Florence Chadwick: Swimming

 American Star of the Women’s International Sports Hall of Fame

On August 21, 1950, Florence Chadwick walked without much fanfare off the beach of France and into the waters of the English Channel. She swam quickly to escape the inshore current, and once out in open water, she slowed her pace. Chadwick had applied to a London newspaper’s half-century contest to swim across the Channel, but the newspaper rejected her application because they did not know who she was. Instead, the press accepted the application of a 17-year-old swimmer named Shirley May. Six boatfuls of reporters waited for May to begin her swim across the English Channel, having financed her trip and swimming attempt, while letting Chadwick swim away first without fanfare. Chadwick made it a point to show up on that day, to achieve the goal she had been so focused on in front of those whom had snubbed her. She had won several long-distance swimming competitions in California, having won a two and a half -mile race in La Jolla, California, 10 times in 18 years. But the London newspaper did not know about her successes across the Atlantic.

 

Chadwick had keyed in on her goal months before applying to the London newspaper. She was granted a transfer by her employer, the Arabian-American Oil Company, to Saudi Arabia that paid her way abroad. Once overseas, she saved money from her job as a comptometer operator, a type of mechanical adding machine, and would go on training swims before and after work in the rough waters of the Persian Gulf. In June 1950, Chadwick quit her job and moved to France to train for her first swim across the Channel in July. In France, she applied to be sponsored by the Daily Mail, the London newspaper, but was not accepted. Chadwick, though, had saved enough money from her job in the Arabian-American Oil Company to rent a boat and hire a trainer for her August swim.

 

At about 11:30 a.m., more than eight and a half hours after she first began her swim, her father, who was trailing on a boat just behind her, wrote on a blackboard: “Only three miles to go.” It would be a grueling three miles. Her protective grease coating had worn off so that the chilly waters of the Channel were cruelly numbing. Her swimming appeared to resemble more of a paddling motion, but just 500 yards off the coast of England, as she was urged to take a rest before reaching total exhaustion, Chadwick said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it made now.”¹ She made it up to shore, climbing up rocks off the coast that gashed her feet. Chadwick had finished the 19-mile swim in 13 hours and 23 minutes, finishing ahead of the previous record of 14 hours and 34 minutes set 24 years earlier by Gertrude Ederle. Only 40 minutes later, the other swimmer, Shirley May, gave up to exhaustion and was pulled out of the water in tears. “Everyone’s going to think I’m a flop,”² May said.

 

Perhaps it was meant as a joke when Chadwick reached the shore and said, “I feel fine, I am quite prepared to swim back.”³ But only 13 months later, on September 24, 1951, Chadwick was again swimming across the Channel, this time taking the more arduous route from England to France, a 21-mile route that had never been accomplished by a woman and up to that time had been completed by nine men. Three hours into her swim, Chadwick was vomiting every three strokes until it was discovered that fumes from one of the boats trailing her were the cause of her nausea. Her father, again accompanying her, took pill after pill to calm his weak heart, but 16 hours and 22 minutes after she had begun to “swim back,” Chadwick dragged herself up on the shore of France to be greeted by boys who ran up to her to cheer her becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel from England to France.

 

Chadwick could have given up years before stepping into the Channel. She wanted to be a speed swimmer. The first race she ever entered, a 50-yard race as a six-year-old, resulted in her coming in last place. Chadwick continued to practice on her speed, but she could never finish first. At the age of 14, she competed in the national backstroke championship, but came in second to future gold-medal Olympian Eleanor Holm. At age 18, Chadwick missed out on making the Olympic swimming team and decided to give up competitive swimming. As time passed by she remembered her success as an endurance swimmer, and realized where her talent lay. As an 11-year-old, she entered a San Diego Bay endurance swim and gained praise and attention when she finished the six-mile swim. Her swimming career was soon revived.

 

Her conquest of the Channel sparked a five-year period of swimming brilliance. In 1952, she became the first woman to swim the Catalina Channel (a stretch of water from Catalina Island off the coast of California to mainland California), and only the 10th individual ever. No woman would complete the Catalina Channel swim for another three years after Chadwick first accomplished the feat. In 1953, she would go on to become the first woman to swim the Straits of Gibraltar and the Bosporus one way, and also the first woman to swim the Dardanelles round trip.

 

Chadwick’s swimming career would lead to a number of public appearances in which she promoted swimming and encouraged people to push themselves and to test their physical limits. At the age of 51, in 1969, she embarked on a new career as a stockbroker and would later become vice president of First Wall Street Corporation in San Diego, California. In 1970, she was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame. Chadwick passed away on March 15, 1995, at the age of 76 after a lengthy illness, having swum the English Channel four times and the Catalina Channel three times.

 

Notes

1 “Two Girls in Swimming,” Time, August 21, 1950.

2 Ibid.

3 International Swimming Hall of Fame. http://www.ishof.org/honorees/70/70fchadwick.html (accessed March 15, 2008).

This excerpt was written by Horacio Ruiz.