Lilian Harrison: the making of a pioneering swimmer, 1904–1923

ABSTRACT

Lilian Harrison was a pioneering South American swimmer who established new records for open water distance swimming, and time spent swimming, in December 1923, as she became the first person to swim across the Rio de la Plata, from Uruguay to Argentina. Until now, her achievements have been remembered and studied as a South American history, from Harrison’s birth in Quilmes to her training in Tigre, to the tumultuous reception she received when returning to Buenos Aires after her successful swim. In this article, we situate Harrison’s achievement within the historical context of her early life and education, which was spent in an idealistic and pioneering school in Letchworth Garden City, in England. We argue that Harrison’s English schooling was a vital ingredient in her 1923 success that was generally overlooked in the press reports. Using existing newspaper sources as well as privately-held family papers which we have been fortunate to consult, we look at Harrison’s education at school, in the pool and her family upbringing. The article concludes with some reflections on the nature of global sporting histories in the early twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Swimming
• 1920s
• Argentina
• Uruguay
• education

A historic swim?

Lilian Harrison swam 48km across the River Plate from Uruguay to Argentina, swimming for 24 hours overnight in December 1923. She was the first person to achieve this feat, succeeding where famous male swimmers had failed. In a period before the establishment of globally-legitimate records the Buenos Aires press declared her a world champion both for the length of the swim, and for the time she spent swimming in the water. While this title was much repeated in the media, her prizes were awarded by businesses and sponsors in Buenos Aires, rather than by the International Swimming Federation (FINA, now World Aquatics, which had been founded in 1908). As a woman who swam far away from sporting institutions in Europe with their pretensions to universality, Harrison was perhaps always going to remain on the fringes of record-keeping and sports history. As we show in this article, however, her story reveals a lot about the globalised nature of sporting success in the early 1900s, as well as much about the ways in which certain activities are remembered and commemorated, and others less so.

This article examines the early life of the world-record-breaking Argentine swimmer Lilian Harrison, as part of our wider reappraisal of her life, achievements and cultural representations that seeks to add a gendered perspective to that of the sportsmen who have dominated the historiography. Harrison’s case is spectacular for the historian both because of her achievements on their own, and also because of the survival of a disparate archive across continents, recently made more accessible through the digitisation of collections in Britain, France, the USA and encompassing news of her exploits in India, China and across the Americas.

We first present the theoretical framework that we have adopted to study Lilian Harrison’s global swimming career and its cultural representations, and explain our methodologies and the sources consulted. We then provide a brief biographical overview, necessary because this is shockingly still lacking in even the most basic repositories of public knowledge, even whilst her male contemporaries and competitors have been remembered in much greater detail. The article then goes on to analyse Lilian Harrison’s early life, particularly her education, sporting and family background, arguing that this set her up to engage in competitive swimming upon returning to Argentina in ways which have not until now been fully appreciated by historians. After a brief summary of the feat for which she is best remembered we reflect on the ways in which Lilian Harrison’s international swimming career was made possible by the global connections that shaped her early life (educational, personal, intellectual, economic and cultural) and curtailed by some of the same factors, plus the intensification of the forces of globalising sports modernisation in the light of the expansion of cultural media that presented her figure in particularly gendered ways.¹

Lilian Gemma Harrison was born in Quilmes, a settlement 30 km south of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, to parents Edward Harrison (a banker with the London and South American Bank) and Anita Harrison (née Gale), on 8 February 1904. They had met in Oakham, England before crossing the Atlantic together. After her 1923 crossing of the River Plate (known as the Rio de la Plata in Spanish) she moved to Europe to attempt to swim across the English Channel. In 1926 she retired from competitive swimming, and returned to Buenos Aires. She lived there, surrounded by her watersport-loving family, until her death on 11 February 1993 at the age of eighty-nine.²

Global histories of sports have recently excavated the transnational connections that underpinned the rise, success and mythification of sporting heroes in the first half of the twentieth-century. Lara Putnam showed, through analysis of the boxer Oscar Bernard, ‘the Panama Cannonball’, that popular sports enabled and facilitated moments where the boundaries of social mobility framed by racialised identities could be pushed against, and occasionally, pushed through.³ Building on Puttnam’s use of critical historical biography, we argue that the case of Lilian Harrison – whilst unique in some ways – demonstrates the way that some sports enabled some South American women to push against and even circumvent the limits being placed upon their bodies in society.

Historians of sports know, of course, the role that gendered practices played in shaping national masculinities in the first decades of the twentieth-century. Most of this work focuses on sportsmen and women from Europe and North America. From the pioneering work of Eduardo Archetti on, we can see the ways that sports and their cultural representations were used in South America – both from above and from below – to set out, challenge and enhance – models of cultural behaviour amongst urbanising populations around the world. In recent years there has been a solidification of research in the history of women’s sports and their cultural representations in South America. The relative absence of surviving sources, however, has made until recently the construction of a detailed case study like this very difficult.⁴

