Before August 6th, 1926, no woman had ever swam the English channel, let alone think about it. Then came Gertrude Ederle. She was the first woman to swim the channel, and she did it in 14 hours and 31 minutes. She beat the average man’s time, by nearly 2 hours. And she did all of this when she was 19 years old.
Gertrude Ederle was an American Competitive swimmer, Olympic champion, and world record-holder in five events. On August 6th, 1926, she became the first ever woman to swim all the way across the English Channel. It reached between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. Among other nicknames, the Press called her the “Queen of the Waves”.
CHILDHOOD
Gertrude’s life began on October 23rd, 1905. She was born into the family of Gertrude Anna Haberstroh (Mom) and Henry Ederle (Dad). Both of her parents were German immigrants. She grew up in New York City, specifically Manhattan, where her dad ran a butcher shop on Amsterdam Avenue. She had 5 siblings, two older sisters (Helen and Margaret) and 2 younger siblings (George and Emma). When Gertrude was about 5 years old, she was diagnosed with Measles. Ederle got the measles in her ears, which meant that any pressure would further harm her for the rest of her life. Because of this, doctors warned that it could worsen with swimming. That was a problem. Gertrude loved to swim. By the 1940’s, she was almost all the way deaf because of her measles. Her hearing continued to get worse, but she kept swimming despite the fact.
LEARNING HER PASSION
Ederle learned to love swimming from a really young age. She grew up learning how to swim in the ocean in Highlands, New Jersey, because she wasn’t allowed in swimming pools due to her previous disease. She later switched to swimming at the Swimming Association (WSA). Some background information on the WSA- It was a historic organization whose leadership and members campaigned for women’s suffrage, and worked both to create more swimming events open to women and increase their participation in the Olympics. This sparked Eredle to join, and she did so when she was 12. The first stroke she went for was the American Crawl, which was in fact developed by the WSA head coach Louis. It also happens that in the same year, she set her very first world record, becoming the youngest person ever to do the 880-yard freestyle. She later set 8 more world records after that and 7 of them in 1922 at Brighton beach. In total, Gertrude held 29 US national and world records from 1921, to about 1925. At the 1924 summer Olympics in Paris, she won a gold medal as a member of the first place U.S. team in the 4 x 100 meter freestyle relay. She and her teammates set another world record for this event in 4:58.8 in the finals. In 1925, she decided to go professional. The same year she swam the 22 miles from Battery park to Sandy Hook in 7 hours and 11 minutes. She held the record for 81 years before it was broken by an Australian swimmer. Her nephew, Bob, described his Aunt’s swim as a warm up for her later swim across the channel.
ACROSS THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
In the year 1925, the WSA sponsored Helen Wainwright and Ederle for their first attempt for the difficult swim. Last minute though, Helen had to cancel due to an injury, and it was up to Ederle if she wanted to do it herself, or if she wanted to wait for her to get better. Of course, she decided she would do it alone, and got coaching from Jabez Wolffe, who attempted to swim the channel 22 times before. August 8th rolled around and she began her swim, but she was disqualified when Wolffe tried to get another swimmer to recover her from the water. Gertrude was bitterly against this decision, and later it was speculated that he didn’t want Ederle to succeed. She later returned to New York and continued to train, but this time it was with coach Bill Burgess, who swam the channel in 1911. She received a contract from the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune that paid her expenses and gave her a decent salary. Approximately one year after her first attempt, she was successful in swimming across the channel. She started at Cap Gris-Nez in France at 7:08 am on August 6th, 1926, and reached shore at Kingsdown Kent. This was about 14 hours and 34 minutes later. Her record stayed for almost 50 years before someone broke her record in 1950 by 13 hours and 23 minutes.
Before Ederle had successfully crossed the English Channel, only 5 men had succeeded before her, best time being 16 hours and 33 minutes by Enrique Tirabocchi.
Later Life and Death
She had made an arrangement with Edward L. Hyman to appear in the Brooklyn Mark Strand Theatre, which paid her way more than any other performer. She played herself in a movie (Swim Girl).
Because she had measles as a child, Ederle had bad hearing the majority of her life. She had never married and by 2001, she was living in a nursing home. Gertrude Ederle sadly passed away on November 3rd, 2003 in Wyckoff, New Jersey at the age of 98. She was buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.
Gertrude Ederle was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame as “Honor Swimmer” in 1965. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2003. Annual swim in New York (Battery Park to Sandy Hook) is named after her to honor her, and follows the course she swam
Gertrude Ederle is an amazing woman, and with her hard determination, and never giving up, she reached her goal. A biographical film was released in 2024, sharing her life.