‘Swimming instruction trust of America’: the Cavill family, borderlands and decentring Australia sport history

ABSTRACT

The Cavill family of swimmers has been recognised as the ‘first family of Australian swimming’ because of their reputation and achievements as competitive swimmers and for their contributions to swimming promotion, stroke development and instruction in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. As a family of British migrants based in Sydney, their memory focuses on Anglo-Australian connections. This emphasis overlooks the American dimension of the Cavill legacy – several family members lived, and died, in the USA and made important contributions to swimming in that country, where they were also celebrated as preeminent figures. This article adopts a transnational perspective, particularly borderlands history approaches, to examine this American connection, viewing the, trans-Pacific crossing from Sydney to San Francisco as an under-appreciated sport border zone. The focus is on contributions made to swimming coaching and teaching, with a biographical spotlight on Percy and Sid Cavill, siblings who contributed in these areas over two decades on both sides of the country. By repositioning Australia and the USA in the Cavill swimming narrative, this article contributes to decentring the nation in this realm of sport history.

Acknowledgements

Research for this project occurred over several years, aided initially by a travel grant from the University of Queensland. The author would like to thank the Olympic Club in San Francisco, especially Jessica Smith, History & Archives Collections Manager; Jason Gibbs at the San Francisco Public Library; the California Historical Society; John Shipley at the Miami Public Library; HistoryMiami Museum; the Henning Library at the International Swimming Hall of Fame (Fort Lauderdale); and the Chicago History Museum. Finally, thank you to Cathy Peel, great-granddaughter of Frederick Cavill, for her assistance and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Gary Osmond http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4866-3765

Notes

1. San Francisco Call, January 1, 1911, 47. This was not an isolated claim: see also, for example, unidentified news clipping, dated January 28, 1940, in J. Scott Leary Scrapbook, Olympic Club, San Francisco, MS#OC02608, p. 060.

2. Percy is misnamed in this report as Charlie, another Cavill brother who had died in California during a swimming exhibition in 1897.

3. Adapted by the Cavills from Solomon Islander Alick Wickham, the crawl stroke was not well-known in competition internationally in the first decade of the twentieth century. Dick Cavill had lowered the world record in the 100 yards by winning a race in England in 1902 in less than one minute using the stroke, and the other brothers were exponents. See: Gary Osmond and Murray G. Phillips, ‘“Look at That Kid Crawling!”: Race, Myth and the “Crawl” Stroke’”, Australian Historical Studies 37, no. 127 (April 2006): 43–62.

4. Richard Cashman, Sport in the National Imagination: Australian Sport in the Federation Decades (Sydney: Walla Walla Press, 2002), 118.

5. Ibid., 122–4. Case studies include: John Nauright, ‘Making an International Legend: The Media, Pat O’Dea and Midwestern Football in the 1890s and 1930s’, Football Studies 2, no. 2 (1999): 37–56; Gary Osmond, ‘Forgetting Charlie and Tums Cavill: Social Memory and Australian Swimming History’, Journal of Australian Studies 33, no. 1 (2009): 93–107.

6. Richard Cashman and Anthony Hughes, ‘Sport’, in Americanization and Australia, ed. Philip Bell and Roger Bell (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1998), 191.

7. Philip Bell and Roger Bell, eds. Americanization and Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1998); Richard Waterhouse, ‘Popular Culture’, in Americanization and Australia, ed. Philip Bell and Roger Bell (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1998), 48–52.

8. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, ‘Introduction’, in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ed. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2005), 6–7.

9. Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, ‘On Borderlands,’ Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (2011): 338–61.

10. Ibid., 355.

11. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), n.p. [Preface].

12. Hämäläinen and Truett, ‘On Borderlands’, 338.

13. Colin Howell and Daryl Leeworthy, ‘Borderlands’, in Routledge Companion to Sports History, ed. S. W. Pope and John Nauright (London: Routledge, 2010), 81.