A body in water

The abundant primary sources that have survived relating to Lilian Harrison and her swim across the Rio de la Plata (River Plate, in English) have allowed us to explore the relationship between the realms of education, sports and family. The article draws conceptually on three major and interrelated theoretical fields: historical biography, the social and cultural history of sports, and gender studies.⁵ Firstly, we use historical biography as a resource, a viewpoint and a window. While Harrison was just one swimmer, and unique to the extent that the achievements of very few South American sportswomen were reported nationally and globally at the time, the detailed study of her life can be used to explain and understand the cultural, sexual, erotic, and political processes that she lived through. Secondly, the successful and widely publicised swim across the widest river in the world is hermeneutically addressed as a way of organising the discussion of certain problems of the past, in order to identify the logics, representations and socio-political dynamics that go beyond the sporting event. In this way we are able to identify agents, actors, institutions and social groups in conflict. Thirdly, Harrison’s biography and the internationally well-known sporting event linked to swimming is analysed as a ‘dense descriptor’ that allows us to identify how certain senses about femininities were produced, transmitted, distributed, and put into circulation. Harrison’s biography and her subsequent sporting achievement, read and interpreted by multiple social actors such as the press, produced, made visible, praised, questioned, excluded, and omitted certain ways of conceptualising sexual difference, bodies and desirable and odious femininities. That the first person to swim across the Rio de la Plata was a woman was much remarked upon by her contemporaries. A century on, we can perceive how and why her actions made so many waves.

Leaving a trace in the water and the archive

This co-authored article builds upon our previously separate trajectories in the histories of sports and physical education, exploring the ways in which bodily practices and the meanings attached to them were shaped by local social, political and ideological contexts in South America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁶ It forms part of a wider analysis of Harrison’s life and career within its social, political and cultural contexts. We have sought out every possible archive where Lilian Harrison’s life and career might have been recorded. In the first place this has meant newspaper and magazine sources, at first in the Argentinian and Uruguayan press around the 1923 swim, and then using digitised publications from around the world, including the USA, France, Spain, England, Scotland, Wales, China and India. Some of these were syndicated but many added their own gloss to the story, giving Harrison’s story an intriguing global dimension. No doubt there are more press reports that we were not able to encounter elsewhere. Media sources were supplemented by the published memoirs of people who knew Lilian Harrison, and finally, by the generous access granted to us by the archivist of Lilian Harrison’s school in Letchworth Garden City, UK, who gave us school magazines and the educational philosophy of the school founder, and by Lilian Harrison’s descendants in Argentina, who opened to us their homes, their archive and their memories. The family archive contains a wealth of press clippings collected by her parents, personal correspondence, photographs, film recordings, and other documents which were essential to us in the attempt to reconstruct a sporting career and a life that have been largely lost from public view. They were particularly vital in the light of the media reports largely erasing Lilian Harrison’s own voice, privileging instead the interpretations of photographers, doctors, her father, her coaches, and the male swimmers who accompanied her.⁷ Finally, we took time to walk together on the sands of Punta Lara at the point where Lilian Harrison’s 1923 swim reached its successful conclusion, reflecting on sporting resistance – the resistance of Lilian Harrison’s body, to swim for 24h, as well as on the resistance of sporting historiography, with its national and gendered categories, to take seriously and to remember a recordwoman like Lilian Harrison.

Education at school

In 1912, at the age of eight, Lilian Harrison and her two sisters Rosie and Patty were sent to England for their schooling, accompanied by their mother. Whilst many members of the British expatriate community in Buenos Aires sent their children to local British schools, it was not uncommon for them to be sent back to Britain for their education. In 1915 all three enrolled in a brand new school run by the Theosophical Society in the new garden city of Letchworth, 70km north of London. The Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875, was a religious movement based on the ideas of the Russian thinker Helena Blavatsky. Under the leadership of Annie Besant in the early twentieth century it became an important conduit for Indian spiritual ideas into Europe. Lilian was enrolled under the name Gemma Harrison, and was known as Gemma by schoolfriends and family throughout her life. They attended the school by day, and returned home every evening. Annie Besant visited the school during Harrison’s time there.⁸

The educational experience of the Theosophical School (renamed as Arundale School in 1918, and as St Christophers School in 1922) shaped Harrison’s remarkable personality and, no doubt, contributed some of the resilience and independence which enabled her, now known as Lilian Harrison, to challenge and defeat her male rivals in the much publicised swimming crossing of the Rio de la Plata in 1923. This was no ordinary British school shaping the future leaders or housewives of empire.

The three Harrison sisters were amongst the first 23 students to study at the Theosophical School in 1915. During Lilian’s five years there, numbers expanded to include boarders, and reached nearly 100 by 1920. Their time at the school mapped roughly onto the First World War, and the education they were given ran against the militarism, patriotism and obedience to orders and duty that characterised more mainstream education within what the headmaster Armstrong Smith called ‘the wrecks of a Civilization built up on selfishness, competition and individualism’.⁹ Given that in 1916 all but two of the pupils were recorded as ill with Spanish influenza, it seems very likely that Lilian fell ill at this time.

The Arundale School privileged instead independence, creativity and self-control. Amongst the school’s first rules were ‘Play the game. Neither grumble nor make excuses’.¹⁰ In his memoir the headteacher noted that

the ideals of the school in this respect are to be found in J. Krishnamurti’s two little books Education as Service and At the feet of the master. Here great stress is laid on the need for tolerance, and kindliness of thought and speech.¹¹

It was determinedly internationalist in outlook. ‘Our inspiration came chiefly from the teachings of Mrs Besant, Mr G.S Arundale, Mr C.J. Jinarajadasa, Mr Edmund Holmes, and other educational experts’, and co-educational. Students, who came from Russia, India and France as well as England and Argentina, were encouraged to see each other as colleagues and family members.¹²

