It’s a swim literature episode! Featuring John Hancock, who told us the colourful life story of Sir Bernard Freyberg and his wartime swim.
This time John and Shona talk about:
The “mad, bad and dangerous to know” poet Lord Byron’s 1810 swim across the Dardanelles (formerly the Hellespont, between Europe and Asia). Lord Byron was inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Leander, who swam across the same body of water to his lover Hero’s lantern-lit tower each night. Byron recounted his swim triumph in his poem ‘Don Juan’.
The Old English poem Beowulf, whose protagonist spent a week in the freezing Scandinavian ocean, first competing with his childhood friend Breca and then fighting off ‘sea monsters’.
Much more recently, British writer Roger Deakin’s series of swims across Britain, captured in his beautiful book Waterlog (1999). Deakin is considered by many to be the founding father of the modern ‘wild swimming’ movement.
John and Shona do some readings from the texts above (extra points to John for managing some Old English). John also talks about the book Haunts of the Black Masseur: the Swimmer as Hero by Charles Sprawson (1992).
We’re keen to know what you think of this episode! Leave a comment or email swimchatswithshona at gmail dot com.
*
In the introduction Shona talks about Ben Knight, a Wellington ocean advocate and protector who sadly passed away this month. Over the years Ben worked with Mountains to Sea Wellington and Sustainable Coastlines, which posted a lovely tribute to Ben on Facebook with some conservation figures that demonstrate his incredible legacy. Thank you, Ben. You have inspired many of us.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Kyodo and welcome to Swim Chats,a podcast about ocean.
Swimming. I'm Shona Riddell, a writer,
former journalist and swimmer from Wellington Altairo in New
Zealand. For each episode, I talk to a
different. Guest from our swim community
remember. If you have any questions.
Thoughts or suggestions? You can e-mail me at
swimchatswithshona@gmail.com. Or follow swim.
(00:30):
Chats on Instagram please hit the follow or subscribe button
so you don't miss an. Episode you can also.
Leave a five star rating which helps more people discover the
podcast. And if you know people who you
think. Would enjoy it.
Please tell them about swim chats.
Before we get started with this episode, I'd first like to
(00:52):
acknowledge the passing of Ben Knight, who was a marine
conservation advocate here in Wellington.
Ben was a guardian of Carpeting Marine Reserve and he worked
with Mountains to Sea Wellingtonand Sustainable Coastlines,
which published some numbers on Facebook last week in a post
I'll link to in the show notes. But in the post they said that
Ben had LED or helped to lead 1297 cleanup events involving
(01:18):
18,289 participants. He ran 137 trainer events,
oversaw the planting of 24,320 trees and the removal of 67,157
litres of rubbish from our coastlines.
And on a personal note, Ben helped me to organise the
(01:40):
Sunrise Seaweed Swim in March this year which opened.
Alteredo's first seaweed festival, he wrote.
The Safety. Plan for the event and he made
sure that everyone was well briefed on the day.
He was a lovely guy and a real champion for the ocean.
He did a lot of good work and I know he inspired a lot of
people, including me. So thank you, Ben.
(02:02):
And I'll link to mountains. To see Wellington and
Sustainable Coastlines on the show notes for people who want
to learn more. All right.
Well, today I'm very excited to have my first returning guest to
the podcast. You may remember him from
April's episode where we talked about Sir Bernard Freiburg and
(02:24):
his heroic World War One swim and also his own heroic ultra
marathon swimming. So this is John Hancock who's
come back to the podcast. Welcome back, John.
Hey Yashona, how's it going? Very well, thank you.
And so when John and I were talking about Sir Bernard's sort
of colourful life and swim history, we both discovered this
(02:48):
mutual interest in not only swimhistory, but literature about
swim history. And we both felt there's a an
untapped market in New Zealand for podcasts about swim literary
history. Yes, I, I was saying before we
started recording Shona, that I've been quite impressed by how
(03:08):
your podcast has taken off and you've got this enormous
listenership now. So I thought I'd do something to
bring that to a juddering halt. And to.
And we can record a podcast thatabout four people are going to
be interested in just to bring it back down to earth.
But. Yeah, but some, sometimes it's,
it's good to have a niche audience of a small but very
(03:30):
passionate group. So I, I think everyone will be
curious about this episode and we'll, we'll see where it takes
us. See.
See how long we can keep. Actually, if you could tell us
at the end of it, I got to minute 7, you know, I got to
minute 15 and then gave up. Exactly.
Yeah. So we'll be very interested in
people's feedback. And I'm assuming people will
(03:51):
enjoy this episode and be interested in more, in which
case we can we can carry on the tradition.
Yes, I mean, the the inspirationfor this, I was trying to sort
of cleverly segue back to what we talked about with Sir Bernard
Freiburg, who was this sort of boy's own hero whose life just
read like a cartoon comic. And the thing that it really
(04:14):
reminded me of was this swashbuckling poet in the 19th
century, Lord Byron. And this guy famously swam
between Europe and Asia across the Dardanelle Strait.
And his inspiration for doing this is, was this a Greek myth?
(04:38):
The the myth of hero and Leander.
And so the story of hero and Leander is that Leander was in
love with hero and every night he used to swim across the
Dardanelles Strait. But they they called it the
Hellespont sounds incredibly romantic to spend time with her,
(04:59):
which is a bit of a euphemism, Ithink.
And every night Hero would have would light a lamp and the the
light would be visible from the tower.
Like Juliet, she was in her tower and he had to swim across
the the channel. And so he would, once he got
(05:22):
ashore, he'd seduce her with hiswonderful words.
And they had this secret love affair all the way through warm
summer. But when it was winter and the
weather got rougher, they decided that they'd separate for
the rest of the season and resume their illicit
relationship in the spring. But one stormy night in winter,
(05:47):
Leander saw the torch at the topof Heroes Tower and decided that
that was her calling him, And sohe leapt into the Hellas.
Pomp promptly lost his way and drowned.
Sounds like an opera, doesn't it?
One of these sort of catastrophic deaths.
And of course, as soon as Hiro saw his dead Boshy body wash up
(06:08):
on the shore as an opera diva, she herself threw herself off
the top of the tower and was instantly killed.
And then their two bodies were discovered on the beach
together, locked in a lover's embrace and subsequently buried
in a lover's tomb. So sort of early, early fun from
(06:30):
our literary literary swimming history anyway, so that that
that's been a a story in the in the in the Canon, you know, as
you say for whatever the 1200 years now and.
One, sorry, one thought I had was or actually two thoughts?
When was? How far was he swimming every
night? Do we know that that well?
(06:53):
While I was reading about this, I found this incredibly nerdy
swimming blog page with all the details of swimming across the
Hellespont. Because people do it these days,
you can go on a holiday with Swim Trek Limited.
So I think the straight line, it's only about sort of 1500
meters or something like that. But it like a lot of our lovely
(07:16):
tidal swims in New Zealand, it'sgot a very, very strong current.
So there are all these sort of school geometry pictures of, you
know, you need to swim 16° against the currents at so and
such a speed in order to actually cross directly over the
Hellespont. But yeah, the.
(07:37):
So it's quite, quite a feat of endurance to be doing that every
night. And the other thought, the other
thought I, yeah, true. The other thought I had was, you
know, he stopped over winter andresumed in spring.
And you know, that wouldn't deter Wellington Ocean swimmers,
would they would just keep swimming.
No, that's right. Even if there wasn't a light on
the other side of the harbour toto attract them over.
(08:00):
A lot of people swim towards thelighthouse don't, don't they, in
Wellington. So it's sort of similar.
Maybe there's something secret going on inside the lighthouse
that we've never stopped to investigate.
Yeah, if. Anybody wants to write in and
tell us they came? So anyway, so this this story
has been around forever and everand ever but that and I wasn't
(08:22):
totally sort of familiar with all the the sort of background.
But as I was saying, there's this very, very famous 19th
century poet Lord Byron. And this guy was in, he was
Bernard Freiberg on steroids. He lived this incredibly
colorful life. And interestingly, he had what's
(08:44):
called a club foot. So one of his feet was turned in
and it didn't really work properly.
So he couldn't walk or run very comfortably.
But he was a very good swimmer and obviously because it didn't
need him to be able to take his own weight.
And as this sort of boy's own hero, he was very, very
athletic. And he used to do boxing and
(09:06):
fencing and whatever and found one little detail that while he
was at Trinity College, Cambridge, he kept a bear as a
pet because the college rules said that you weren't allowed to
have a dog. So he decided it would be much
more fun to break the rules and have a bear in his own chambers.
