Gertrude Ederle 

1906- 
Athlete, swimmer

An American swimmer, Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, breaking the time record of the fastest man by one hour and fifty-nine minutes.

Early Life

Gertrude Caroline Ederle was born to a German immigrant family on October 23, 1906, in New York City. Her father, Henry J. Ederle, was a successful butcher who owned the Ederle Brothers Meat Market on upper Amsterdam Avenue. Her mother, Gertrude Haverstroh Ederle, was a homemaker who reared six children. 

It was Trudy's mother who taught her to swim. At their summer cottage in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, her mother tied a rope around Trudy and let her down into the water. Dangling from the end of the rope, Trudy learned to dog paddle; within three days, she had learned to swim. Three years later Mrs. Ederle took Trudy and her five brothers and sisters to a swimming exhibition at the Highlands. It was there that Trudy decided she wanted to swim like the experts. 

A mere four years after her mother taught her to swim, Trudy set an eight-hundred-yard freestyle record with a time of thirteen minutes and nineteen seconds. By the age of twelve, Trudy was the youngest person to break a nonmechanical world record. 

After one year of courses, Trudy dropped out of high school. At about the same time, Charlotte Epstein of the Women's Swimming Association of New York had convinced the Amateur Athletic Union to register female swimmers and sponsor meets. Trudy's older sister, Margaret, encouraged her to swim for the association, and there Trudy received her early training and coaching. 

At the age of fourteen, Trudy first demonstrated her long-distance swimming prowess by defeating fifty-one other women in a three and one-half mile international race from Manhattan Beach to Brighton Beach. By the age of seventeen, Trudy held eighteen world swimming records and was a member of the United States Olympic swimming team. During the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris, Trudy won a gold and two bronze medals in the five racing events open to women. The following year, Trudy swam the twenty-one mile distance from the Battery in lower Manhattan to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in seven hours and eleven minutes, bettering the men's record. By this time, Trudy held twenty-nine national and world records. 

Life's Work

With funding from the Women's Swimming Association, Gertrude Ederle first attempted to swim the English Channel on August 18, 1925. Eight hours and forty-six minutes in the water, with only six miles to go, a wave engulfed her, and she stopped to spit out the salt water. Her trainer thought that she was collapsing and called to a man swimming alongside her to grab her. He did, thus disqualifying her. Although Ederle said, "I could have gone on," there was no fame in defeat. 

Many men and some women had tried to swim the English Channel, but the passage proved to be too severe. The existence of crosscurrents, heavy tides, and choppy waves made the English Channel a treacherous body of water. Until 1926, only five men had successfully made the swim. Of the five fastest times recorded, Enrique Tiraboschi of Argentina held the first position with the time of sixteen hours and thirty-three minutes. 

Ederle's second attempt to swim the Channel would require funding, and the Women's Swimming Association simply did not have adequate resources to sponsor her swim. After learning of Ederle's situation, Captain Patterson, a newspaper publisher, agreed to provide the necessary funds, knowing that if Ederle was successful, he would have the exclusive story and the lead on every other newspaper in the country. Signing the contract for her expenses and a modest salary was something Trudy would have to give serious consideration. Once she signed the contract she would be upgraded to a professional status, and therefore, ineligible to participate in future amateur competition. With determination on her side, Ederle signed the contract. 

Accompanied by her father, her sister Margaret, and her trainer, Thomas W. Burgess in a tug boat, Gertrude Ederle once again attempted to swim the English Channel. With a promise from her father that she would not be pulled out of the water unless she asked, Ederle began her swim at 7:08 A.M. on the morning of August 6, 1926. The odds were three-to-one that she would fail. 

The sea was fairly calm when she began her swim. By mid-morning, however, rain began to fall; by afternoon, a change of tide brought increasing wind and currents, turning the channel into rough waters. After twelve hours of swimming, the winds reached gale proportions, and her trainer told her that she must come out of the water. Ederle simply asked, "What for?" She continued to swim the Channel using the American crawl stroke. Fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes after she began, Ederle walked ashore at Kingsdown on the Dover coast at 9:35 P.M., becoming the first woman to swim across the English Channel successfully. While the heavy sea had forced her to swim thirty-five miles to cover the twenty-one mile distance, Ederle swam from Cape Gris-Nez, France, to Dover, England, and broke the time record of the fastest man by one hour and fifty-nine minutes. The moment she completed her swim, she became the most famous and talked about woman in the world. 