14. Jared van Duinen, ‘Playing to the “Imaginary Grandstand”: Sport, the “British World”, and an Australian Colonial Identity’, Journal of Global History 8, no. 2 (2013): 342–64. For other examples of Borderlands sport history, see: Colin D. Howell, ‘Borderlands, Baselines and Bearhunters’, Journal of Sport History 29, no. 2 (2002): 250–70; Mark Dyreson, ‘The Foot Runners Conquer Mexico and Texas’, Journal of Sport History 31, no. 1 (2004): 1–31.

15. Waterhouse, ‘Popular Culture’, 48.

16. Hämäläinen and Truett, ‘On Borderlands’, 350.

17. Benjamin Bryce and Alexander Freund, ‘Introduction’, in Entangling Migration History: Borderlands and Transnationalism in the United States and Canada, ed. Alexander Freund and Benjamin Bryce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 1–2.

18. Murray G. Phillips, Swimming Australia: One Hundred Years (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008). Of these pioneers, Fred Cavill has received the most attention – the others deserve more.

19. Cashman and Hughes, ‘Sport’, 184.

20. Gary Osmond, ‘Myth-Making in Australian Sport History: Re-Evaluating Duke Kahanamoku's Contribution to Surfing’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 2 (2011): 260–76; Osmond and Phillips, ‘“Look at That Kid Crawling!”’.

21. Gary Osmond, ‘Object Lesson: Approaching Nineteenth-Century Swimming through the Von Hammer Probate Inventory’, Journal of Australian Studies 40, no. 3 (2016): 337–52.

22. Angela Woollacott, Race & the Modern Exotic: Three ‘Australian’ Women on Global Display (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2015) (Kellerman); John A. Lucas and Ian Jobling, ‘Troubled Waters: Fanny Durack's 1919 Swimming Tour of America amid Transnational Amateur Athletic Prudery and Bureaucracy’, Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies 4 (1995): 93–112.

23. Rob Hess and Claire Parker, ‘Against the Tide: New Work on Australasian Aquatic Cultures’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 26, no. 14 (2009): 2061.

24. See, for example: J. G. Williams, ‘Cavill, Frederick (1839–1927)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cavill-frederick-5536/text9431, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed October 11, 2018.

25. International Swimming Hall of Fame, ‘The Cavill Family (AUS): 1970 Honor Contributors,’ https://ishof.org/the-cavill-family--(aus).html (accessed October 2, 2018); Sport Australia Hall of Fame, http://www.sahof.org.au/hall-of-fame/member-profile/?memberID=266&memberType=general (accessed October 2, 2018).

26. The Cavill siblings were: Ernie (1868–1935); Charlie (1870–97); Madeline (1872–1943); Alice (1874–1945); Percy (1875–1940); Arthur (1877–1914); Fredda (1878–1961); Sydney (1881–1945); Richmond (Dick) (1884–1938).

27. Dave Day, ‘London Swimming Professors: Victorian Craftsmen and Aquatic Entrepreneurs’, Sport in History 30, no. 1 (2010): 39; 46–47.

28. Cavill had clearly failed in his first attempt to swim the Channel in 1876, but in 1877 came close enough to argue his case. See: Kathy Watson, The Crossing: The Glorious Tragedy of the First Man to Swim the English Channel (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000), 167–70.

29. Victoria Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, marriage certificate registration number 10578313; Cavill family papers.

30. Kevin Starr, California: A History (New York, Modern Library, 2005), 300.

31. Argus (Melbourne), February 15, 1879, 7.

32. Sydney Morning Herald (hereinafter SMH), May 19, 1879, 3; San Francisco Chronicle, June 23, 1879, 1.

33. Argus, February 9, 1880, 5.

34. Illustrated Sydney News, September 4, 1880, 14; SMH, October 9, 1880, 6.

35. Frederick Cavill, How to Learn to Swim – with Press Reports of His Swim from France to England and Other Long Swims (Sydney: Caxton Printing Office, 1884).

36. Royal Humane Society of New South Wales, 1909 Annual Report, 15.

37. Dave Day, for example, cites the visit to Australia of James Finney in 1897 and again, with his sister Elsie Finney, in 1911: Day, ‘London Swimming Professors’, 47; Day, ‘From Oldham Baths to American Vaudeville and Beyond: The Finney Family’, Working Papers on Professional Natationists, Paper 1 (April 2014), n.p. [18–19].