So that's sort of pretty much sums the guy up.
(09:28):
I. Remember I remember listening to
a podcast about his fascinating life and they said it was a
trained circus bear and quite, quite a small bear.
So that adds a bit of context toyour mental picture.
Yeah, I'm sort of picturing a little Paddington Bear type pet.
It's a bit like the bears at Wellington Zoo.
(09:51):
You know, Wellington Zoo is likethis incredibly small zoo that's
on the side of the hill, and they've sort of specialized in
really small animals. So the bear enclosure at
Wellington Zoo, they have sun bears, and sun bears are very
small. They're probably the sort of
thing that Byron had in his chambers.
But there's some absolute geniushas got the bear enclosure at
Wellington Zoo sponsored by Arataki Honey.
(10:13):
And I can just imagine small children all over Wellington
dragging their parents to go andbuy Arataki Honey to go with the
very small sun beds that wasn't.All very good product.
Placement anyway, so so Byron and we'll maybe talk about some
of the other things that Byron did, but he's one of his his
(10:34):
famous long poems was about Don Juan and Don Juan was this sort
of character in history who actually sounded rather like
Lord Byron. He basically slept and womanized
and drank and debauched his way through life.
I think in my notes I said he was a free living philanderer.
(10:58):
And in canto 2 of Don Juan, so canto 2 so canto in a in a epic
poem is sort of, I suppose it would be like a chapter.
These poems were all really, really, really long.
And he tells the story of a shipwreck.
And Don Juan finds himself hanging onto a raft with lots of
(11:22):
other survivors. And the conditions are very
brutal and they're miles away from land, so they start eating
each other. But Don Juan, of course, is one
of the survivors. And then he washes ashore in one
of the Greek islands. And so there's this a beautiful
(11:45):
sort of example of Byron talkingabout swimming as part of the
epic tradition, which of course,is one of the things that he
did. And Byron's telling his readers
that because Don Juan was a great swimmer, he was a great
hero, just like Byron. Byron wasn't a very modest
person. And with the with the swimming,
(12:09):
what style of swimming are we talking about?
Do you know? Because I gathered this was the
time before the front crawl thatmost of us swim with today.
Would they have been swimming breaststroke?
Is that? Well, that's, that's a really
good question. I mean, the famous story about
Captain Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel, he
(12:30):
swam that breaststroke, didn't he?
But one of the guys who I swim with always in the pool,
whenever we finish squad, he always finishes with what looks
like sort of upside down breaststroke.
And it's called Old English backstroke, where you do the
frog legs and you do both arms at the same time.
(12:51):
And I actually wonder whether that's the sort of stroke that
these guys would have been sort of exploiting in the 19th
century. Yeah, makes sense.
Creates a whole different picture, doesn't it?
Yeah, so I thought the readers, the readers, the listeners might
be quite interested in hearing some of Byron's great, great
(13:14):
epic poem about Don Juan. So as he's sort of escaping
escaping death and eating all ofhis fellowshipwreck companions,
he's he's rescued and Byron saysbut in his native stream, the
(13:34):
Guadalquivir Juan to lathe his youthful limbs was won't, and
having learnt to swim in that sweet river had off turned the
art to some account. A better swimmer you could
scarce ever see. He could perhaps have passed the
Hellespont as once, a feat on which ourselves we prided.
(14:00):
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead and I did.So this is Byron telling the
story of Don Juan and basically using it to skite about what an
amazingly great swimmer he was by saying that Byron could have
swum across the the Hellas Pond as as as he did.
(14:20):
Yeah. So that's the that's the segue
to to Byron's great sort of swim.
But again, lovely call back to our conversation about Sir
Bernard Freiburg. So the listeners might remember
that I've outed Freiburg who lived his life as a post truth
Trumpian and who for my entire life has been famous for having
(14:43):
been involved in the Mexican Civil War.
That turns out simply not to have been true, but that he was
very happy to let this story circulate and make him sound
like a complete hero. But it turns out that Byron
actually did get involved in theGreek War of Independence.
So in 1823, Byron, who who was an aristocrat, he was a, he was
(15:06):
a Lord when he was 18. So when he was at university,
his Ruden sort of says Lord Byron from the door.
It wasn't something that happened to him later in life.
So it was quite wealthy. He donated a very large chunk of
his personal fortune, so about 4000 lbs in 1823.
So I don't know what that would be worth nowadays, but it would
(15:27):
be. It would be. $5 billion.
This is a Post Truth podcast, isn't it?
Yeah, but but making an investment to support the Greek
fleet and very like Freiburg, healso decided that he wanted to
get involved. So off he went from London down
(15:49):
to Greece, wanted to get involved in the fight himself
and rather like Freiburg in the First World War, was given
command of corps of soldiers andtraining.
Training with them. Unfortunately, unlike Freiburg,
(16:09):
who I don't know if your listeners remember, was sort of
shot to pieces and came out of the trenches with about sort of
2 kilos of buckshot in him, which was steadily removed and
he was virtually unable to walk at the end of it.
But very, very sadly, Byron actually died of a fever before
he even got to fight. So that was a rather less heroic
(16:33):
sort of end to his his life. But but the thing I really
wanted to talk about was Byron'sfamous swim across across the
Hellas Pond. So, you know, we talked at the
start of the interview shown about Hero and Leander and Byron
and one of his mates decided that this is what they wanted to
(16:57):
do. So, so that people have got this
in their mind. It, it, it, it's very romantic
because this is the very narrow stretch of water that separates
Europe and Asia. So even though it's only a
kilometre or so across, you're, you're effectively swimming from
one continent to another, which is the sort of romantic thing
that Lord Byron would want to do.
(17:20):
And as we were saying, it's very, very strong currents.
It's very, it's very shallow, but it separates 2 enormous
bodies of water. So a bit like French Pass in the
Marlborough Sounds, which has these incredibly strong currents
because all the water is is coming out of the sounds.
So on the 3rd of May 1810, the frigate the Salzette arrived
(17:44):
between Europe and Asia on the Hellespont, and Byron sort of
nobbled one of the crew of this ship, the Salzette, and his name
was Lieutenant Econhead. And Econhead was a notoriously
good swimmer, so Byron's obviously quite sensible and
(18:05):
he'd actually been to breeze safety briefings about how you
should never swim alone. So carrying it forward in our
Wellington world of today. And so they decided to try and
replicate this famous swim of Leander from Cestos to Abydos.
And it took Byron an hour and 10minutes to do the swim.
(18:27):
So it's not super fast, but verystrong currents.
But slightly humiliatingly, the sailor from the boat Econ Head
was 5 minutes quicker than him. Also, very prudently, they
decided to take a boat with them, so they had all their they
didn't have brightly coloured tow floats, but they had a
(18:48):
support vessel to look after them.
Excellent good health and safetyfrom Lord Byron.
Exactly. So even though he was a wild
philanderer who lived life on the edge, he didn't take
unnecessary risks. And this swim would have no
doubt pleased his very large fanclub that he had.
I remember learning that Byron'sone of the earliest celebrities
(19:13):
as we know it. He received a lot of fan mail.
He was very good looking and exactly, yeah, quite a
philander, as you said. And he was described by a former
partner as mad, bad and dangerous to know.
We talked in the Bernard Freiburg episode about how
Freiburg was sort of ahead of Trump in post Truth media.
(19:38):
I think in a way, Byron was ahead of the world in terms of
being an influencer. I mean, he was absolutely
because he was a society guy, but everybody loved him because
he was so colourful and charismatic.
And yes, but again, I thought weshould we should read some of
some of this. So we've heard Byron telling us
(20:00):
a little bit about. Don Juan and how Don Juan was
nearly a good a swimmer as him and then embedding himself that.
But of course he wrote his own little little diary note about
his own swim and it's titled written after swimming from
Cestos to Abydos. If in the month of dark December
(20:23):
Leander, who was nightly won't, What made Will not the tale
remember to cross thy stream broad Hellespont?
If when the wintry Tempest roared, he speed to hero nothing
loath, And thus of old thy current poured fair Venus.
(20:44):
How I pity both for me degenerate modern Wretch.
Though in the genial month of May my dripping limbs I faintly
stretch, and think I've done a feat today.
But since he crossed the rapid tide, according to the doubtful
story to woo and Lord knows whatbeside and swam for love, as I
(21:12):
for glory to a hard to say who fared the best sad mortals.
Thus the God still plague you. He lost his labor.