Independence, understood as choosing one’s options and defending them, were crucial parts of the students’ makeup. Indeed, the students were given the choice as to whether they even wanted to learn or not. When the school opened, Smith was clear that ‘there would be no punishment’, and that students would regulate themselves and their colleagues. With the experience of the first few weeks, a little discipline was introduced. Students who were disruptive in class were invited to sit in the headteacher’s office until they wanted to return to their studies. There was none of the corporal punishment and humiliation that characterised most private schools in England at the time. Similarly there were no prizes: ‘the reward for progress or exceptional talent in any subject will be the opportunity to help some backward member of the class in that subject’.¹³

The School magazines, published three or four times a year by the students themselves without teachers’ supervision, suggest that this philosophy was matched by reality, with reflections on the nature of self-discipline and the actions students took to change behaviour amongst their community. In a lively roster of extra-curricular clubs, Gemma Harrison was reported giving a talk about ‘The Life of the People’ in the Middle Ages, and her sister Rosa published a poem ‘Autumn Leaves’. The magazines also included editorials, woodcuttings, poetry, art, and the team-sheets and results of the mixed-sex hockey and cricket teams—none of the Harrisons appeared here.¹⁴

Co-educational learning and mixed Swedish gymnastics and swimming were central to Armstrong’s vision of pupils acting as if they had nothing to be embarrassed about in each other’s company and being comfortable in their active bodies: ‘Our boys and girls had all their lessons together, their gymnastics and games (except football); they often went to the swimming baths together’.¹⁵ All subjects were taught to both sexes at the same time, ‘with only the exception of football’, according to Smith. Teaching girls alongside boys was still relatively revolutionary in the closed world of the English private school in the 1910s. The surviving sources do not provide any data as to the kind of education that girls were receiving about sexual health, personal hygiene or menstruation. Reports of Lilian’s 1923 swim emphasised the ways in which her training schedule had been adapted around her menstrual cycle, with Dr. Gofredo Grasso advising her not to enter the water at all while menstruating, drawing on long-established medical fear of mixing water and menstruation.¹⁶

A holistic approach to physical education was developed at the school. Sports and exercise were performed to music rather than the exhortations of a coach:

Rhythm and harmony in physical action were developed by means of Dalcroze Eurythmics, the children performing graceful movements founded on musical rhythm, while at the same time their powers of attention and concentration were being carefully developed in a pleasant and happy manner.¹⁷

Classical music was played each morning ‘during the opening exercise …  and it was most interesting to watch how fond the children became of Wagner, Beethoven, Tschaikowski, and others of the great masters’. This was a very different education from that which Harrison might have received in Buenos Aires, where physical education for girls, even in the more exclusive British private schools, was more functional and orientated towards health and hygiene.¹⁸ Sports were important in character building ‘evoking self-discipline and self-control’ and encouraging pupils to ‘have a right attitude towards difficulties’ but competition was not the goal to which this was aimed. As Smith wrote,

open-air lessons and excursions will be arranged whenever convenient, for we want our boys and girls to be healthy in body as well as in mind. We recognise some truth in the Chinese proverb – ‘It is time the children learnt something – let them have a holiday’.¹⁹

It might be inferred, therefore, that the education Lilian Harrison received could have given her some of the resilience, rhythm and determination to spend hour after hour training in the sea from the age of 16 until her retirement from the sport in 1926 at the age of 22.

Education in the pool

Lilian learned to swim in one of the best provided places in England, and not just because it was on the school curriculum. The new Letchworth Garden City, to where the Harrisons had moved in 1912, had been founded in 1903 following the inspiration of Ebenezer Howard, often hailed as the pioneer of the Garden City movement. Lilian and Letchworth were born within a year of one another. Letchworth was known as the First Garden City, and was designed by Howard in collaboration with Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, the celebrated architects and town planners. Intriguingly, the architects of Letchworth both went on to work in South America, most famously in the Jardim America and Pacaembu districts of São Paulo, Brazil, where they worked in 1917–1919, a precise overlap with Lilian Harrison’s schooling in Letchworth.

Letchworth became a magnet in the early 1900s for idealistic people seeking to combine the outdoors with a new model of urban living. As part of this a large municipal swimming pool was dug out by residents and opened in 1911, and it is likely that Lilian’s first swims were enjoyed there. In addition to Letchworth’s new open-air public facilities – in contrast to many indoor, public swimming baths that opened in late-Victorian and Edwardian British industrial cities and towns – there were also private open-air swimming pools that the pupils were able to access through schools, friends and neighbours.²⁰

Harrison’s physical education teachers included a Miss Boughton-Head and Miss Backhouse, according to the school magazine. Further data about them does not survive, but these women physical education teachers would at least have been aware of the ongoing Suffragette movement, and may have been inspired by the pioneering women educationalists in Letchworth. Swimming was always encouraged as a physical form of recreation for the girls. When school trips to the swimming baths were postponed in spring 1919 because of an outbreak of chickenpox, they were encouraged to attend Cloister Baths nearby.²¹ A pupil writing as ‘E.H.D.’ in the school magazine reported that

SWIMMING: Swimming has been somewhat a failure this term because of the outbreak of chickenpox. The Cloister Baths are not very large and therefore we cannot swim very far without having to swim in small circles … [However] I am sure that we all heartily thank Mrs Lawrence for letting us have use of the baths and we all wish we had been able to appear there more.²²

The Mrs Lawrence referred to in the magazine was Annie Jane Lawrence, a wealthy Quaker who had built an experimental school – The Cloisters – in Letchworth in 1907. Its architecture was inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, and the open-air swimming pool was at the heart of the design of a landscape where children could learn surrounded by nature, as a surviving photograph of the pool from 1910 shows.²³

Harrison was therefore the beneficiary of a confluence of factors in Letchworth: a new urban planning movement that prioritised outdoor activity and public space; an educational movement that promoted co-educational learning and the equality of women and men; and a local benefactor who invited pupils into their private open-air swimming pool and normalised the practice of swimming outside.