38. The Times, July 5, 1897, 13.

39. Referee, April 6, 1892, 4; Referee, January 11, 1893, 7; Referee, August 16, 1893, 3; Referee, August 23, 1893, 6.

40. Referee, September 20, 1893, 8; Referee, November 22, 1893, 8.

41. Referee, August 2, 1893, 6.

42. Referee, July 26, 1893, 6; Referee, February 1, 1893, 3, 8; Referee, September 5, 1894, 3; Phillips, Swimming Australia, 66–67. Not all of these activities were unique to the USA: high-diving, for example, had a long tradition in Britain.

43. For one exception, an unnamed high diver, see Referee, April 15, 1891, 3. For an Australian report summarising Kenney's achievements, see: Referee, 20 September 1893, 8.

44. Sun (New York), August 1, 1892, 6; St Paul Daily Globe (Minnesota), August 28, 1892; New York Times, September 15, 1893, 3; Referee, April 6, 1892, 4; Referee, November 1, 1893, 6; Nancy R. Miller, University of Pennsylvania Archives, email to author, September 17, 2014. Intriguingly, the University of Pennsylvania hired British swimmer George Kistler as its swimming coach in 1897, a role in which he served until 1934: Penn University Archives and Records Center, Penn Biographies, ‘George Kistler (1864–1942)’, https://www.archives.upenn.edu/people/1800s/kistler_george.html (accessed December 3, 2018).

45. See, for example, F. Von Hammer to Sydney Municipal Council, 19 July 1873. City of Sydney Archives, NSCA CRS 26: 122/753.

46. Unidentified news clipping, dated February 10, 1937, in J. Scott Leary Scrapbook, Olympic Club, San Francisco, MS#OC02608, p. 057 (Sid). Re. Percy, see: Karl Baarslag, Islands of Adventure (London: The Travel Book Club, 1944 [1940]), 124. Baarslag's reference to Percy's mining work is trustworthy because of the accuracy of his overall account of his life, which was based on his encounters with Percy in the Bahamas in the 1930s and 40s.

47. James R. Smith, San Francisco's Lost Landmarks (Sanger, CA: World Dancer Press 2005), 67.

48. Referee, February 22, 1893, 8.

49. Referee, March 13, 1895, 6.

50. Referee, August 2, 1893, 6; Referee, August 9, 1893, 6.

51. Osmond, ‘Forgetting Charlie and Tums Cavill’.

52. Frederick Cavill had two sons, Frederick and Frank, from his first marriage: Cavill family papers. Frank, who joined his family in Sydney, was also a competent swimmer who at 16 years of age was commended for saving the life of a drowning woman: SMH, April 6, 1883, 5.

53. Gary Osmond, ‘Swimming Her Own Course: Agency in the Professional Swimming Career of Alice Cavill’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 29, no. 3 (2012): 385–402.

54. Osmond, ‘Forgetting Charlie and Tums Cavill’.

55. Referee, July 24, 1912, 8.

56. Sydney Sportsman, November 5, 1902, 6.

57. See, for example, unidentified news clipping, dated January 28, 1940, in J. Scott Leary Scrapbook, Olympic Club, San Francisco, MS#OC02608, p. 060; New York Times, May 6, 1945, 38.

58. Dave Day, ‘The “Human Training Stables” of Victorian America: Cultural Differences in Sports Coaching’, Staps: Revue Internationale des Sciences du Sport et de l'Éducation Physique, no. 115 (2017): 39; Dave Day, ‘The British Athlete “is born not made”: Transatlantic Tensions over Sports Coaching’, Journal of Sport History 44, no. 1 (2017): 20–34.

59. Dave Day, Professionals, Amateurs and Performance: Sports Coaching in England 1789–1914 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 74–83.

60. Phillips, Swimming Australia, 71.

61. Day, ‘The British Athlete “is born not made”’, 21.

62. Referee, January 26, 1898, 6.

63. San Francisco Chronicle, August 29, 1898, 8.

64. San Francisco Call, November 18, 1899, 5.

65. Bulletin, December 3, 1898, 24; Advertiser (Adelaide), February 17, 1899, 4; San Francisco Call, November 18, 1899, 5.

