People have been trying to swim the English Channel for centuries. During the 1950s, it was even done competitively, in a series of races that attracted the world’s best. The Egyptians were particularly successful. But no one could have enjoyed himself quite so much as the entrepreneur Billy Butlin.
The first successful Channel swim was completed in 1875 by Captain Matthew Webb. The first race was held 75 years later. It started on 22 August 1950, on a beach near Calais, when a green flare was fired into the sky. It finished at Folkestone nearly eleven hours later. The winner of that initial event was Hassan Abdel Rehim, an Egyptian soldier, who received a prize worth nearly £30,000 in today’s money. A Frenchman finished second, another Egyptian came third, and Briton Sam Rockett was fourth.
He was already well-known as a water polo player who had once tried out for the British Olympic team. Entrants over the next decade hailed from various countries including Syria, India, New Zealand, and Peru. However, the people who followed them in boats, and occasionally pulled them out of the water when disaster loomed, were usually from towns along the Kent coast. They included Folkestone’s own Harry Sharp, and Dover sailors Vic Clarke and moustachioed Mike O’Neil.
Crocodile of the Nile
The second Channel race was similar to the first. It too was based in Folkestone. Sam Rockett again figured prominently, as the contestants’ trainer this time. The honours were claimed by another Egyptian, Mareeh Hassan Hamad, whose countrymen also took third and fourth place. And the Frenchman who had been runner-up in 1950 finished runner-up again that year. But the 1951 race also witnessed at least one startling novelty. At the post-swim reception in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel, the successful Egyptians refused to accept their prizes because of comments made by British newspapers about King Farouk.
The race didn’t take place the following year. When it returned in 1953, foreign swimmers weren’t allowed to take part. This was the year Billy Butlin became involved as a sponsor. The headquarters were moved from Folkestone to the Ocean Hotel in Saltdean, which he had purchased only a few weeks before. But of the seven contestants he managed to attract, none completed the swim.
Before long, the race had returned to Folkestone and Billy Butlin had begun following it himself, from the prow of his own motor launch, or even from a helicopter. It was won by a Portuguese, who sipped wine all the way across, and then by an Egyptian named Abdel Latif Abu Heif. A Sandhurst graduate and accomplished pianist, he was known as ‘Crocodile of the Nile’. He donated his prize money to the family of a British swimmer who had died attempting his own unofficial crossing of the Channel.
Friends of Bylines Network
There has never been a greater need for grassroots journalism that investigates the stories that really matter, holds power to account and champions the voices of everyday citizens. We are proudly powered by volunteers but what we do isn’t free.
STAND WITH US for independent, citizen-led journalism that makes democracy stronger, and you will even get some exclusive benefits.
Dangling parrots
But Abu Heif would be the last Egyptian winner of the race. He and his compatriots were banned in 1956, after King Farouk’s successor, President Nasser, turned the British out. “They’ve got the Suez Canal,” Billy Butlin angrily told the press. “I’m not going to let them have the English Channel as well.” The race would, however, be abandoned after 11 hours because of bad weather.
There was yet another move the following year, when contestants and officials decamped to the Queen’s Hotel in Margate. Now itself part of the Butlin’s empire, this place had a glass-sided swimming pool that gave members of the public what Billy called “a frogman’s eye-view” of the contestants in training. It also had plastic parrots and monkeys dangling from the ceiling.
But conditions were much less congenial in the Channel, and only two swimmers finished the 1957 race. For the first time, the winner was a woman – 30-year-old Greta Andersen, a Danish-American with an Olympic gold medal to her name. And prizes were also awarded to two Dover teenagers – Jimmy Granger, a Snowdon Colliery worker, and Rosemary George, who had left her job to dedicate herself to the race. She managed to stay afloat for more than 13 hours on what was her very first Channel attempt.
White handkerchief
There were separate contests for men and women the following year, but Greta Andersen’s time was the fastest overall, and she became the only person to claim two victories. She drank fruit juice and honey during her crossing, and she fell just short of the record set in the very first race. Greta kissed her boatman, Mike O’Neil, when she landed, and she was followed onto Folkestone beach by Billy Butlin. He was nearing 60 now and rather portly, but that didn’t prevent him from removing his duffel coat and throwing himself into the waves to swim the last few yards.
The 1959 Butlin Race would turn out to be the last. Rough seas caused confusion at the start, and Billy had to use a simple white handkerchief instead of the customary flare. The winner, an Argentinian named Alfredo Camarero, called it “the toughest swim I have ever had.” And Dover’s Rosemary George again came away with a prize.
But Billy Butlin then announced that he was done with cross-Channel swims. His holiday camp business was taking up all his time, he said. And although he offered the equivalent of £40,000 to any town willing to organise the race, none came forward.
Swimmers still gathered along the south coast in the summer of 1960, and some of them vowed to press on with their own individual attempts. But critics had already begun to sneer. There had been almost a hundred crossings by then, with more than 20 of them having been made in the last year alone. And these figures would only increase. The number of successful Channel swims now stands at almost 3,000, while the speed record is held by a German, who managed in 2023 to take more than a third off the 1950 winning time.