I my jest for he was drowned andI've the age you yes, and it
sounds terrible in rhyming couplets because we don't really
(21:34):
do that these days. But as you say, people people
absolutely loved it. I actually found there was
there's a famous what they call the war poets, a guy called
Rupert Brooke, who was also a student at Cambridge and all of
them are at Cambridge, who wrotea poem about a place just
(21:56):
outside Cambridge at Grantchester.
And he talks about Byron's swimming and there is actually a
little pond next to the the river there, which is now called
Byron's pool. And Brooke wrote this little
ditty about Byron's pool and it goes still in the dawnlit
waters. Cool.
His ghostly lordship swims his pool and tries the strokes
(22:21):
essays the tricks long learnt onHellespont or Styx.
Again, hasn't aged well, but anyway, it's a lovely.
Little I like Yeah, it's a lovely tribute and I I like the
idea that Byron has his own pooland that his ghost is still.
Swimming. Still swimming there.
That's exactly right. Anyway, but Byron was a great
(22:43):
poet. And I don't think the things
that we've read today are exactly Byron at the top of his
game, but they're may be more interesting to a swimming
audience. So he was very famously the
author of poem called She Walks in Beauty, which I'm sure a lot
of people will have heard. She walks in beauty like the
night of cloudless climbs and starry skies, and all that's
(23:07):
best of dark and bright meet in her aspect.
And her eyes thus mellowed to that tender light which heaven
to gaudy day denies. So he wasn't just cheesy rhyming
couplets the whole way through. There was a bit of bit of
substance to it. You've redeemed him.
(23:28):
So if we've still got any listeners going, I think people
should have write it at the end.And there's gonna be a prize for
anyone who gets to the end of the of the thing.
But the the prize at the end is that Shona is gonna tell us a
little bit about some more modern swimming literature.
But before we get there, the thing that I really wanted to
talk about wasn't Lord Byron. And people might remember that
(23:54):
about five years ago, a whole bunch of us got extremely
excited about this crazy Scandinavian sport where you
swim with your shoes on and you run in a wet suit and in the
most prosaically Scandinavian way imaginable.
It's called swim run. But a guy from the UK who was a
(24:15):
bit of a Lord Byron himself, really, ex military, went to
Eton College interested in literature.
He'd named the company that he used to run swim run events,
Breca. And nobody knows what Breca was
all about. But Breca is actually a
character from the, well, what would you call it?
(24:39):
The literary epic Beowulf. So Beowulf is one of the
foundational pieces of English literature, really.
It's a it's an epic poem. It was written sometime between
the 7th and 10th century. No one really knows.
So this is maybe 200 years afterthe Greek myth of Hero and
(25:01):
Leander, or maybe 500 years after the myth.
We just don't know. And I'd always thought that
Beowulf was written in what was called Middle English.
So Middle English is what the famous poet Geoffrey Chaucer
wrote the Canterbury Tales in. And I did this when I was at
school and at A level we had to read the Canterbury Tales in
(25:24):
Middle English and I can still remember I could.
Still remember? I can still remember the first
couplets of of the Canterbury Tales.
It goes one that April, with hisshortest suitor, the draught of
merch, hath pursed to the rota and bathed every vein in switch
(25:44):
liqueur, of which virtue on gendered is the floor.
And it's just as embarrassing trying to read that when you're
56 as it was when I was 17. So it's good to know that
nothing's changed there. Except the language.
The language has changed a lot, hasn't it?
I didn't recognise a word of that.
(26:06):
But I was wrong. It's Beowulf isn't written in
Middle English. Chaucer was writing, I think 3
or 400 years after Beowulf was written.
So Middle English was around sort of 1100 to 1500 AD, and
Beowulf was written in about 700AD.
(26:29):
And the language that Beowulf iswritten in is called Old
English. And this is based on German and
it's looked it up. It's closely related to Old
Frisian. So Frisian is from what's now
Holland and Denmark, that part of Northern Europe, an Old
Norse, whereas Middle English bythen England had been invaded by
(26:57):
the French. And obviously they introduced
some of their own, their own vocabulary.
And the absolute superb sentenceI discovered reading about this,
it said significant changes to vowel pronunciation occurred,
including the Great Vowel Shift,which continued into the modern
English period with a capital GA, capital V, and a capital S,
(27:20):
the Great Vowel Shift. So there you go.
Sounds like a a migration doesn't.
It so that's of no interest to our swimming listeners.
But what is interesting is the story of Beowulf and his
childhood friend Brekka. And the reason that Brekka swim
run was named after Brekka rather than Beowulf is that the
(27:44):
two of them survived a week longbattle in the sea against
monstrous sea creatures. And this story is told by a
character called Unferth. And he was one of the retainers
of King Rothgar who tried to undermine Beowulf the hero, by
(28:07):
bringing up this sort of silly schoolboy challenge that the two
of them took on. And Unfurth tells the story as
if Beowulf was some reckless andsilly boy who was defeated by
his friend Breka. But of course, Beowulf, who is
the the hero of the epic poem, sets the record straight and
(28:30):
explains that they were just boys when they made this boast
boast. In Old English the word is glyp
gilp, which is rather wonderful.And that they would swim in the
ocean, sea the for seven nights fully armed.
So you know, this is taking it to the next level of reality.
(28:51):
Full armour swords in the North Sea, which is absolutely
freezing. And it's in the winter, and
it's, yeah, that's right, in thewinter.
So it's even more freezing. So he, unlike Leander, he wasn't
put off by the difficulties of swimming, swimming in cold water
(29:12):
and. Earth is telling the story in a
pub, right? With the equivalent of a pub so.
That's right. So it's all sort of exaggerated,
but but the idea is it was a sort of endurance test really.
It wasn't a rate. It was sort of racing each other
down the down the North Sea and they they swam side by side and
(29:35):
then a storm blew up of course, and they got separated.
And of course, that's where the story gets really exciting.
And Beowulf finds himself fighting Nikos and sea monsters.
So these are the Tanifar of the North Sea, and he had to defend
himself. And of course, he's conveniently
(29:56):
wearing chainmail armor, so he swings his sword around his
head, presumably while treading water.
And if you thought it was embarrassing, listening to me
trying to pronounce Chaucer in Middle English will now get me
trying to read Beowulf in Old English.
(30:19):
He says forth on float farming. He house fugly ye likost.
And roughly translated that means forth on the flood, foamy
necked most like a bird. And this is trying to describe
what the seas that Beowulf was fighting the monster look like.
(30:44):
When you were sorry, when you were reading the Old English, it
sounded like we were playing youbackwards.
Backwards. It'll be like those conspiracy
theorists who say if you play some of the early Beatles songs
backwards, you get. Exactly.
You're probably saying somethinglike just keep swimming.
Just do you think we should be wearing chainmail in the sea?
(31:09):
Would this be good protection for us against?
Well, it's funny, I'd forgotten about this.
There is a story that when PeterJackson was shooting The Lord of
the Rings in Wellington and we had all these Hollywood film
stars living on the Miramar Peninsula.
Very famously Viggo Mortensen, who was 6 foot 8 heroic warrior,
(31:36):
is a method actor. And famously the Wetter Studios
had made him a suit of chainmailand an absolutely enormous
sword, rather like Brekka and Beowulf.
And every morning he would run round the Miramar Peninsula
wearing full chainmail with thisenormous sword.
And every single morning, the police would really receive a
(31:58):
phone call from some alarmed lady who'd seen this enormous
Viking running around the Miramar Peninsula with an
enormous sword. And so they went to go and see
him. And they said, Mr. Mortenson, we
do understand that this is part of your process and totally
respect your right as a free citizen to do these things, but
(32:18):
we were just wondering whether you could maybe leave the sword
at home next time you go out. So that's it.
But I mean, who? Who would be better to play
Brekka or Beowulf than Viggo Mortensen in his full Lord of
the Rings thing so we could shoot it?
Yeah, we could. I mean, Peter Jackson's just
down the road, so we can presentour pitch to him.
(32:41):
So. So Beowulf and Brekka were in
the sea for a week, first competing, swimming against each
other and then got separated. And then Beowulf was engaged
with some sea monsters of unknown origin.
But I'm guessing at this time they hadn't identified many
marine creatures and so we're thinking Dragons, whales.
(33:04):
What a elephant. Or or or just the froth on the.
Yeah, just the froth. On on the water and the
Presumably your brain starts playing very funny tricks on you
if you've. Been Yeah, maybe it's just
hallucinating, but it does seem quite timely because just a
couple of days ago in the harbour we had a visit from a
(33:26):
humpback whale. I don't know if you were
swimming on Sunday morning. Yeah, everyone was very excited
and I didn't see a thing. No, nobody was brand.