Ederle returned to New York to a heroine's welcome. The whistle-cord of every steamship in New York Harbor was tied down, sirens were sounded, and airplanes overhead dropped flowers. After stepping off the Berengaria liner, Trudy rode in a motorcade up lower Broadway, passing under the fall of ticker tape. On her route an enthusiastic crowd of two million people rushed to touch the car in which she rode. Never before had there been such a welcome for a sports hero. To newspaper reporters she simply said, "I knew I could do it. I knew I would, and I did." 

After a day of being greeted and dined by everyone who was anyone in the city, Ederle received her scroll of honor from the mayor of New York. The text of the scroll in part read, "to you for the indomitable courage, the skillful grace, the tremendous athletic prowess, which enabled you to be the first girl in the world to swim the English Channel." It was then that she stated, "It was for my flag that I swam and to know that I could bring home the honors, and my mind was made up to do it." At the end of her day of public adoration, yet another welcome awaited her on the west side of town. As neighbors and friends prepared for the homecoming of "Trudy, Queen of the Seas," thousands stood in front of her house, on adjoining roofs, and in windows to welcome her back to her neighborhood. 

The day after the news of her return home, promoters, manufacturers, and motion picture producers lined up to solicit endorsements of every kind. Dudley Field Malone, her legal counsel, stated that the offers totaled $900,000. The offers included a contract paying $125,000 for a twenty-week appearance on the stage, and another for a forty-week theatrical offer. For the first time, riches were offered to a swimmer. 

Ederle eventually signed a contract with the William Morris Agency to tour for two years in vaudeville as a swimmer. She costarred with Bebe Daniels in the film Swim, Girl, Swim. Unfortunately, Ederle's fame did not last, and the pressure of public life proved hard to endure. Her record as the only woman to swim across the English Channel successfully lasted less than a month when Amelia Gade Corson successfully crossed the Channel on August 29. Ederle's record time was broken when a German man named Vierkoetter swam the Channel in twelve hours and forty-three minutes. Her hearing, which was impaired since childhood and was further damaged by her Channel swim, eventually deteriorated into deafness. Ederle suffered a fall in 1933 that injured her spine; she was forced to wear casts for almost four years. Nineteen neurologists said she would never walk again. 

With the same determination with which she swam the English Channel, Ederle recovered from her injury and appeared in Billy Rose's Aquacade at the New York's World Fair in 1939. Like thousands of other American women, she was employed in an aircraft plant during World War II. After the war, however, her dreams of becoming a swimming instructor were deterred by her deafness. Ederle overcame this obstacle by using it to her advantage and focusing her talents on teaching deaf children to swim. In 1965, she was one of the first twenty-one inductees into the international Swimming Hall of Fame. 

On the very day Gertrude Ederle successfully swam the English Channel, a London newspaper ran a front-page editorial which argued that her previous failure to swim the Channel proved the athletic inferiority of women and the uselessness of competitive athletics for women. This was, however, not an unusual theme for the time. Experts in a variety of fields had long argued that strenuous activities for women could lead to problems in childbearing or the development of bulging muscles, and it was not until the late nineteenth century that women participated in competitive sports. Even still, appropriate sports and proper competitive levels were to be maintained so as not to compromise the traditional image of the woman which included traits of passivity and cooperation. No doubt Ederle helped lay to rest the notion that a competitive female athlete was an impossibility. 

Ederle was among the first real sports heroines to prove that women were not physically inferior or incapable of strenuous activity. Her record-breaking times, beginning with the twenty-one mile race from the Battery to Sandy Hook and ending with her Channel swim, clearly proved that women were not physically inferior to men. With determination and hard work, she illustrated the potential for women who practiced hard and maintained their dedication. Her twenty-nine national and world records demonstrated that women were fully capable of achieving great prowess in competitive sports. The accomplishments of Gertrude Ederle will always serve as evidence for the endless possibilities for women in sport.