Today started with a headline I almost missed completely.

Two words, tucked into the bottom corner of the May 15th 1926 issue of The Washington Times. Below it: a small photo of a young woman in a swimsuit, standing straight, holding a dog on a leash, waving at the camera like she was ready for something big.

I had never heard of Lillian Cannon.

Which, as it turns out, is the whole story.

I grew up knowing what the English Channel was. Not as a geography lesson, exactly, but as this mythic thing that people swam across to prove something. Like the Mt. Everest of the water. It existed in the cultural air as an ultimate test of human endurance. So when I saw Lillian's headline, I did what anyone would do: I looked her up. And then I immediately looked up who actually swam it first.

Gertrude Ederle. August 6, 1926. First woman to swim the English Channel. 14 hours and 31 minutes, smashing the men's record by nearly two hours.

That's the fact everyone knows. Or at least the fact that gets remembered online and in the history books. But here's what I didn't know: Lillian Cannon was already in France when Ederle made that swim. In fact, their attempts overlapped. They were essentially teammates. She had been there for months. Getting “ready” like the headline said.

So I kept reading.

The papers couldn't stop writing about her, and once you read them, you understand why.

She was 23 years old, from Baltimore, described repeatedly as "a whale of a swimmer" from the Chesapeake Bay country. Which, in 1926, was apparently sufficient qualification. She'd been competing since she was 10, had won the South Atlantic championship, and conquered 22 miles across the Chesapeake Bay in a storm. 11 hours, in the water, and finished in "excellent physical condition.” She was regarded — per the Record-American — as one of the greatest long-distance swimmers in the world.

When a booking agent offered her a lucrative contract to become a professional high diver, which included diving three times daily from a 70-foot tower into a tank less than five feet deep, she turned it down. Not because it was terrifying (though it absolutely had to be, can you imagine?!), but because it might interfere with swimming the Channel. As the Cleveland Press put it: "She didn't sign his contract. Something held her back."

She quit her job. She got sponsored by the NEA newspaper syndicate — the "world's greatest newspaper feature service," as they called themselves without a hint of modesty — which meant papers across the country, from The Cleveland Press to The Scranton Republican to The Shrevep[ort] Times, were all running her story, her training updates, even first-person dispatches written by Lillian herself from Gris Nez, France.

She sailed for France on May 15, 1926. And my favorite part…she brought her dogs.

I kept seeing the same syndicated photo of her with her dogs in many newspapers.

Two Chesapeake Bay dogs: named Chesacroft Drake and Mary Montauk. They were going to accompany Lillian on her Channel swim. The Shrevep[ort] Times reported that Paris papers had already declared them "Merveilleuse" — 1926 for marvelous. Crowds everywhere stopped to look at them.

Lillian wrote about them in one of her dispatches from Gris Nez:

"My dogs, so far as the French people are concerned, are the life of the party. I expect them to be just that for me, too, as companions when the final long grind is in progress. But the great popularity of the dogs could move one almost to jealousy."

I don't know exactly what the plan was for the dogs during the swim itself. Would they be in a boat alongside her? Paddle next to her? Or was this was simply extraordinary 1920s sports marketing? Either way, I am deeply charmed by the fact that this was a thing.

By July, she was in France writing her own dispatches for the papers back home, looking out at the Channel she was about to attempt.

"I will be under no illusions when the day for my attempt to swim the English Channel comes," she wrote. "On the contrary, I will realize fully that the Channel is a worthy foe. I already realize it, in fact. In practice swims I have felt the chill of its waters and sensed the trickery of its currents and tides. But I am unafraid of failure."

She wrote that she was painting "go and bust" on her sweater.

Her trainer was Bill Burgess, who was one of a tiny group of famous athletes who had actually swam across the Channel. Her strategy revolved around tides, not weather. She planned to time her entry carefully, reading the currents to give herself the best possible drift across. It was calculated. Methodical. She knew exactly what she was doing.

She was, by every account, ready.

August 17, 1926. Lillian entered the water at 12:55 a.m. By 2 o'clock she was fast, two miles out in the Channel, headed toward Folkestone, England.

Then the clouds came.

By 3:30 a.m., the storm broke. Heavy seas. The boat following her ordered her out of the water. She refused. She demurred, as the Baltimore Sun put it, saying she desired to keep at her task. Finally, told it would be useless to go on, she came out.

2 hours and 35 minutes. She said she'd try again within a few days.

She was still at Cape Gris Nez, waiting, when the weather kept turning against her.