Yeah, it's always the way, isn'tit?
And nobody was brandishing a sword.
I'm assuming we're better identifying sea creatures now
and respecting them. But we should switch to you.
(33:49):
Really, Shona. I mean, as you say, there's the
most enormous Canon of now we'vestarted looking into it.
There are so many examples of great and not so great
literature about swimming. But you wanted to bring us bring
us sort of up to date a little bit and to talk to us about
(34:11):
Roger Deakin, who who who isn't really the same as as great epic
poems from the 5th century AD. So tell us a little bit about
Waterlog. OK, well, yeah, this is quite a
giant leap forward in time. But when we were discussing
Beowulf and thinking about what we were going to say about it,
(34:33):
and then it made me think about what is a heroic swim because,
you know, Byron swim, you know, that that was a fate of
achievement. And Beowulf, even though
fictional, you know, surviving in seven days and winter Norway
and fighting sea monsters, that's, you know, certainly
impressive. But in a in a smaller way, I
(34:56):
find Roger Deakin quite heroic because for one thing, he
embarked on the series of wild swims across Britain just by
himself as a sort of journey of self discovery.
But also his book Waterlog, which came out in 1999, has
inspired so many other people toget in the water and think about
(35:19):
water conservation. And I guess that's a different
kind of heroic legacy to leave. I don't know if have you read
Waterlogged John? No, you're embarrassing me.
No, sorry. No pressure.
Well, I haven't read Beowulf, soit's fine.
So Roger Deakin was, was this British writer who lived in
(35:40):
Suffolk and he was quite unusualin that he owned a Moat, which
not many people can say that they own a house with a Moat.
But he he lived in this cottage which was built in the 16th
century known as Walnut Tree Farm Cottage.
And it, it came with its own Moat, which in the book he
(36:02):
explains was sort of a status symbol at the time that people
would sort of dig these moats. And his one happened to be sort
of fed by an act of spring and such kept the water fresh.
And so all year round, he would swim happily in his Moat with,
you know, frogs and lilies and pond weed and, and it all sounds
(36:23):
quite idyllic. And the only time of year he
would stop is when it froze overso thickly that he could ice
skate on it. So he was clearly comfortable
with swimming in all seasons. But at the time he wrote this
book, I think he wrote it in sort of 1996, his relationship
(36:43):
had just ended and his only child had moved away.
And I think he was quite lonely.And I don't know if it was a
midlife crisis or just somethinghe randomly felt like doing.
But he'd been inspired by a short story I think he'd read
called The Swimmer, where the protagonist in the book swims
home after a party via a series of swimming pools.
(37:07):
And he thought, well, why don't I do the equivalent of that but
swim across Britain in rivers and ponds and sort of learn
something as I go. And so it's it's sort of a
travel book. It's quite a meandering style.
Like he does look at maps and make plans, but there's a lot of
coming and going. One thing I really like about
(37:29):
it, apart from the beautiful wayhe describes the places he
swims, is that being written in the late 90's, the Internet was
around, but I don't think he refers to it.
And he definitely doesn't have asmartphone, so he's not using
GPS to locate places, and he's not Googling things as he goes.
He's actually visiting librariesand looking through old maps and
(37:51):
trying to rediscover these forgotten waterways that people
swam in, you know, 100 years earlier or something.
And as a writer, I quite enjoy him describing his process of
researching all these different places to swim.
Yeah. And he talks about, you know,
(38:12):
it's quite sad in a way that allthese beautiful places have been
forgotten. And some of them are still used
and celebrated and other rivers have gotten polluted.
So, you know, he does talk aboutenvironmental degradation and
having to, you know, look after our waterways.
But basically, you can dip in and out of this book, no pun
(38:34):
intended. And.
And it's like a celebration of swimming.
Yeah. And so if people haven't read
it, then I would definitely recommend it.
And yeah, I guess a question foryou, John, not to put you on the
spot is like, what would you consider heroic swimming?
Like, is it a long swim? Is it a cold swim?
(38:56):
Or is it a any sort of swim thatyou might do out of your comfort
zone? Yeah, surely they're about
adventures, aren't they? And adventures can be in your
Moat in the middle of the ocean.I really need to dig myself a
Moat. I think it's.
Yeah, that reminds me. I was just going to read the
(39:17):
first paragraph of the book. Yeah.
Where Chapter 1 is called the Moat, and that's where the story
begins. So he writes.
The warm rain tumbled from the gutter and one of those
Midsummer downpours as I hastened across the lawn behind
my house in Suffolk and took. Shelter in the Moat.
Breast stroking up and down the 30 yards of clear green water
(39:41):
are nosed along eyes just at water level.
The frog's eye view of rain on the Moat was magnificent.
Rain calms water, it freshens, it sinks.
All the floating pollen, dead bumblebees and other flotsam.
Each raindrop exploded in a momentary bouncing fountain that
turned into a bubble and burst. The best moments were when the
(40:02):
storm intensified, drowning birdsong and a haze rose off the
water, as though the Moat itselfwere rising to make the lowering
sky. Then the rain ceased and the
reflected heavens were full of tiny dancers, water sprites
springing up on tiptoe like bright pins over the surface.
It was raining water sprites. It was at the height of this
(40:24):
drenching in the summer of 1996 that the notion of a long swim
through Britain began to form itself.
I wanted to follow the rain on its meanderings about our land,
to rejoin the sea, to break out of the frustration of a lifetime
doing lengths of endlessly turning back on myself.
Like a tiger pacing its cage. I began to dream of secret
(40:45):
swimming holes and a journey of discovery.
Raining water sprites, That's beautiful.
Yeah, he's, he writes very poetically.
Yeah. And it's, it's just amazing the
way he he had this idea of swimming across the country and
actually did it and wrote about it.
(41:06):
I find it inspiring. And much more accessible than
either 5th century epic poems orstupid rhyming couplets from
the. Actually, one of the, I was
going to say one of the sad things is that Roger Deakin died
about five years after this bookwas published.
(41:28):
He had a brain tumour. And so, you know, he lived to
see it published and saw that itit was a success, but he didn't
live to see the the sort of legacy it created.
Yeah. Absolutely.
And, and there is this amazing tradition, as we were saying
earlier on, I mean, we probably haven't got time to sort of go
into it now, but if people are keen, there's a a book which
(41:52):
apparently is very highly thought of, which was published
in 1992. It's called Haunts of the Black
Masser, the Swimmer as Hero. So it was actually written for
your podcast shown 30 years before you thought about having
one. And then somebody described it
to me as the greatest book aboutswimming.
(42:13):
So I went through all sorts of hoops to try and I couldn't even
find it on Amazon I don't think.I couldn't get it from my
Kindle. So I had to get a copy posted to
me from the UK and whatever and I found it in completely
unreadable. Actually.
It was very hard work. But he and he talks about Byron
and Hero and Leander and all that stuff and poets, more
(42:35):
modern British poets like Swinburne and even John
Bechelman who's this sort of very jolly sort of war period
poet who I thought we could finish with.
And it's this little skit. We were talking about him
earlier on about Captain Webb the Dolly man.
So Captain Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel.
(42:58):
And veteran says we saw the ghost of Captain Webb Webb in a
water sheeting come swimming along the old canal to the
Sunday evening meeting. And that's the low point of the
the podcast literary quality. But there's there's masses in
this book. He he's got all the stories
(43:18):
about records and some of the adventures rather than the
great, the great sort of literary pieces about swimming,
the different styles of the Spartans and the samurai, where
the German professional swimmerswere competing with the English
amateurs like Captain Webb. The collapse of the American
(43:40):
champions at the Los Angeles Games in 1932 before a Japanese
team defeated them headed by an 8 stone 14 year old.
Unbelievable. So so so much.
And then there are loads of of recent books which probably are
(44:01):
an entire podcast. You need to get one of your
intellectual young Kiwi friends to come on and talk about these
Shona. But the books lots of people
have read, The Swimmers by ChloeLane that was published about
five years ago, where We Swim byIngrid Horrocks published about
the same sort of time book Barnett Lees a few years earlier
(44:25):
called Swim a Year of Outdoor Swimming in New Zealand.