In addition to all this, Lilian was learning to swim in Letchworth at a time of great popularity for the sport in England. Councils and private and state schools were building pools, both indoor and outdoor, at a great rate. The 1908 Olympic Games, held in London, featured swimming in a pool cut into the outfield of the White City stadium, and were a major catalyst of interest in competitive as well as recreational swimming. The Federation Internationale de Natation Amateur was founded in a Manchester hotel after the Games.²⁴ Swimming for women and girls was promoted by keen advocates within the sport. As Claire Parker has shown, women were increasingly able to swim in public and by the early 1900s to ‘overcome restrictive ideologies and gain social acceptance’.²⁵ The Amateur Swimming Association staged its first Ladies Championships in 1902, at first with men prohibited from spectating. Certain institutions, like the Anstey College of Physical Education in Halesowen (opened in 1897), and certain companies, like the Cadbury’s chocolate production factory in Bourneville, put swimming at the centre of the recreational activities offered for girls and women. Cadbury’s even constructed a Girls bath on their site, in 1904, and every employee under 18, male or female, was obliged to undertake at least two 30-minute periods of exercise per week. The company paid for every employee to learn to swim. Historians of swimming in England in this period have shown how patchy this swimming boom was, however. In certain places, such as Letchworth and the Midlands around Bourneville, schools, companies and councils all dedicated themselves to constructing and maintaining swimming facilities, both indoor and outdoor. The messy and irregular provision for swimming catalysed Agnes Campbell’s Report on Public Baths and Wash-houses in the UK by Agnes Campbell (1918), over 400 pages of richly-documented analysis of the swimming world from which Lilian Harrison emerged.²⁶ In Buenos Aires, in contrast, the number of public swimming pools where young women could swim was much more limited.²⁷

As the Amateur Swimming Association’s book on Swimming and Swimming Strokes reported in 1921

during the past few years the growth in the popularity of swimming has been almost phenomenal; what used to be the pastime of a comparative few is now the favourite sport of the million. Happily, this unrivalled exercise is entirely suitable for, and appeals equally to, both sexes, and with the ever increasing facilities for practise, this more general participation of the people must inevitably raise their standard of health and physique.²⁸

Here we can also see the roots of Harrison’s preference for the breast stroke over the front crawl favoured by many of her rivals. In the ASA’s official words,

it can be claimed that breast-stroke swimming is the most graceful form of progression throughout the water when the movements are performed with rhythmical precision; more particularly does this apply to women, whose limbs and muscles are most supple and their bodies more naturally buoyant than is the case with the majority of men.²⁹

It was also useful for life-saving. Press reports on her swimming style frequently landed on Harrison’s ‘classic, graceful stroke remain[ing] regular, 25 to the minute’.³⁰

Preparation in the family

Beyond receiving the financial support and personal connections to be sent from Buenos Aires to school in Letchworth, Lilian Harrison the swimmer was formed by her family in other, more personal ways. Her father, Edward Harrison, had remained in Argentina working for the Bank of London and South America. Letters in the family archive demonstrate that he was an assiduous supporter of Lilian’s swimming career, writing to rivals such as Anita Gutbrod to clarify existing records and achievements, and liaising with clubs, trainers and institutions.³¹ Nevertheless, witnesses of Edward’s interactions with Lilian during her famous swims attest to her not always heeding his advice or instructions. Indeed, in his account Dr. Gofredo Grasso observed that Lilian owed much of her success precisely to the way in which she ignored her father and his call to ‘Gemma, come back!’.³²

A more important influence at both the personal and sporting levels was Lilian’s mother, Anita Harrison, who brought up her daughters as vegetarians and moved to Letchworth with them during their schooling. The school was also vegetarian, which may have been a reason for the family choosing to study there. A vegetarian woman was an unlikely sporting hero in a meat-obsessed economy and society like Argentina, where as Eduardo Archetti and others have demonstrated, the sporting heroics of male footballers were routinely celebrated with the classic asado (barbeque). The boxer Luis Angel Firpo, famed for knocking down the US superstar Jack Dempsey earlier in 1923 in a fight reported on around the world, was widely-reported to owe his strength to his classic, Argentinean diet of steak and maté. When asked by the media, Anita Harrison placed her explanation for the success of the swim upon her daughter’s strict training regime in the months leading up to the swim, and to her healthy vegetarian diet that enabled her to control her body and prepare it for maximum efficiency in the swim. Anita Harrison’s influence was clearly crucial in Lilian’s education, dedication and bodily formation.³³

The Harrison sisters had left the school in early 1920 and arrived back in Argentina in mid-1920. They moved to the camp of Martínez, ten stops on the British-built train line from the city centre to the boating resort of Tigre, and joined the exclusive Club Náutico San Isidro (CNSI) nearby. The club was already a centre for elite swimming, rowing and sailing, its notable members including Enrique Tiraboschi, who swam the English Channel in 1923, and Juan Garramendy and Romeo Maciel, who had already declared their intentions to swim the River Plate. Perhaps Lilian’s parents chose to move to the north of Buenos Aires, rather than their earlier home to the south in Quilmes, because of this burgeoning aquatic sporting culture around the CNSI. Sport club culture was booming in Buenos Aires in the early 1920s, as the frontiers of the urban areas were designed to expand, civilising the land and its inhabitants through modernisation of the landscape and the bodies of the people who lived in them.³⁴ Or, maybe Edward had already moved north while his daughters were in England. It seems likely that the sisters embraced the swimming sessions and their ability was spotted by the renowned trainer Gunther Webber. The family were linked to the Anglican Church in Olivos but were not regular churchgoers. Lilian’s descendants told us that Sundays were for watersports at the Club. It might be extrapolated that aquatic pursuits came to have a ritualised, cleansing meaning for Lilian and her family, almost like a secular religion as has been theorised for other sports such as football. With its strict training routines and schedules, sense of purpose, meditative qualities and belonging to a group of fellow believers through the club, swimming can come to be seen as a way of being that transcends physical activity.³⁵

