The recent announcement that there will have the first figure of a woman at Parliament Square – the woman who was suffragist Millicent Fawcett — has me thinking. What woman would I pick to build a statue of, and where would I put her? The answer is that she must be a swimmer, not royal or fictional. According to @tkingdot’s infographic on the campaign, there are more statues of males named John than women that aren’t royal or even fictional.
Therefore, the woman that I pick is real. It’s Agnes Beckwith, and I’d like to put her next to the Thames at some point in Waterloo in some way. She was born in 1861. her swimming teacher’s father would have her participate in water-based shows at 4. When she was 14, she wore the “tight bathing costume of rose-pink lame, trimmed with lace” She could swim across London Bridge to Greenwich with an enthusiastic crowd lining the bridges and banks. An athletic woman was an uncommon sight, so she was an example to younger women. Maybe she was the genesis of This Girl Could.
What do you feel about Martha Gunn from Brighton or Mary Wheatland from Bognor? They were dippers, a job that began with the invention of the bathing cabin. For every fragile and pale woman putting on her layer of bathing clothes in this extravagant shed that was a wheeled structure, There was a woman of more robust material who pushed the shed across pebbles until the edge of the water before gently (or) getting her bather in the pool—a set of women in support of the dignity and modesty of another. Martha has been honored in Brighton, where there’s a restaurant named after her. So I’ll go with Mary and put her memorial on the shoreline, which she worked on for more than 50 years until she retired aged 70. I’m not sure I’m up for dragging fashionable women across pebbly beaches. So, in the end, this is the minimum we can do.
Another woman who lived her time on the beach, serving other people, was Freda Streeter, and her statue ought to be sitting on a deckchair, likely smoking and possibly carrying Vaseline. The figure should be located at the highest point of Swimmer’s Beach in Dover to honor her dedication to helping others swim the Channel to fulfill their goals in her eyes. Streeter has recently retired and began her training by educating her daughter, who broke records herself, Alison Streeter. She sat there every Sunday morning for over 30 years, supervising the training schedules of everyone and telling them when to go into and out. “She worked out why each person was undertaking this and how to help them across it,” swimmer Lucy Petrie told me. Freda was a crucial player in the past three years in Channel swimming. She is worthy of an award.
As we move into the realm of numerous statues, I’ll add women swimmers from the past worth mentioning. The scene is slightly more crowded, which is a beautiful thing. Some fantastic women are participating in excellent swims worldwide, so who should I choose? One woman who jumps out at me can be Beth French, who is the definition of an adventurer. French is currently engaged in an endurance challenge that will test the limits of endurance swimming by attempting seven famous ocean swims over twelve months. As of this writing, she’s only three swimming and has four more to go, and if she manages to complete the challenge, she’ll be the first to achieve this feat. It’s easy to imagine the statue of this woman: strong, clear and inspirational, precise, robust, and brimming with purpose.
My last pick is a group of women I’m unfamiliar with. They were from Chiswick Baths at some time in the 1920s. I even created them as my Twitter header. I came across them in a film of the 1920s which I then wrote about together with the other women featured here in my novel Swell, a Waterbiography, released this week. Four women are in this group. Three of them are sitting, and two with their feet hanging on the waters of the lido. The fourth one is kneeling. I believe she’s telling a hilarious story. They’re smoking cigarettes, and two wear hair scarves. One wears a swimming hat. They’re wearing simple swimming singlets that are not fitted and are boring. I adore this group of women. I’ve known them for years, and they’ve been everywhere since women were allowed to enter. These women are my buddies as well as mine. They’re a group, a community where they are comfortable enough to slap their heads, laugh loudly and maybe even go swimming. I’ll place their statue in Tooting Lido, Hathersage, Stonehaven, and Jubilee Pool in Penzance. We all have them at all of those locations. I believe that this statue is what I desire.