And then of course, you've had Kate Camp on the podcast talking
about her own poems and her mostrecent book of poetry, Makeshift
seasons. She read us this beautiful poem
called Freiburg Park Car Park, all about Graham watching us all
come and go. But maybe that's where we should
(44:48):
well. That that brings us full circle
because you just mentioned Freiburg car Park, which was
named after Bernard Freiburg. Indeed, that we start started
with him and finished with him. Yeah, I mean the the car park is
not particularly glamorous, so should add that Freiburg Pool
and Freiburg Beach are also named after him, not just the
(45:11):
car park. The car park just happens to be
between the pool and the beach. But it's got a lovely view it.
Does, yeah. It's a very nice car park.
Thanks. For listening to this episode of
Swim Chats, Please remember to follow or.
Subscribe to the podcast So You Don't.
Miss an episode and if you enjoyed it, you can leave a five
(45:32):
star rating and review which helps other people find it too.
Enjoy the water and we'll see you next time.
Kyodo and welcome to Swim Chats,a podcast about ocean.
Swimming. I'm Shona Riddell, a writer,
former journalist and swimmer from Wellington Altairo in New
Zealand. For each episode, I talk to a
different. Guest from our swim community
remember. If you have any questions.
Thoughts or suggestions? You can e-mail me at
swimchatswithshona@gmail.com. Or follow swim.
(00:30):
Chats on Instagram please hit the follow or subscribe button
so you don't miss an. Episode you can also.
Leave a five star rating which helps more people discover the
podcast. And if you know people who you
think. Would enjoy it.
Please tell them about swim chats.
Before we get started with this episode, I'd first like to
(00:52):
acknowledge the passing of Ben Knight, who was a marine
conservation advocate here in Wellington.
Ben was a guardian of Carpeting Marine Reserve and he worked
with Mountains to Sea Wellingtonand Sustainable Coastlines,
which published some numbers on Facebook last week in a post
I'll link to in the show notes. But in the post they said that
Ben had LED or helped to lead 1297 cleanup events involving
(01:18):
18,289 participants. He ran 137 trainer events,
oversaw the planting of 24,320 trees and the removal of 67,157
litres of rubbish from our coastlines.
And on a personal note, Ben helped me to organise the
(01:40):
Sunrise Seaweed Swim in March this year which opened.
Alteredo's first seaweed festival, he wrote.
The Safety. Plan for the event and he made
sure that everyone was well briefed on the day.
He was a lovely guy and a real champion for the ocean.
He did a lot of good work and I know he inspired a lot of
people, including me. So thank you, Ben.
(02:02):
And I'll link to mountains. To see Wellington and
Sustainable Coastlines on the show notes for people who want
to learn more. All right.
Well, today I'm very excited to have my first returning guest to
the podcast. You may remember him from
April's episode where we talked about Sir Bernard Freiburg and
(02:24):
his heroic World War One swim and also his own heroic ultra
marathon swimming. So this is John Hancock who's
come back to the podcast. Welcome back, John.
Hey Yashona, how's it going? Very well, thank you.
And so when John and I were talking about Sir Bernard's sort
of colourful life and swim history, we both discovered this
(02:48):
mutual interest in not only swimhistory, but literature about
swim history. And we both felt there's a an
untapped market in New Zealand for podcasts about swim literary
history. Yes, I, I was saying before we
started recording Shona, that I've been quite impressed by how
(03:08):
your podcast has taken off and you've got this enormous
listenership now. So I thought I'd do something to
bring that to a juddering halt. And to.
And we can record a podcast thatabout four people are going to
be interested in just to bring it back down to earth.
But. Yeah, but some, sometimes it's,
it's good to have a niche audience of a small but very
(03:30):
passionate group. So I, I think everyone will be
curious about this episode and we'll, we'll see where it takes
us. See.
See how long we can keep. Actually, if you could tell us
at the end of it, I got to minute 7, you know, I got to
minute 15 and then gave up. Exactly.
Yeah. So we'll be very interested in
people's feedback. And I'm assuming people will
(03:51):
enjoy this episode and be interested in more, in which
case we can we can carry on the tradition.
Yes, I mean, the the inspirationfor this, I was trying to sort
of cleverly segue back to what we talked about with Sir Bernard
Freiburg, who was this sort of boy's own hero whose life just
read like a cartoon comic. And the thing that it really
(04:14):
reminded me of was this swashbuckling poet in the 19th
century, Lord Byron. And this guy famously swam
between Europe and Asia across the Dardanelle Strait.
And his inspiration for doing this is, was this a Greek myth?
(04:38):
The the myth of hero and Leander.
And so the story of hero and Leander is that Leander was in
love with hero and every night he used to swim across the
Dardanelles Strait. But they they called it the
Hellespont sounds incredibly romantic to spend time with her,
(04:59):
which is a bit of a euphemism, Ithink.
And every night Hero would have would light a lamp and the the
light would be visible from the tower.
Like Juliet, she was in her tower and he had to swim across
the the channel. And so he would, once he got
(05:22):
ashore, he'd seduce her with hiswonderful words.
And they had this secret love affair all the way through warm
summer. But when it was winter and the
weather got rougher, they decided that they'd separate for
the rest of the season and resume their illicit
relationship in the spring. But one stormy night in winter,
(05:47):
Leander saw the torch at the topof Heroes Tower and decided that
that was her calling him, And sohe leapt into the Hellas.
Pomp promptly lost his way and drowned.
Sounds like an opera, doesn't it?
One of these sort of catastrophic deaths.
And of course, as soon as Hiro saw his dead Boshy body wash up
(06:08):
on the shore as an opera diva, she herself threw herself off
the top of the tower and was instantly killed.
And then their two bodies were discovered on the beach
together, locked in a lover's embrace and subsequently buried
in a lover's tomb. So sort of early, early fun from
(06:30):
our literary literary swimming history anyway, so that that
that's been a a story in the in the in the Canon, you know, as
you say for whatever the 1200 years now and.
One, sorry, one thought I had was or actually two thoughts?
When was? How far was he swimming every
night? Do we know that that well?
(06:53):
While I was reading about this, I found this incredibly nerdy
swimming blog page with all the details of swimming across the
Hellespont. Because people do it these days,
you can go on a holiday with Swim Trek Limited.
So I think the straight line, it's only about sort of 1500
meters or something like that. But it like a lot of our lovely
(07:16):
tidal swims in New Zealand, it'sgot a very, very strong current.
So there are all these sort of school geometry pictures of, you
know, you need to swim 16° against the currents at so and
such a speed in order to actually cross directly over the
Hellespont. But yeah, the.
(07:37):
So it's quite, quite a feat of endurance to be doing that every
night. And the other thought, the other
thought I, yeah, true. The other thought I had was, you
know, he stopped over winter andresumed in spring.
And you know, that wouldn't deter Wellington Ocean swimmers,
would they would just keep swimming.
No, that's right. Even if there wasn't a light on
the other side of the harbour toto attract them over.
(08:00):
A lot of people swim towards thelighthouse don't, don't they, in
Wellington. So it's sort of similar.
Maybe there's something secret going on inside the lighthouse
that we've never stopped to investigate.
Yeah, if. Anybody wants to write in and
tell us they came? So anyway, so this this story
has been around forever and everand ever but that and I wasn't
(08:22):
totally sort of familiar with all the the sort of background.
But as I was saying, there's this very, very famous 19th
century poet Lord Byron. And this guy was in, he was
Bernard Freiberg on steroids. He lived this incredibly
colorful life. And interestingly, he had what's
(08:44):
called a club foot. So one of his feet was turned in
and it didn't really work properly.
So he couldn't walk or run very comfortably.
But he was a very good swimmer and obviously because it didn't
need him to be able to take his own weight.
And as this sort of boy's own hero, he was very, very
athletic. And he used to do boxing and
(09:06):
fencing and whatever and found one little detail that while he
was at Trinity College, Cambridge, he kept a bear as a
pet because the college rules said that you weren't allowed to
have a dog. So he decided it would be much
more fun to break the rules and have a bear in his own chambers.
So that's sort of pretty much sums the guy up.
(09:28):
I. Remember I remember listening to
a podcast about his fascinating life and they said it was a
trained circus bear and quite, quite a small bear.
So that adds a bit of context toyour mental picture.
Yeah, I'm sort of picturing a little Paddington Bear type pet.
It's a bit like the bears at Wellington Zoo.
(09:51):
You know, Wellington Zoo is likethis incredibly small zoo that's
on the side of the hill, and they've sort of specialized in
really small animals. So the bear enclosure at
Wellington Zoo, they have sun bears, and sun bears are very
small. They're probably the sort of
thing that Byron had in his chambers.