In 1920, 1921 and 1922, Lilian, her mother and sisters enjoyed considerable leisure time in which to practice swimming and the social interactions that surrounded it. There is no record of Lilian having any paid employment in this time. We do know, from a letter sent by the headteacher, that Lilian volunteered as a Girl Guide leader at the English-language Northlands school nearby, and taught the skills she had already learned as a Girl Guide in Letchworth: ‘cobbling, painting, first aid drills and swimming’. Girl Guiding, part of the Scout movement, has been recognised as a sphere that opened up opportunities for girls in physical activities and the outdoors. It was also, of course, part and parcel of a British imperial mindset that was predicated on superiority over colonial subjects, and that developed its own meanings in Argentina, as Laura Méndez has shown.³⁶

During the summers of 1921 and 1922, therefore, she was often able to spend five or six hours a day swimming. Edward Harrison’s banking income and the access to exclusive social circles earned through their British identity, Whiteness and relative wealth therefore enabled the first steps of Lilian's a swimming career in Argentina. The adoption of the name of Lilian Harrison for swimming around 1921 suggests a certain separation of the sporting persona, Lilian, from the school girl and daughter, Gemma, and might be taken as a statement of intent. So then, taking all these factors together – economic, social, educational and cultural – why did a 19 year old Argentinian woman set out to become the first person to swim across the Rio de la Plata, in December 1923?

Lilian was far from the only person thinking about it. Her club, the CNSI, was at the forefront of the initiative. The first short-term reason as to why anyone was setting out to swim across the river was that it was being heavily promoted by popular media outlets in Buenos Aires. El Gráfico promised 5,000 pesos. The Kalisay commercial company manufactured a solid gold cup which it promised to the first person to complete the swim. The CNSI’s swimmers’ preparations and training schedules were reported in newspapers and magazines. The CNSI’s club doctor, Gofredo Grasso, advised on nutritional intake, and Gunther Webber became Lilian Harrison’s coach. However, it is not known who, if anyone, was paying Webber. With the constant support of her mother, often rowing alongside her in swims along the tributaries of the Rio de la Plata, and to a schedule designed and monitored by Grasso and Webber, Lilian Harrison started swimming longer and longer distances. On 4 February 1923 she swam downstream from Zarate to El Tigre in 21h and 20min. The regular press speculation about the chances of Tiraboschi, Garramendy, Maciel and others began to include the possibility that young Lilian Harrison might be the one to complete the swim first.³⁷

What has been written about Lilian Harrison until now to explain her record-breaking swim has largely been drawn from the words of journalists and her male contemporaries. In the family archive, however, an apparently autobiographical note survives to explain how she came to swimming, undated but probably from 1923. It is handwritten in English in the first-person and in her own hand, according to her family. This is what it says:

Learnt swimming in Letchworth Garden City bath 8 years ago. The water was often as low as 12 degrees centigrade. During the four summer months, of which it was, often. My mother taught me to swim much against my wish.

Joined the Girl Guides in 1915. In the summer we used to go to camp. The last one I went to was in Bedfordshire, where we stayed 10 days. That time we slept in a large barn on straw. At another time we slept in tents [illegible] soaking wet of [illegible].

In the Guides we were taught cobbling, weaving, swimming, painting, first aid drills and many outdoor games.

During the war we used to collect old newspapers which was used again and horse chestnuts for use in ammunition workers. We also used to do gardening to get money for the Red Cross.

I soon became very fond of swimming. My elder sister and I used to go for a swim after school in a private swimming bath near our house where we often had the bath to ourselves. It was a pretty oval shaped swimming bath surrounded by a thick hedge of evergreens.

The longest distance that I ever swam in England was a mile in the River Waveney in 1919.

When we stayed at the seaside in the summer we used to go for a swim every morning before breakfast.³⁸

Lilian’s own account, unpublished until now, reveals several keys to her swimming success. First, that not only did she learn to swim at school in England, but that she had access to a private pool every afternoon for as long as she wanted, thanks to the good offices of one of her neighbours, the philanthropist Annie Jane Lawrence. Second, that she was already well experienced in medium-distance river swimming, during a family or school holiday in Suffolk, England. And third, that she spent at least three family holidays at the seaside in England in 1916, 1917 and 1918, where she swam in the sea every morning. So returning to Argentina, Lilian was already an accomplished and experienced open-water swimmer, comfortable in both river and sea. She was very far from the figure of the joven moderna as traced by Cecilia Tossounian: the unmarried, pleasure-seeking young woman involved in consumer culture … single young women [who] became icons of the modern city’.³⁹

