This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
About 20 years ago, I shared a desk at The Times with the veteran sports reporter John Goodbody, who began most lunchtimes with the words “Just off for a paddle”. He would then go to the swimming baths to do a few dozen lengths whilst I headed to the pub for a few pints. That was why we both looked the way we did: Goodbody by name …
In 1991, one of John’s “paddles” got him on to the front of the newspaper when he touched the sand at Cap Blanc Nez after swimming the Channel. John, then aged 48, had spent dozens of hours of training along the Kent coast before he felt ready to tackle the crossing. Even now, he says, the cry of a seagull will give him shudders.
In a new book to mark 150 years since the first unaided Channel swim, John describes the pain and disorientation of being tossed about “as if in a washing machine”, the waves crashing over your head and up your nose, your gums raw from salt. The shortest crossing is 21 miles, but the currents make it much farther. As Jim Counsilman, who did it aged 58, said: “It hurt just once — from beginning to end.”
They are in a rare club. At the end of last season, 2,607 successful swims had been made and many thousands more aborted. That is more than the 1,924 oarsmen who have rowed an ocean or the 518 sailors to complete a solo circumnavigation, but it is a lot fewer than the 12,000 or so who have climbed Everest. It remains a phenomenal achievement.
The first to do it unaided, in August 1875, was Matthew Webb, a 27-year-old from Shropshire. Some said it was achieved 58 years earlier by Giovan Maria Salati, an Italian in Napoleon’s army who was found collapsed on the beach at Boulogne after escaping from a prison ship near Dover, but it was suspected he had used a bundle of straw for buoyancy. J.B. Johnson claimed to have swum the Channel in 1872, but it turned out he’d taken a boat for all but the first and last mile. Paul Boyton also made the crossing in 1875 wearing an inflatable rubber suit, a sail and clutching a paddle.
Webb did it all on his own. A strong swimmer since childhood, at the age of eight he had saved his brother from drowning and, when working on a Cunard liner, dived into the Atlantic in an attempt to save an overboard sailor. Webb trained in the Thames estuary, covering the 18 miles from Blackwall to Gravesend in five hours.
His first attempt was abandoned after seven hours, with Webb declaring there was “too much sea”. He tried again 12 days later, fortified by a few glasses of whisky. Despite getting tangled in seaweed and attracting some frisky porpoises, he got to within a couple of miles of France. Then the stiff tides and his fatigue began to draw him back out to sea.
His support boat considered whether to pull him out but, as the Daily Telegraph reported, “his indomitable pluck would not allow him to give up with the prize so near”. For the last stretch, they urged him on by singing “Rule, Britannia”. Webb finally hit the French beach, having taken 21 hours and 45 minutes. “Nothing great is easy,” he said.
It was 36 years before the next official crossing, Thomas Burgess succeeding where 71 others failed — some quite exotic. Baroness Walpurga von Isacescu from Vienna managed 15 miles in 1900. Five years later Australian Annette Kellerman failed three times. She had a more notable first in 1916 as the first actress to appear nude on screen in the film A Daughter of the Gods.
Lt Gen Lord Bernard Freyberg, VC DSO and three bars, also made several attempts. His closest finish came in 1926 when he got within 200 yards of France. His wife gave him brandy for the final push — which sent him to sleep, and he had to be rescued. That same year, Gertrude Ederle, from New York, became the first woman to complete it. “‘England or Drown’ is my motto,” she said. It took her 14 hours and 39 minutes, almost two hours faster than any man to that point. The record now is 6hr 45min.
Many chase impossible challenges simply “because it’s there”. In 2005, Dean Karnazes ran for more than 80 hours without sleep; in 2012, the Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumped to Earth from a height of 24 miles, hitting 833mph before deploying his parachute. He died this summer in a paragliding accident.
Webb, too, had a sad ending. Hailed as a hero, he was invited to dinners galore and received £2,400 in donations (worth about £300,000 today) but he grew impatient to attempt another impossible feat. In 1883, he decided to swim through the whirlpool rapids of Niagara Falls, a stretch that he called “the angriest bit of water in the world”. The water won. Webb was sucked under and drowned. His corpse was found eight miles downstream with a deep hole in his head from being dashed on the rocks. The fear of irrelevance proved fatal. As The Times wrote: “Can there be any position more awful than that of a man who has been a nine-days wonder on the morning of the tenth day?”