But there's some absolute geniushas got the bear enclosure at
Wellington Zoo sponsored by Arataki Honey.
(10:13):
And I can just imagine small children all over Wellington
dragging their parents to go andbuy Arataki Honey to go with the
very small sun beds that wasn't.All very good product.
Placement anyway, so so Byron and we'll maybe talk about some
of the other things that Byron did, but he's one of his his
(10:34):
famous long poems was about Don Juan and Don Juan was this sort
of character in history who actually sounded rather like
Lord Byron. He basically slept and womanized
and drank and debauched his way through life.
I think in my notes I said he was a free living philanderer.
(10:58):
And in canto 2 of Don Juan, so canto 2 so canto in a in a epic
poem is sort of, I suppose it would be like a chapter.
These poems were all really, really, really long.
And he tells the story of a shipwreck.
And Don Juan finds himself hanging onto a raft with lots of
(11:22):
other survivors. And the conditions are very
brutal and they're miles away from land, so they start eating
each other. But Don Juan, of course, is one
of the survivors. And then he washes ashore in one
of the Greek islands. And so there's this a beautiful
(11:45):
sort of example of Byron talkingabout swimming as part of the
epic tradition, which of course,is one of the things that he
did. And Byron's telling his readers
that because Don Juan was a great swimmer, he was a great
hero, just like Byron. Byron wasn't a very modest
person. And with the with the swimming,
(12:09):
what style of swimming are we talking about?
Do you know? Because I gathered this was the
time before the front crawl thatmost of us swim with today.
Would they have been swimming breaststroke?
Is that? Well, that's, that's a really
good question. I mean, the famous story about
Captain Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel, he
(12:30):
swam that breaststroke, didn't he?
But one of the guys who I swim with always in the pool,
whenever we finish squad, he always finishes with what looks
like sort of upside down breaststroke.
And it's called Old English backstroke, where you do the
frog legs and you do both arms at the same time.
(12:51):
And I actually wonder whether that's the sort of stroke that
these guys would have been sort of exploiting in the 19th
century. Yeah, makes sense.
Creates a whole different picture, doesn't it?
Yeah, so I thought the readers, the readers, the listeners might
be quite interested in hearing some of Byron's great, great
(13:14):
epic poem about Don Juan. So as he's sort of escaping
escaping death and eating all ofhis fellowshipwreck companions,
he's he's rescued and Byron saysbut in his native stream, the
(13:34):
Guadalquivir Juan to lathe his youthful limbs was won't, and
having learnt to swim in that sweet river had off turned the
art to some account. A better swimmer you could
scarce ever see. He could perhaps have passed the
Hellespont as once, a feat on which ourselves we prided.
(14:00):
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead and I did.So this is Byron telling the
story of Don Juan and basically using it to skite about what an
amazingly great swimmer he was by saying that Byron could have
swum across the the Hellas Pond as as as he did.
(14:20):
Yeah. So that's the that's the segue
to to Byron's great sort of swim.
But again, lovely call back to our conversation about Sir
Bernard Freiburg. So the listeners might remember
that I've outed Freiburg who lived his life as a post truth
Trumpian and who for my entire life has been famous for having
(14:43):
been involved in the Mexican Civil War.
That turns out simply not to have been true, but that he was
very happy to let this story circulate and make him sound
like a complete hero. But it turns out that Byron
actually did get involved in theGreek War of Independence.
So in 1823, Byron, who who was an aristocrat, he was a, he was
(15:06):
a Lord when he was 18. So when he was at university,
his Ruden sort of says Lord Byron from the door.
It wasn't something that happened to him later in life.
So it was quite wealthy. He donated a very large chunk of
his personal fortune, so about 4000 lbs in 1823.
So I don't know what that would be worth nowadays, but it would
(15:27):
be. It would be. $5 billion.
This is a Post Truth podcast, isn't it?
Yeah, but but making an investment to support the Greek
fleet and very like Freiburg, healso decided that he wanted to
get involved. So off he went from London down
(15:49):
to Greece, wanted to get involved in the fight himself
and rather like Freiburg in the First World War, was given
command of corps of soldiers andtraining.
Training with them. Unfortunately, unlike Freiburg,
(16:09):
who I don't know if your listeners remember, was sort of
shot to pieces and came out of the trenches with about sort of
2 kilos of buckshot in him, which was steadily removed and
he was virtually unable to walk at the end of it.
But very, very sadly, Byron actually died of a fever before
he even got to fight. So that was a rather less heroic
(16:33):
sort of end to his his life. But but the thing I really
wanted to talk about was Byron'sfamous swim across across the
Hellas Pond. So, you know, we talked at the
start of the interview shown about Hero and Leander and Byron
and one of his mates decided that this is what they wanted to
(16:57):
do. So, so that people have got this
in their mind. It, it, it, it's very romantic
because this is the very narrow stretch of water that separates
Europe and Asia. So even though it's only a
kilometre or so across, you're, you're effectively swimming from
one continent to another, which is the sort of romantic thing
that Lord Byron would want to do.
(17:20):
And as we were saying, it's very, very strong currents.
It's very, it's very shallow, but it separates 2 enormous
bodies of water. So a bit like French Pass in the
Marlborough Sounds, which has these incredibly strong currents
because all the water is is coming out of the sounds.
So on the 3rd of May 1810, the frigate the Salzette arrived
(17:44):
between Europe and Asia on the Hellespont, and Byron sort of
nobbled one of the crew of this ship, the Salzette, and his name
was Lieutenant Econhead. And Econhead was a notoriously
good swimmer, so Byron's obviously quite sensible and
(18:05):
he'd actually been to breeze safety briefings about how you
should never swim alone. So carrying it forward in our
Wellington world of today. And so they decided to try and
replicate this famous swim of Leander from Cestos to Abydos.
And it took Byron an hour and 10minutes to do the swim.
(18:27):
So it's not super fast, but verystrong currents.
But slightly humiliatingly, the sailor from the boat Econ Head
was 5 minutes quicker than him. Also, very prudently, they
decided to take a boat with them, so they had all their they
didn't have brightly coloured tow floats, but they had a
(18:48):
support vessel to look after them.
Excellent good health and safetyfrom Lord Byron.
Exactly. So even though he was a wild
philanderer who lived life on the edge, he didn't take
unnecessary risks. And this swim would have no
doubt pleased his very large fanclub that he had.
I remember learning that Byron'sone of the earliest celebrities
(19:13):
as we know it. He received a lot of fan mail.
He was very good looking and exactly, yeah, quite a
philander, as you said. And he was described by a former
partner as mad, bad and dangerous to know.
We talked in the Bernard Freiburg episode about how
Freiburg was sort of ahead of Trump in post Truth media.
(19:38):
I think in a way, Byron was ahead of the world in terms of
being an influencer. I mean, he was absolutely
because he was a society guy, but everybody loved him because
he was so colourful and charismatic.
And yes, but again, I thought weshould we should read some of
some of this. So we've heard Byron telling us
(20:00):
a little bit about. Don Juan and how Don Juan was
nearly a good a swimmer as him and then embedding himself that.
But of course he wrote his own little little diary note about
his own swim and it's titled written after swimming from
Cestos to Abydos. If in the month of dark December
(20:23):
Leander, who was nightly won't, What made Will not the tale
remember to cross thy stream broad Hellespont?
If when the wintry Tempest roared, he speed to hero nothing
loath, And thus of old thy current poured fair Venus.
(20:44):
How I pity both for me degenerate modern Wretch.
Though in the genial month of May my dripping limbs I faintly
stretch, and think I've done a feat today.
But since he crossed the rapid tide, according to the doubtful
story to woo and Lord knows whatbeside and swam for love, as I
(21:12):
for glory to a hard to say who fared the best sad mortals.
Thus the God still plague you. He lost his labor.
I my jest for he was drowned andI've the age you yes, and it
sounds terrible in rhyming couplets because we don't really
(21:34):
do that these days. But as you say, people people
absolutely loved it. I actually found there was
there's a famous what they call the war poets, a guy called
Rupert Brooke, who was also a student at Cambridge and all of
them are at Cambridge, who wrotea poem about a place just
(21:56):
outside Cambridge at Grantchester.
And he talks about Byron's swimming and there is actually a
little pond next to the the river there, which is now called
Byron's pool. And Brooke wrote this little
ditty about Byron's pool and it goes still in the dawnlit
waters. Cool.
His ghostly lordship swims his pool and tries the strokes
(22:21):
essays the tricks long learnt onHellespont or Styx.
Again, hasn't aged well, but anyway, it's a lovely.