Conclusions

The CNSI swimmers worked together to attempt the crossing of the Rio de la Plata in early summer (December) 1923. The first attempt would be made by Lilian Harrison, supported by Maciel, Garramendy and others, who would all take turns at swimming with her to maintain her motivation and distract her from the task at hand. All were planning their own attempts later in the season when the weather would be more favourable. The Naval Ministry – many of whose officials were also members of the club – supplied a boat, the A5, whose crew consisted of 13 sailors, which would act as support vessel and transport Lilian’s parents and various representatives of the media. Also in the party were Grasso, Webber and several journalists. Key write-ups from journalists who followed the action appear in Caras y Caretas and La Vanguardia. The promotion, delivery and discussion of the crossing was part of the rapid growth of the media industry in Buenos Aires at this period, co-opted by the armed forces (who sent a ship to support the swim), the national government (whose president visited Lilian the day of the successful arrival) and the many sponsors. Photographs of the successful swimmer at the culmination of the feat were widely circulated and turned the swim into a cause for national and global celebration, ‘shaping popular perceptions of sport as an integral aspect of modern culture’, in Mike O’Mahony’s interpretation of sports photography in the early 1900s.⁴⁰ Explaining Lilian’s success therefore became a matter of pressing importance for those who defended and resisted gendered ideologies of national citizenship and the appropriate activities for men and women. Newspaper chroniclers debated the merits of ‘the Argentinian girl’ or the ‘Argentinian swimmer’. Her unique educational background in Letchworth was hidden behind generic references to school in England.⁴¹

When the swim was completed, the national and international media fell over themselves to explain how it might have been achieved. Were women somehow better suited to open-water swimming than men? Was it a particularly calm day? Or was there something in Lilian Harrison’s birth and education that might explain her superiority to the great sportsmen like Maciel and Tiraboschi who had tried and failed before her? We hope that this article has allowed readers to understand Harrison’s sporting feat not as a miracle, but as a sporting fact that makes sense due to her education in England, the encouragement of her family in relation to some ideals of the time that challenged gender roles and the privilege of being able to access spaces that other swimmers did not have.

Lilian’s schooling was certainly noted by some reporters, particularly those who were able to talk with her after the event, and especially those in the English-language media. The Buenos Aires Herald reported that ‘Miss Harrison first took up swimming at the Letchworth Garden City’. La Prensa focused on the ‘strength of will’ (‘fuerza de voluntad’) that enabled Lilian to have ‘absolute faith in her success’ and to overcome the conditions, even to the extent of ignoring the recommendations of her coach and manager that urged her to wait for a better day when the sea temperature would be warmer. The Review of the River Plate recorded that ‘from her earliest days she was taught to love the open air and exercise’ and that at her school students were taught ‘to develop their own personalities instead of endeavouring to conform to a general type’.⁴²

Generally, however, newspaper reporting glossed over Lilian Harrison’s backstory and the role her unique education and family history played in this. Her training in England, her school and the role of her mother, were all overshadowed by the spectacular achievement of this swimmer who appeared to have come out of nowhere. Her crossing of the Rio de la Plata shocked the sporting and general press. It was as if they couldn’t believe it, and photographs of Lilian smiling uncertainly for the cameras suggested that she couldn’t believe it either.⁴³

Gender-based explanations of natural talent were preferred rather than analysis of Harrison’s training, coaching or technique. Some newspapers suggested that the river had gentlemanly-ceded its powers to allow the passage of a woman swimmer, who was somehow naturally in tune with the rhythms of the natural environment.⁴⁴ Others observed that the waves and wind were much less strong than was to be expected, and that Harrison benefited from ‘calm’ and ‘beneficial’ waters. Her companions were generous in their public comments, expressing how proud and how impressed they were at the resilience of her body in swimming breaststroke for over twenty-four hours, refreshed hourly only with coffee, orange juice and the occasional sweet.⁴⁵

The completion of the swim led to a maelstrom of political and media interest. Analysis of this media coverage demonstrates how Harrison’s sexual difference was constantly being remarked upon and shaped by rhetorical devices, languages and discursive practices. She went on a tour of newspaper offices and sports clubs, and galas were held in her honour where she was photographed, always beaming her ‘winning smile’, alongside dignitaries including the president of the republic, Marcelo Alvear (also a member of the CNSI). Harrison quickly tired of the attention, however. Careful to receive the cash prizes in ‘a way that did not compromise her condition as an amateur’, Harrison resolved to spend it on a trip to Europe, and an attempt to become the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Her efforts were reported all around the world in the mid-1920s.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, the memory of her miraculous 1923 crossing of the River Plata has faded from sporting memory until now. As a woman, a swimmer, a vegetarian, and an Anglo-Argentine schooled unconventionally in England, Lilian Harrison’s story did not fit with the developing narratives of sporting communities, either in Argentina or worldwide.

Contextualised and analysed within its global, continental and national histories, we can see that Lilian Harrison was at once a pioneer and the heir to a significant tradition of sportswomen. Around the world, women like the Australian Annette Kellerman, the Romanian Walpurga von Isacescu and Gertrude Ederle from the U.S.A. were able to seize the opportunities presented by endurance swimming and gain a degree of public recognition through media coverage of their efforts. In South America, where women’s sporting participation was increasingly limited from the 1920s by the concentrated relationship between nationalism, masculinity and teamsports, Harrison’s achievement was all the greater. Her global connections – economic through her father’s banking career, and educational through her schooling – were crucial in enabling her to break through these barriers. As Cecilia Tossounian and Patricia Anderson have shown, the media boom of the 1920s in Argentina – magazines, newspapers, newsreels and radio – challenged hegemonic ways of thinking about women’s sports and the femininities they created. Lilian Harrison was a pioneering sportswoman in a developing country, in ways that we are only now beginning to understand.⁴⁷

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more detail on Harrison’s life, achievements and legacies see Matthew Brown and Pablo Ariel Scharagrodsky, Nadando contra los corrientes: Lilian Harrison y los cruces a nado en los 1920 (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2024).

