Chadwick, Florence May

(b. 9 November 1918 in San Diego, California; d. 15 March 1995 in San Diego, California), champion marathon swimmer who gained worldwide acclaim in 1950 when she swam the English Channel one hour faster than any previous woman swimmer.

Chadwick was the second child and the only daughter of Richard William Chadwick, a San Diego police detective, and Mary Lacko, the owner of a downtown restaurant. Florence Chadwick was encouraged by her uncle, Mike Lacko, to enter competitive swimming when she was six years old and growing up at 2120 Warrington Street in Point Loma on San Diego Bay. The youngster set her sights on emulating Gertrude Ederle’s 1926 record English Channel swim, and at age ten she became the first child to swim the six-mile San Diego Bay Channel. Soon afterward she won her first trophy in the city’s annual 2.5-mile rough-water night swim off Hermosa Beach, the first of dozens of Pacific Coast amateur open-water titles she captured over the next nineteen years. While growing up, Chadwick was trained by her father, who set up a gym in the family’s garage, where she sawed wood to develop both her stamina and her shoulders. In 1930 the local swimming coach Henry Gunther took over, and he remained her coach throughout Chadwick’s amateur career. She failed to break into the national ranks while swimming with the Los Angeles Athletic Club with teammates Eleanor Holm and Esther Williams. Chadwick did little better than a second-place finish to Holm in the 1932 U.S. Nationals. She realized that her forte was in outdoor swimming.

Chadwick attended Loma Portal Elementary School and in 1936 graduated from Point Loma Senior High School, where she swam competitively, was elected president of the associated high school student body, and was a member of the Girl Reserves, a junior branch of the YWCA. She attended San Diego State College (1937), Southwestern University of Law at Los Angeles (1938), and Balboa Law School in San Diego (1939). In 1940 she entered the local Dickenson Business College for eighteen months and became a trainee at the comptometer school of San Diego’s Felt and Tarrant Manufacturing Company. Vacillating between an athletic career and show business, she produced and performed in aquacades, an entertainment rage of the time. She also appeared in Bathing Beauty, a 1945 MGM swimming film extravaganza, with her former teammate Williams. She was briefly married twice. She first married Alex Balich in 1939; they divorced in 1940. In 1942 she married Bob Warner, a San Diego policeman; they divorced in 1946. Chadwick referred to both marriages as “detours” from her swimming career.

After two years as aquatic director at nearby La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, Chadwick left in June 1948 for Saudi Arabia and an office job with the giant Arabian-American Oil Company. Committed to her childhood goal of swimming the English Channel, she banked her salary and trained daily. When transferred to Ras al Mishah in the Persian Gulf, she trained in the gulf’s redolent, oil-slicked waters, which she later said felt like swimming in “hot soup.” A strict conditioning regime made her “swim until tired, then swim until exhausted, and then swim an extra half-mile.” She saved $5,000 toward her Channel expenses and in June 1950 headed for Wissant, France, where she trained for another two months.

At 2:37 A.M. on 8 August 1950 Chadwick entered the Channel’s choppy, frigid waters, nowhere warmer than 60 degrees Fahrenheit, at Cape Gris-Nez on the coast of France. Escorted by the Marcel Nicole fishing boat carrying her father, two Saudi friends, and officials, she swam through the night, starting off at a blistering sixty strokes a minute. She reached Dover, England, in thirteen hours and twenty minutes, lopping more than an hour off Ederle’s twenty-four-year-old record. She was the twelfth woman and the thirty-second swimmer to complete the nineteen-mile swim since England’s Matthew Webb first swam the route seventy-five years earlier. In a dramatic finish, British artillery forces suspended fire as Chadwick swam into their gunnery practice area. Wading ashore through a bed of kelp she announced, “I feel fine and I am quite prepared to swim back.”

Chadwick did swim back, but not until a year later. She overcame strong tides, winds, heavy fog, and icy waters to become the first woman to swim the Channel from England (Saint Margaret’s Bay, Dover) to France (Sangatte) on 11 September 1951. She made that swim in sixteen hours and twenty-two minutes, a record she would shatter twice before retiring in 1960.

Known as the “channel barnstormer,” Chadwick set swimming records for California’s Catalina (1952), the English Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Bosporus, and the Dardanelles (all in fall 1953). The once-impoverished Californian who had exhausted her nest egg for her first Channel swim now commanded fees ranging from $5,000 to $20,000 an exhibition, made frequent appearances on radio and television, and traveled nationwide on behalf of her sponsor, Catalina Bathing Suits. Between “channels” she worked for Grossinger’s Resort in New York’s Catskills Mountains as aquatics director (1952–1963). Her annual income was well in excess of $50,000, making her the highest paid woman athlete in the country. As late as 1957 she was still setting records, swimming the fourteen-mile Bristol Channel (England to Wales) in six hours and seven minutes. Three years later, after several failed efforts to cross the treacherous North Channel between Ireland and Scotland, Chadwick retired. In her forty-year career she had set seventeen world records in long-distance swimming, leading Sports Illustrated to name her the “best woman long-distance swimmer the world has ever known” (7 November 1960). She was inducted into San Diego’s Hall of Champions in 1962, the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1970, and the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1996.

Chadwick remained in New York City, her home since 1950, where she taught swimming until 1966. At that time she joined Manufacturers Hanover Bank as a credit counselor and public relations representative in its Wall Street branch. Her mother was ailing, so Chadwick moved back to the pink house on Warrington Street in 1970. Equipped with a broker’s license earned in 1969, she spent her remaining years as a stockbroker and financial consultant and continued to work with a new generation of marathon swimmers. She died of leukemia at age seventy-six in San Diego’s Mercy Hospital. Her body was cremated and her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

Chadwick was one of the world’s great marathon swimmers. At 5 feet 6 inches and 140 pounds, her physique was more that of a swimsuit model than an endurance swimmer and helped dispel the myth that only well-padded women could withstand the rigors of marathon swimming. Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic champion and motion picture star, once said of Chadwick, “She’s the greatest swimmer of all time—maybe of either sex.” Her achievements came at a time when most Americans viewed marathon swimming as comparable to flagpole sitting or Niagara Falls barrel sailing. Few regarded the endeavor as much more than a publicity stunt. Chadwick’s career changed that perception. Her records all have been superseded, but she was among the first to lend credibility to the sport of endurance swimming.

Both the Henning Library and Archive at the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the San Diego Hall of Champions maintain a collection of photographs, articles, and memorabilia pertaining to Chadwick’s career. Gail Campbell, Marathon: The World of the Long-Distance Athlete (1977), places Chadwick in the context of the history of marathon swimming and devotes a short chapter to her achievements. “Whatever Happened to Florence Chadwick?” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle (13 Sept. 1970), recounts events in the swimmer’s early career and her training methods. “Florence Chadwick Still Dreams of Channel Swim,” San Diego Union (22 Mar. 1970), offers a glimpse of the aging swimmer’s regrets and hopes as well as her outlook on swimming. Obituaries are in the San Diego Union-Tribune (18 Mar. 1995) and the New York Times (19 Mar. 1995).

Martha Monaghan Corpus