Little I like Yeah, it's a lovely tribute and I I like the
idea that Byron has his own pooland that his ghost is still.
Swimming. Still swimming there.
That's exactly right. Anyway, but Byron was a great
(22:43):
poet. And I don't think the things
that we've read today are exactly Byron at the top of his
game, but they're may be more interesting to a swimming
audience. So he was very famously the
author of poem called She Walks in Beauty, which I'm sure a lot
of people will have heard. She walks in beauty like the
night of cloudless climbs and starry skies, and all that's
(23:07):
best of dark and bright meet in her aspect.
And her eyes thus mellowed to that tender light which heaven
to gaudy day denies. So he wasn't just cheesy rhyming
couplets the whole way through. There was a bit of bit of
substance to it. You've redeemed him.
(23:28):
So if we've still got any listeners going, I think people
should have write it at the end.And there's gonna be a prize for
anyone who gets to the end of the of the thing.
But the the prize at the end is that Shona is gonna tell us a
little bit about some more modern swimming literature.
But before we get there, the thing that I really wanted to
talk about wasn't Lord Byron. And people might remember that
(23:54):
about five years ago, a whole bunch of us got extremely
excited about this crazy Scandinavian sport where you
swim with your shoes on and you run in a wet suit and in the
most prosaically Scandinavian way imaginable.
It's called swim run. But a guy from the UK who was a
(24:15):
bit of a Lord Byron himself, really, ex military, went to
Eton College interested in literature.
He'd named the company that he used to run swim run events,
Breca. And nobody knows what Breca was
all about. But Breca is actually a
character from the, well, what would you call it?
(24:39):
The literary epic Beowulf. So Beowulf is one of the
foundational pieces of English literature, really.
It's a it's an epic poem. It was written sometime between
the 7th and 10th century. No one really knows.
So this is maybe 200 years afterthe Greek myth of Hero and
(25:01):
Leander, or maybe 500 years after the myth.
We just don't know. And I'd always thought that
Beowulf was written in what was called Middle English.
So Middle English is what the famous poet Geoffrey Chaucer
wrote the Canterbury Tales in. And I did this when I was at
school and at A level we had to read the Canterbury Tales in
(25:24):
Middle English and I can still remember I could.
Still remember? I can still remember the first
couplets of of the Canterbury Tales.
It goes one that April, with hisshortest suitor, the draught of
merch, hath pursed to the rota and bathed every vein in switch
(25:44):
liqueur, of which virtue on gendered is the floor.
And it's just as embarrassing trying to read that when you're
56 as it was when I was 17. So it's good to know that
nothing's changed there. Except the language.
The language has changed a lot, hasn't it?
I didn't recognise a word of that.
(26:06):
But I was wrong. It's Beowulf isn't written in
Middle English. Chaucer was writing, I think 3
or 400 years after Beowulf was written.
So Middle English was around sort of 1100 to 1500 AD, and
Beowulf was written in about 700AD.
(26:29):
And the language that Beowulf iswritten in is called Old
English. And this is based on German and
it's looked it up. It's closely related to Old
Frisian. So Frisian is from what's now
Holland and Denmark, that part of Northern Europe, an Old
Norse, whereas Middle English bythen England had been invaded by
(26:57):
the French. And obviously they introduced
some of their own, their own vocabulary.
And the absolute superb sentenceI discovered reading about this,
it said significant changes to vowel pronunciation occurred,
including the Great Vowel Shift,which continued into the modern
English period with a capital GA, capital V, and a capital S,
(27:20):
the Great Vowel Shift. So there you go.
Sounds like a a migration doesn't.
It so that's of no interest to our swimming listeners.
But what is interesting is the story of Beowulf and his
childhood friend Brekka. And the reason that Brekka swim
run was named after Brekka rather than Beowulf is that the
(27:44):
two of them survived a week longbattle in the sea against
monstrous sea creatures. And this story is told by a
character called Unferth. And he was one of the retainers
of King Rothgar who tried to undermine Beowulf the hero, by
(28:07):
bringing up this sort of silly schoolboy challenge that the two
of them took on. And Unfurth tells the story as
if Beowulf was some reckless andsilly boy who was defeated by
his friend Breka. But of course, Beowulf, who is
the the hero of the epic poem, sets the record straight and
(28:30):
explains that they were just boys when they made this boast
boast. In Old English the word is glyp
gilp, which is rather wonderful.And that they would swim in the
ocean, sea the for seven nights fully armed.
So you know, this is taking it to the next level of reality.
(28:51):
Full armour swords in the North Sea, which is absolutely
freezing. And it's in the winter, and
it's, yeah, that's right, in thewinter.
So it's even more freezing. So he, unlike Leander, he wasn't
put off by the difficulties of swimming, swimming in cold water
(29:12):
and. Earth is telling the story in a
pub, right? With the equivalent of a pub so.
That's right. So it's all sort of exaggerated,
but but the idea is it was a sort of endurance test really.
It wasn't a rate. It was sort of racing each other
down the down the North Sea and they they swam side by side and
(29:35):
then a storm blew up of course, and they got separated.
And of course, that's where the story gets really exciting.
And Beowulf finds himself fighting Nikos and sea monsters.
So these are the Tanifar of the North Sea, and he had to defend
himself. And of course, he's conveniently
(29:56):
wearing chainmail armor, so he swings his sword around his
head, presumably while treading water.
And if you thought it was embarrassing, listening to me
trying to pronounce Chaucer in Middle English will now get me
trying to read Beowulf in Old English.
(30:19):
He says forth on float farming. He house fugly ye likost.
And roughly translated that means forth on the flood, foamy
necked most like a bird. And this is trying to describe
what the seas that Beowulf was fighting the monster look like.
(30:44):
When you were sorry, when you were reading the Old English, it
sounded like we were playing youbackwards.
Backwards. It'll be like those conspiracy
theorists who say if you play some of the early Beatles songs
backwards, you get. Exactly.
You're probably saying somethinglike just keep swimming.
Just do you think we should be wearing chainmail in the sea?
(31:09):
Would this be good protection for us against?
Well, it's funny, I'd forgotten about this.
There is a story that when PeterJackson was shooting The Lord of
the Rings in Wellington and we had all these Hollywood film
stars living on the Miramar Peninsula.
Very famously Viggo Mortensen, who was 6 foot 8 heroic warrior,
(31:36):
is a method actor. And famously the Wetter Studios
had made him a suit of chainmailand an absolutely enormous
sword, rather like Brekka and Beowulf.
And every morning he would run round the Miramar Peninsula
wearing full chainmail with thisenormous sword.
And every single morning, the police would really receive a
(31:58):
phone call from some alarmed lady who'd seen this enormous
Viking running around the Miramar Peninsula with an
enormous sword. And so they went to go and see
him. And they said, Mr. Mortenson, we
do understand that this is part of your process and totally
respect your right as a free citizen to do these things, but
(32:18):
we were just wondering whether you could maybe leave the sword
at home next time you go out. So that's it.
But I mean, who? Who would be better to play
Brekka or Beowulf than Viggo Mortensen in his full Lord of
the Rings thing so we could shoot it?
Yeah, we could. I mean, Peter Jackson's just
down the road, so we can presentour pitch to him.
(32:41):
So. So Beowulf and Brekka were in
the sea for a week, first competing, swimming against each
other and then got separated. And then Beowulf was engaged
with some sea monsters of unknown origin.
But I'm guessing at this time they hadn't identified many
marine creatures and so we're thinking Dragons, whales.
(33:04):
What a elephant. Or or or just the froth on the.
Yeah, just the froth. On on the water and the
Presumably your brain starts playing very funny tricks on you
if you've. Been Yeah, maybe it's just
hallucinating, but it does seem quite timely because just a
couple of days ago in the harbour we had a visit from a
(33:26):
humpback whale. I don't know if you were
swimming on Sunday morning. Yeah, everyone was very excited
and I didn't see a thing. No, nobody was brand.
Yeah, it's always the way, isn'tit?
And nobody was brandishing a sword.
I'm assuming we're better identifying sea creatures now
and respecting them. But we should switch to you.
(33:49):
Really, Shona. I mean, as you say, there's the
most enormous Canon of now we'vestarted looking into it.