2 Biographical material in English is very sparse. In Spanish see Eduardo McCallum, ‘Lilian, La Primera reina del Plata’, Náutico 266 (2009): 52–61. The most recent analyses of the way that Harrison’s swims were reported in the media are Pablo Scharagrodsky, ‘¿Cruzando fronteras?: La prensa y el primer cruce a nado del Río de la Plata, Uruguay-Argentina, 1923’, Claves 5, no. 8 (2019): 211–33, https://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/art_revistas/pr.14607/pr.14607.pdf and Daniele Medeiros, ‘Lilian Harrison y la travesía del Río de la Plata (1923): repercusión en la prensa uruguaya’, Revista Brasileira de Ciências do Esporte 45 (2023). Edward Harrison’s employment record at the London and River Plate Bank from 1900 is in the Register of Officers No.2, archive of the Bank of London and South America (BOLSA), Barclays Bank, London, 4598, F/2/1/B/8.2, ff.93-4. It notes that he was previously employed by the Southern Railway.

3 Lara Putnam, ‘The Panama Cannonball’s Transnational Ties: Migrants, Sport, and Belonging in the Interwar Greater Caribbean’, Journal of Sport History 41, no. 3 (2014): 401–24; Matthew Taylor, ‘The Global Ring? Boxing, Mobility and Transnational Networks in the Anglophone World, 1890–1914’, Journal of Global History 8, no. 2 (2013): 231–55; Paul Dietschy, ‘Making Football Global? FIFA, Europe and the non-European Football World, 1912–1974’, Journal of Global History 8, no. 2 (2013): 279–98.

4 Eduardo Archetti, Masculinidades. Fútbol, polo y el tango en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Antropófaga, 2003); Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel, Futboleras: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2019); Silvana Vilodre Goellner, ‘Body, Eugenics and Nationalism’, International Journal of the History of Sport 31, no. 10 (2014): 1278–86; Aira Bonfim, Fuetebol Feminino no Brasil: entre festas, circos e subúrbios, uma história social (1915–1941) (São Paulo, 2023); Patricia Anderson, ‘“Mens sana in corpore sano”: deportismo, salud y feminidad en Argentina, 1900–1945’, in Miradas médicas sobre la ‘cultura física’ en Argentina (1880–1970), ed. Pablo Scharagrodsky (Buenos Aires: Editorial Prometeo, 2014), 83–4; Patricia Anderson, ‘Sporting Women and Machonas: Negotiating Gender Through Sports in Argentina, 1900–1945’, Women’s History Review 24, no. 5 (2015): 700–20; Pablo Ariel Scharagrodsky, ‘La constitución de la medicina deportiva argentina o acerca de cómo construir una de las primeras recordwoman. Argentina, décadas del 20 y 30’, La Aljaba 22, no. 2 (2018): 99–120; Scharagrodsky, ‘El padre de la medicina deportiva argentina o acerca de cómo fabricar campeones, décadas del ’20 y ’30, siglo XX’, Recorde 11, no. 2 (2018): 1–29, https://www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/art_revistas/pr.14608/pr.14608.pdf; Scharagrodsky, ‘¿Cruzando fronteras?’; Scharagrodsky, ‘Nacionalidad, masculinidad y política en relación con la natación. La prensa argentina y el primer cruce a nado del canal de la Mancha en 1923’, Historia y Sociedad 41 (2021): 93–119; Rosa López de D’Amico, Tansin Benn and Gertrud Pfister, eds., Women and Sport in Latin America (London: Routledge, 2016).

5 Paula Bruno, ‘Biografía, historia biográfica, biografía-problema’, Prismas, Revista de Historia Intelectual 20, no. 2 (2016): 267–72; Judith Butler, Cuerpos aliados y lucha política. Hacia una teoría performativa de la asamblea (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2019); Butler, Cuerpos que importan. Sobre los límites materiales y discursivos del “sexo” (Barcelona: Paidós, 2002); César Torres and Scharagrodsky, eds., El rostro cambiante del deporte. Perspectivas historiográficas angloparlantes (1970–2010) (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2019); Brown, Sports in South America: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023); Beatriz Preciado, Manifiesto contrasexual (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011).

6 Brown and Victor Andrade de Melo, ‘Cricket in the Country of Football: Sport and Social and Cultural Exclusion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil’, International Journal of the History of Sport 37, no. 11 (2020): 1025–45.

7 The sources for our research into Lilian Harrison’s early life include: Arundale School Archive, Letchworth Garden City, made available to us by St Christopher’s School archivist David Couzens, without which this study would have been impossible; the Lilian Harrison Archive, Family of Lilian Harrison, Buenos Aires, with permission and many thanks; and the physical and digital collections of the British Library, London, Biblioteque National de France, Paris, Biblioteca Nacional de Argentina and Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay.

8 David Rock, The British in Argentina: Commerce, Settlers and Power, 1800–2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 235–40.

9 Armstrong Smith, Some Ideals in Education and an Attempt to Carry them Out (London: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1920), 16.

10 Arundale Magazine, 3:1, 1918, 3.

11 Smith, Some Ideals, 23.

12 Smith, Some Ideals, 9.

13 J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public Schools (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Smith, Some Ideals, 23.

