming to deaf children.[6] She never married and she was living in a nursing home in 2001.[10] She died on November 30, 2003, in Wyckoff, New Jersey, at the age of 98.[3] She was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.
An annual swim from New York City's Battery Park to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, is called the Ederle Swim in memory of Gertrude Ederle, and follows the course she swam.[16][17]
The Gertrude Ederle Recreation Center on 60th Street
The Gertrude Ederle Recreation Center, which opened in 2013 and is located in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was named for Ederle, and includes an indoor swimming pool.[18][19]
A BBC Radio 4 play, The Great Swim, by Anita Sullivan, based on the 2008 book of the same name by Gavin Mortimer, was first broadcast on September 1, 2010, and repeated on January 23, 2012. It dramatizes Ederle's record-breaking crossing of the English Channel.[20]
^"The History of New York's Ticker-Tape Parades", Downtown Alliance. Accessed September 12, 2023. "In the 1920s, with ticker tape seen as a modernization of the ancient ritual of strewing flowers before conquerors, it became routine to hail arriving heads-of-state with a paper shower. The city started a tradition of recognizing champion athletes with the ticker-tape parade for the American Olympic team in 1924."
Dahlberg, Tim (2009). America's Girl: The Incredible Story of How Swimmer Gertrude Ederle Changed the Nation. Ward, Mary Ederle., Greene, Brenda (1st ed.). New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN978-0-312-38265-0. OCLC269455470.
