Ederle, Gertrud b. October 23, 1906; New York City d. November 30, 2003; New York City
Born to German immigrants in New York City, Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926.
Ederle was raised in the German section of New York’s West Side, a second- generation German immigrant with working-class roots.
Her father Henry was a butcher and her mother a housewife and caregiver to their six children. Trudy, as her family called her, was a tomboy who learned to swim at the family cottage in New Jersey when she was nine, though she claimed she did not learn to swim correctly until she mastered the crawl stroke that carried her across the English Channel.Tutored by the Women’s Swimming Association of New York, whose coach discovered her talent, she won her first swimming competition at fifteen. One year later she beat the men’s record for the classic 21mile race from Manhattan’s Battery to Sandy Hook in New Jersey. Between 1921 and 1925 she held twenty-nine amateur and world records in women’s freestyle events, winning three medals at the 1924 Paris Olympic Games.
Ederle’s first attempt to swim the channel in 1925 ended unsuccessfully. After nine hours her trainer, who claimed Ederle was too nauseated to continue, pulled her protesting from the water. A year later on August 6, 1926, Ederle returned to Cape Griz-Nez on the coast of France for her second attempt, this time with financial backing from Captain Peterson of the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. Wearing an outfit customized by her sister Margaret— red bathing cap, two-piece swimsuit, wraparound goggles—and slathered with lanolin and lard to protect against jellyfish and cold water, she battled the 21-mile crossing for fourteen hours, thirty-one minutes. High winds, driving rain, and shifting tides forced her to swim an arduous extra 14 miles. When her concerned father begged her to retreat into the accompanying boat, she replied “what for?” and kept on swimming until she saw welcoming bonfires off the coast of England.
A roaring crowd who had gathered to celebrate her accomplishment greeted her. Overnight, the newspapers would claim, she had become the most famous woman in the world. Ederle had shown it could be done, triumphing over the prevailing view that opposed competitive athletics for women due to their presumed physical inferiority.Eschewing the public spotlight, she traveled to Germany to visit her father’s relatives. While Ederle was there, another female swimmer accomplished the channel swim, thus diminishing the magnitude of Ederle’s achievement in the eyes of the media. Nonetheless, she returned home to a massive celebration, first in New York Harbor to the din of swooping airplanes and steamship sirens and then up Broadway to a ticker tape parade. At City Hall, the mayor compared her achievement to Moses crossing the Red Sea, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and Washington crossing the Delaware.
The media was not slow to size up the “Queen of the Waters” and “America’s best girl” as the ideal type of American womanhood while at the same time underscoring her sturdy German features and workingclass origins. A telegram from the United German Societies of Americans of German Descent proclaimed their pride that the first woman conqueror of the channel was a German American, a butcher’s daughter who grew up to be a Queen.
Ederle’s ambition stopped short at the channel shore. Her potential professional career was badly mismanaged, and offers of lucrative theater and swimming engagements came to naught. A red roadster promised to her by her father was one of the few tangible incentives she received for her swimming achievement. She was traumatized by her triumph and celebrity status and suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of twenty-one. She was also dogged by misfortune, injuring her back, which severely limited her mobility, and then becoming deaf, which she blamed for her growing shyness and lack of confidence.
During World War II, Ederle became an instrument technician for American Overseas Airlines at La Guardia and later volunteered to teach deaf children to swim.
Around the same time she was appointed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Citizen’s Advisory Committee on the Fitness of America’ s Youth and in 1965 was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame. Her last public appearance was in 1976 on the fiftieth anniversary of her historic channel swim. She lived on until she was ninety-seven, living quietly in New York with two female companions and then at the Christian Health Care Center in New Jersey, where, confined to a wheelchair, she was surrounded by her trophies.Christiane Job and Patricia Vertinsky
References and Further Reading
Benjamin, Philip. “Then and Now: Gertrude Ederle, First Woman to Swim the English Channel Still Gets Fan Mail.” New York Times, August 6, 1961, 58.
Gallico, Paul. “Gertrude Ederle.” The Golden People. New Jersey: Doubleday, 1965.
Trumbull, Walter. “Queen of the Waters.” St. Nicholas 53 (October 1926): 1114.