14 Arundale Magazine, 2:1, 1918, 25, 30.

15 Smith, Some Ideals, 32.

16 Scharagrodsky, ‘El padre’.

17 Smith, Some Ideals, 57.

18 Smith, Some Ideals, 60; Angela Aisenstein and Scharagrodsky, eds., Tras las huellas de la educación física escolar en la Argentina: Cuerpo, género y pedagogía (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2006).

19 Smith, Some Ideals, 35, 26.

20 Ebenezer Howard, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London: Swan, 1898, republished 1902 as Garden Cities of Tomorrow; Brown and Gloria Lanci, ‘Football and Urban Expansion in São Paulo, Brazil, 1880–1920’, Sport in History 36, no. 2 (2016), 162–89; John Tidy, Letchworth Garden City Through Time (London: Amberley, 2015); Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis, Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain (London: Played in Britain, 2007).

21 Arundale Magazine, 2:1, 1918, 3; 3:2, 1919.

22 Arundale Magazine, 3:2, 1919, 41.

23 The photograph can be viewed at The Cloisters Swimming Pool: NEN Gallery.

24 Christopher Love, A Social History of Swimming in England, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 2007); Gordon and Inglis, Great Lengths, 118–19.

25 Claire Parker, ‘Swimming: The “Ideal” Sport for Nineteenth-century British Women’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 27, no. 4 (2010): 688.

26 Gordon and Inglis, Great Lengths, 122–3; Love, A Social History; Agnes Campbell, Report on Public Baths and Wash-Houses in the United Kingdom (London: The Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1918).

27 Gorelik’s seminal work on urban development in this period in Buenos Aires does not mention swimming or pools at all. Adrián Gorelik, The Grid and the Park: Public Space and Urban Culture in Buenos Aires, 1887–1936 (Pittsburgh: Latin America Research Commons, 2022, translated by Natalia Majluf, first published as La grilla y el parque, Buenos Aires, 1998).

28 Amateur Swimming Association (ASA), Swimming and Swimming Strokes (London: ASA, 1921), 5.

29 ASA, Swimming and Swimming Strokes, 19.

30 New York Times, July 17, 1925.

31 Anita Gutbrod (1903–1967) was a well-known Argentine swimmer who specialised in long distance and endurance swimming. In March 1923, at the age of 20, she swam for 22h 47min in the Río de la Plata delta. This was held to have established a new record for the time a woman had spent swimming. The Lilian Harrison Archive contains Gutbrod’s polite responses to Edward Harrison’s enquiries about her times and distances. After setting her record she ceased swimming competitively, and worked as a swimming teacher at the Club Gimnasia y Esgrima de Buenos Aires until the 1950s. Like Harrison, Gutbrod appeared on the front cover of Argentina’s most important sports magazine, El Gráfico.

32 Gofredo Grasso, Acción del médico en la cultura física (Buenos Aires: Establecimiento Gráfico A. de Martino, 1924), 110.

33 Scharagrodsky, ‘Nacionalidad’; Archetti, Masculinidades.

34 Gorelik, The grid and the park; Patricia Anderson, ‘Visibilizando el deporte femenino: el caso del Club Argentino Femenino de Deportes Ima Sumac, 1920s–1930s’, Perspectivas De Investigación En Educación Física 2, no. 3 (2023), https://doi.org/10.24215/29534372e018.

35 For example Patrick Barkham, The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2023).

36 Andrés Bisso, Historia de la Asociación de Boy Scouts Argentinos (1912–1945). El sendero cronológico (La Plata: Teseo, 2021); Laura Marcela Méndez, ‘Una vez guía, siempre guía. Scoutismo en clave femenina, 1910–1955’, in Mujeres en movimiento: deporte, cultura física y feminindades, Argentina 1870–1980, ed. Scharagrodsky (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2016), 205–24.

37 Anderson, ‘Mens sana’.

38 Lilian Harrison, Autobiographical account, untitled, undated, Lilian Harrison Archive, Buenos Aires. Reproduced with many thanks to Lilian’s family, custodians of this document.

39 Cecilia Tossounian, La joven moderna in Interwar Argentina: Gender, Nation, and Popular Culture (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020), 2–3.

40 Mike O’Mahony, ‘The Art and Artifice of Early Sports Photography’, Sport in Society 22, no. 5 (2019): 801, doi:10.1080/17430437.2018.1431382.

41 See Scharagrodsky, ‘Cruzando fronteras’ for more detail on the discussion of the Argentinian nature of the 1923 swim. Some good examples are Caras y Caretas, December 29, 1923 and La Vanguardia, December 23, 1923. An exception was the Letchworth Citadel, 1923, which dwelt upon Lilian’s local school in detail.

42 Buenos Aires Herald, December 23, 1923; La Prensa, December 23, 1923; Review of the River Plate, December 28, 1923.

43 Review of the River Plate, December 28, 1923.

44 Scharagrodsky, ‘Cruzando fronteras’.

45 On the role of magazines in constructing femininity through representations of sporting bodies at this time, see María Paula Bontempo, ‘El cuerpo de la mujer moderna. La construcción de la feminidad en las revistas de Editorial Atlántida, 1918–1933’, in Mujeres en movimiento, ed. Scharagrodsky, 329–48.

46 For examples see The Times of India, August 12, 1925; The China Press, October 25, 1925; L’Auto, August 2, 1925.

47 Lisa Bier, Fighting the Current: The Rise of American Women’s Swimming, 1870–1926 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2011); Tossounian, La joven moderna; Anderson, ‘Sporting Women’.