There are so many examples of great and not so great
literature about swimming. But you wanted to bring us bring
us sort of up to date a little bit and to talk to us about
(34:11):
Roger Deakin, who who who isn't really the same as as great epic
poems from the 5th century AD. So tell us a little bit about
Waterlog. OK, well, yeah, this is quite a
giant leap forward in time. But when we were discussing
Beowulf and thinking about what we were going to say about it,
(34:33):
and then it made me think about what is a heroic swim because,
you know, Byron swim, you know, that that was a fate of
achievement. And Beowulf, even though
fictional, you know, surviving in seven days and winter Norway
and fighting sea monsters, that's, you know, certainly
impressive. But in a in a smaller way, I
(34:56):
find Roger Deakin quite heroic because for one thing, he
embarked on the series of wild swims across Britain just by
himself as a sort of journey of self discovery.
But also his book Waterlog, which came out in 1999, has
inspired so many other people toget in the water and think about
(35:19):
water conservation. And I guess that's a different
kind of heroic legacy to leave. I don't know if have you read
Waterlogged John? No, you're embarrassing me.
No, sorry. No pressure.
Well, I haven't read Beowulf, soit's fine.
So Roger Deakin was, was this British writer who lived in
(35:40):
Suffolk and he was quite unusualin that he owned a Moat, which
not many people can say that they own a house with a Moat.
But he he lived in this cottage which was built in the 16th
century known as Walnut Tree Farm Cottage.
And it, it came with its own Moat, which in the book he
(36:02):
explains was sort of a status symbol at the time that people
would sort of dig these moats. And his one happened to be sort
of fed by an act of spring and such kept the water fresh.
And so all year round, he would swim happily in his Moat with,
you know, frogs and lilies and pond weed and, and it all sounds
(36:23):
quite idyllic. And the only time of year he
would stop is when it froze overso thickly that he could ice
skate on it. So he was clearly comfortable
with swimming in all seasons. But at the time he wrote this
book, I think he wrote it in sort of 1996, his relationship
(36:43):
had just ended and his only child had moved away.
And I think he was quite lonely.And I don't know if it was a
midlife crisis or just somethinghe randomly felt like doing.
But he'd been inspired by a short story I think he'd read
called The Swimmer, where the protagonist in the book swims
home after a party via a series of swimming pools.
(37:07):
And he thought, well, why don't I do the equivalent of that but
swim across Britain in rivers and ponds and sort of learn
something as I go. And so it's it's sort of a
travel book. It's quite a meandering style.
Like he does look at maps and make plans, but there's a lot of
coming and going. One thing I really like about
(37:29):
it, apart from the beautiful wayhe describes the places he
swims, is that being written in the late 90's, the Internet was
around, but I don't think he refers to it.
And he definitely doesn't have asmartphone, so he's not using
GPS to locate places, and he's not Googling things as he goes.
He's actually visiting librariesand looking through old maps and
(37:51):
trying to rediscover these forgotten waterways that people
swam in, you know, 100 years earlier or something.
And as a writer, I quite enjoy him describing his process of
researching all these different places to swim.
Yeah. And he talks about, you know,
(38:12):
it's quite sad in a way that allthese beautiful places have been
forgotten. And some of them are still used
and celebrated and other rivers have gotten polluted.
So, you know, he does talk aboutenvironmental degradation and
having to, you know, look after our waterways.
But basically, you can dip in and out of this book, no pun
(38:34):
intended. And.
And it's like a celebration of swimming.
Yeah. And so if people haven't read
it, then I would definitely recommend it.
And yeah, I guess a question foryou, John, not to put you on the
spot is like, what would you consider heroic swimming?
Like, is it a long swim? Is it a cold swim?
(38:56):
Or is it a any sort of swim thatyou might do out of your comfort
zone? Yeah, surely they're about
adventures, aren't they? And adventures can be in your
Moat in the middle of the ocean.I really need to dig myself a
Moat. I think it's.
Yeah, that reminds me. I was just going to read the
(39:17):
first paragraph of the book. Yeah.
Where Chapter 1 is called the Moat, and that's where the story
begins. So he writes.
The warm rain tumbled from the gutter and one of those
Midsummer downpours as I hastened across the lawn behind
my house in Suffolk and took. Shelter in the Moat.
Breast stroking up and down the 30 yards of clear green water
(39:41):
are nosed along eyes just at water level.
The frog's eye view of rain on the Moat was magnificent.
Rain calms water, it freshens, it sinks.
All the floating pollen, dead bumblebees and other flotsam.
Each raindrop exploded in a momentary bouncing fountain that
turned into a bubble and burst. The best moments were when the
(40:02):
storm intensified, drowning birdsong and a haze rose off the
water, as though the Moat itselfwere rising to make the lowering
sky. Then the rain ceased and the
reflected heavens were full of tiny dancers, water sprites
springing up on tiptoe like bright pins over the surface.
It was raining water sprites. It was at the height of this
(40:24):
drenching in the summer of 1996 that the notion of a long swim
through Britain began to form itself.
I wanted to follow the rain on its meanderings about our land,
to rejoin the sea, to break out of the frustration of a lifetime
doing lengths of endlessly turning back on myself.
Like a tiger pacing its cage. I began to dream of secret
(40:45):
swimming holes and a journey of discovery.
Raining water sprites, That's beautiful.
Yeah, he's, he writes very poetically.
Yeah. And it's, it's just amazing the
way he he had this idea of swimming across the country and
actually did it and wrote about it.
(41:06):
I find it inspiring. And much more accessible than
either 5th century epic poems orstupid rhyming couplets from
the. Actually, one of the, I was
going to say one of the sad things is that Roger Deakin died
about five years after this bookwas published.
(41:28):
He had a brain tumour. And so, you know, he lived to
see it published and saw that itit was a success, but he didn't
live to see the the sort of legacy it created.
Yeah. Absolutely.
And, and there is this amazing tradition, as we were saying
earlier on, I mean, we probably haven't got time to sort of go
into it now, but if people are keen, there's a a book which
(41:52):
apparently is very highly thought of, which was published
in 1992. It's called Haunts of the Black
Masser, the Swimmer as Hero. So it was actually written for
your podcast shown 30 years before you thought about having
one. And then somebody described it
to me as the greatest book aboutswimming.
(42:13):
So I went through all sorts of hoops to try and I couldn't even
find it on Amazon I don't think.I couldn't get it from my
Kindle. So I had to get a copy posted to
me from the UK and whatever and I found it in completely
unreadable. Actually.
It was very hard work. But he and he talks about Byron
and Hero and Leander and all that stuff and poets, more
(42:35):
modern British poets like Swinburne and even John
Bechelman who's this sort of very jolly sort of war period
poet who I thought we could finish with.
And it's this little skit. We were talking about him
earlier on about Captain Webb the Dolly man.
So Captain Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel.
(42:58):
And veteran says we saw the ghost of Captain Webb Webb in a
water sheeting come swimming along the old canal to the
Sunday evening meeting. And that's the low point of the
the podcast literary quality. But there's there's masses in
this book. He he's got all the stories
(43:18):
about records and some of the adventures rather than the
great, the great sort of literary pieces about swimming,
the different styles of the Spartans and the samurai, where
the German professional swimmerswere competing with the English
amateurs like Captain Webb. The collapse of the American
(43:40):
champions at the Los Angeles Games in 1932 before a Japanese
team defeated them headed by an 8 stone 14 year old.
Unbelievable. So so so much.
And then there are loads of of recent books which probably are
(44:01):
an entire podcast. You need to get one of your
intellectual young Kiwi friends to come on and talk about these
Shona. But the books lots of people
have read, The Swimmers by ChloeLane that was published about
five years ago, where We Swim byIngrid Horrocks published about
the same sort of time book Barnett Lees a few years earlier
(44:25):
called Swim a Year of Outdoor Swimming in New Zealand.
And then of course, you've had Kate Camp on the podcast talking
about her own poems and her mostrecent book of poetry, Makeshift
seasons. She read us this beautiful poem
called Freiburg Park Car Park, all about Graham watching us all
come and go. But maybe that's where we should
(44:48):
well. That that brings us full circle
because you just mentioned Freiburg car Park, which was
named after Bernard Freiburg. Indeed, that we start started
with him and finished with him. Yeah, I mean the the car park is
not particularly glamorous, so should add that Freiburg Pool
and Freiburg Beach are also named after him, not just the
(45:11):
car park. The car park just happens to be
between the pool and the beach. But it's got a lovely view it.
Does, yeah. It's a very nice car park.
Thanks. For listening to this episode of
Swim Chats, Please remember to follow or.
Subscribe to the podcast So You Don't.
Miss an episode and if you enjoyed it, you can leave a five
(45:32):
star rating and review which helps other people find it too.
Enjoy the water and we'll see you next time.
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