Here's where it gets philosophically interesting, and I couldn't stop thinking about this.

The same morning that Lillian was pulled from the water, August 17, there was a second piece, filed from London: "Ederle Success Accident of Weather, Briton Says."

An unnamed member of the Royal Cinque Ports Yacht Club had analyzed Ederle's crossing just ten days earlier, and concluded that her success was, in large part, luck — specifically tidal luck. When Ederle entered the water on August 6, the ebb tide was already dying. Within 45 minutes, it was gone entirely. Then came seven hours of flood tide, pushing her toward England. A strong southwest wind blew all day, helping her further. She crossed in 30 miles while others had historically needed to swim 50.

Think about what Lillian was reading that morning, pulling herself out of the water after 2 hours and 35 minutes in a thunderstorm. The paper covering her own failure was simultaneously running an analysis arguing that the woman who had already claimed the thing she'd spent the entire year chasing had been, in part, lucky. That the tide had simply favored the right person on the right day.

This is not to diminish Ederle — she was extraordinary, and her record still stands as one of the great athletic feats of the 20th century. But there's something quietly devastating about the juxtaposition. Lillian's entire strategy had centered on timing the tides correctly. She knew the Channel. She'd studied it. She'd trained in it for months. And on August 6, while she was still on that beach waiting for her own conditions to align, the tide ran perfectly for someone else.

While Lillian was still waiting at Gris Nez, something remarkable happened.

On August 28th — three weeks after Ederle's crossing — Clemington Corson of New York, a mother of two children, stumbled ashore from the Channel in fifteen hours and twenty-eight minutes.

The New Orleans States ran a breathless account by a United Press correspondent that is genuinely one of the best sports articles I've ever read. Mrs. Corson nearly broke Ederle's record. She was within three miles of the shore with fifteen minutes to go when a treacherous ebb tide hit her. Fifteen minutes more, and she would have broken the record.

Her husband, swimming alongside to support her, raised his hands in surrender and was taken in his boat. She refused. She kept going.

"I wouldn’t do it again for a million dollars," were her first words as she took a long, deep breath after coming in at 3 o'clock.

Scores of men, the piece noted, had failed to do what this young mother had just done — beating every man who had made the crossing before her.

Lillian Cannon had now watched two women succeed where she had not. She had failed twice. The season was ending.

Here's what she said:

"I am glad Mrs. Corson made it. I would have started tonight but the weather is too bad now. I'll return next year and try and break the record."

No bitterness. No excuses about storms. Just: I'm glad she made it.

I find this more moving than almost anything else in the archive. Lillian Cannon really was wonderful.

There's a bit about how in competition, the difference between legendary and forgotten is sometimes a nose hair. A nanosecond. A silver medal instead of gold. The athlete who trains for a decades and gets hit by a thunderstorm at 3:30 a.m.

It’s obvious reading old newspapers that we have a cultural obsession with firsts. We (or at least wikipedia) knows Ederle's name. But we don't know Lillian's. And yet by every measure of courage, preparation, and athletic ability — Lillian Cannon was extraordinary. She just didn't get the tide.

The Channel was swum by a lot of women in 1926. History chose one of them to remember.

And in 2024, Disney made a movie about her.

Young Woman and the Sea — Daisy Ridley as Gertrude Ederle, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, released theatrically to coincide with the Paris Olympics. But here's the detail that stuck out to me: The film was made partly because Ederle herself was in danger of becoming a historical footnote. That's the framing. An extraordinary woman, and people had almost forgotten her.

Lillian Cannon was actually forgotten. Completely. Instead, she stood on the beach and shook Ederle's hand. Got in the water herself eleven days later, into a thunderstorm, knowing the first was already gone. Failed twice. Said she was glad Mrs. Corson made it. And disappeared into the archive.

I dug around on this. She did come back in 1927 and attempted again. She never successfully crossed the English Channel. She eventually became Mrs. Edwin M. Day. She also set a new Chesapeake Bay record in 1928. But the archives go quiet after that.

What I hope, is that Lillian Cannon lived a full, interesting, thoroughly un-forgotten life. That she told the story of the dogs at dinner parties for decades. That somewhere there are grandchildren who grew up hearing about the time their grandmother tried to swim to England with two Chesapeake Bay retrievers.

That she meant it when she said she was glad Mrs. Corson made it. Because after researching her, Lillian Cannon was quite extraordinary.

-Chris

And for the people in your life who don't read:

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