The recent news that there is finally to be a statue of a woman in Parliament Square – the suffragist Millicent Fawcett – got me thinking. Which woman would I choose to make a statue of, and where would I put her? Well, she would definitely be swimming-related, and definitely not remotely royal or fictional. As @tkingdot’s infographic about the campaign shows, there are already more statues of men named John, than women who aren’t royal – or fictional.
Discounting fictional women eliminates mermaids, which is no bad thing. We’re replete with mermaid statues. Seaside councils seem to like them. Sure, they’re a great excuse to put a bronze topless woman in public, but celebrating a mythical creature who woos men to their watery deaths seems pretty reckless, for a coastal resort. And it’s not exactly the kind of representation I had in mind to celebrate women’s achievement.
So the first woman I choose is real. She’s Agnes Beckwith, and I’d put her beside the Thames, somewhere around Waterloo way. Born in 1861, Agnes’s swimming professor father had her performing in aquatic displays by the time she was four years old. At 14, wearing a “tight bathing costume of rose-pink lamé, trimmed with lace”, she swam from London Bridge to Greenwich with a cheering crowd lining the banks and bridges. A sporting woman was a real rarity, so she served as an inspiration to other young women – perhaps the original This Girl Can.
Or how about Martha Gunn from Brighton or Mary Wheatland from Bognor? These women worked as dippers, a role which came about with the advent of the bathing hut. For every pale and fragile creature piling on her bathing layers in this glorified shed on wheels, there was another woman, made of sturdier stuff, hoiking that shed across the pebbles to the water’s edge then gently (or otherwise) persuading her bather into the water. One set of women in service to the modesty and decorum of another. Martha has already been commemorated in Brighton – there is a gastropub named after her. So I’ll chose Mary, and put her statue on the beach where she worked for over 50 years until her retirement at the age of 71. I’m not sure that, at 71, I’ll be up for carting posh women across pebbly beaches, so really, this is the least we can do.
Another woman who spent her life on the beach in the service of others is Freda Streeter, whose statue should be on a deckchair, probably smoking, and maybe wielding some Vaseline. The statue shouldbe at the top of Swimmer’s Beach in Dover, to commemorate her commitment to helping people swim the Channel – to fulfil their dreams, as she sees it. Streeter, who recently retired, started by training her own record-breaking daughter Alison Streeter. She sat in that spot every Sunday morning for more than 30 years, overseeing everyone’s training schedules, telling them when to get in and out. “She worked out why each person was undertaking this and how to help them across it” swimmer Lucy Petrie told me. Freda has been key to the last three decades of Channel swimming. She deserves a statue.
Now in the realm of multiple statues, I’ll add more contemporary woman swimmers of note. This is where things get a little more crowded, which is in every respect an excellent thing. There are awesome women doing incredible swims all over the country, so who would I pick? One woman, who leaps out at me, is Beth French, the epitome of adventurer. French is currently embarked on a challenge that tests the boundaries of endurance swimming by tackling seven renowned ocean swims in 12 months. As I write, she is three swims down, four to go, and if she completes the challenge, she will be the first person in the world to do so. It is easy to visualise this statue: bold, clear and inspiring, strong, direct and full of purpose.
My final pick isa group of women, whose names I don’t know, from Chiswick Baths at some time in the 1920s. I even made them my Twitter header. I found them in a 1920’s film and wrote about them, along with all the women mentioned here, in my book Swell, A Waterbiography, published this week. There are four women in the group, three seated, two with their feet dangling by the lido waters. The fourth is kneeling and I think she’s telling a funny story. They are smoking, and two of them have their hair covered in scarves, while one is in a swimming hat. They’re wearing plain swimming singlets, unfitted and unglamorous. I love this group. I know these women; they’ve existed at every lido since women were allowed in. These women are my friends and me. They’re a gang, a community, in a place where they feel free enough to throw their heads back and laugh out loud and maybe even to swim. I’ll put their statue at Tooting Lido, or Hathersage, or Stonehaven or Jubilee Pool in Penzance. They’re all of us in all those places. I think this is the statue I really want.
And who would my sculptor be? Well, that’s a different debate for a different day.
Swell, A Waterbiography, is published by Bloomsbury Books on 4 May.
@jennylandreth
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