66. One Hundred Years: The Olympic Club Centennial (San Francisco: The Olympic Club, 1960); Ronald Fimrite, ed. Wingèd O: The Olympic Club of San Francisco 1860–2009 (San Francisco: The Olympic Club, 2010).

67. Doris Muscatine, Old San Francisco: The Biography of a City from Early Days to the Earthquake (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1975), 350.

68. The History of the Olympic Club (San Francisco, The Art Publishing Co., 1893), 72–3.

69. San Francisco Chronicle, June 29, 1903, 4.

70. Olympian, March 1940, 15.

71. J. Scott Leary Scrapbook, Olympic Club, San Francisco, MS#OC02608, pp. 049, 052, 065; Berkeley Daily Gazette, August 1, 1921; San Francisco Examiner, May 5, 1945; Fimrite, Wingèd O, 161. Both Gailey and Jim Resleure, a champion water polo player with the club who had one leg, were also Australians.

72. All Sports Dinner and Hall of Fame Induction, September 24, 2010, Olympic Club brochure; Fimrite, Wingèd O, 88–90.

73. Olympian, November 1917, 13 (Larry); Cutting from the Olympian, 29 March [1920], n.p., Item 013 in Charlie O’Brien Scrapbook, MS#OC02586, Olympic Club, San Francisco (St. Larry; Sheriff); Olympian, February 1918, 25 (majordomo).

74. Olympian, September 1918, 25.

75. Examiner, February 9, 1923, 27.

76. All Sports Dinner and Hall of Fame Induction, September 24, 2010, Olympic Club brochure.

77. Unidentified newspaper clipping, author's collection; Post-Intelligencer (Seattle), (hereinafter PI), March 2, 1914, p. 1; PI, March 5, 1914, 9.

78. Referee, June 29, 1910, 1.

79. Citizen (Pennsylvania), September 28, 1910, 2.

80. Chicago Daily Tribune, October 1, 1910, 11; Chicago Daily Tribune, November 16, 1910, 10.

81. Illinois Athletic Club Magazine, 2, no. 1 (June 1912), 18. Cavill claimed credit for developing McGillivray: Referee, December 20, 1911, 8.

82. Illinois Athletic Club Minute Book, No 4, 1911–14, Illinois Athletic Club records 1904–1986, Chicago History Museum. The club's membership was modest in comparison to the San Francisco Olympic Club, which had boasted 6,000 members as early as the 1870s: Muscatine, Old San Francisco, 349–50.

83. Referee, July 5, 1911, 13; Chicago Record-Herald, April 20, 1911, 17.

84. Evening Standard (Utah), April 29, 1911, 10 (criticism); Chicago Daily Tribune, May 14, 1911, G8 (women).

85. Referee, December 20, 1911, 8.

86. Inter Ocean (Chicago), January 8, 1912, 1, 4; New York Times, January 8, 1912, 7.

87. Referee, July 24, 1912, 8; Sydney Sportsman, October 29, 1913, 7.

88. SMH, March 10, 1884, 6.

89. Referee, August 17, 1898, 6 (professional status); Referee, March 29, 1899, 6 (South Africa); Bulletin, September 30, 1899, 24 (France); Referee, October 25, 1899, 9 (Spain); Thierry Terret, email correspondence with author, December 9, 2008. For an interview with Percy about his activities in France, see Western Mail (Perth), January 27, 1900, 11. For further information on the development of sportised swimming in France, see Thierry Terret, Naissance et Diffusion de la Natation Sportive (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994).

90. San Francisco Public Library, California Passenger and Crew Lists 1893–1957, March 1900; San Francisco Call, September 9, 1900, 28 (McCusker); Daily Miami Metropolis (hereinafter DMM), February 23, 1905, 9 (Nuttall).

91. San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 1901, 10 (San Francisco); Miami Metropolis (hereinafter MM), April 7, 1905, 2 (Watch Hill); MM, April 2, 1908, 6 (Missouri).

92. MM, December 20, 1901, 13.

93. Melanie Shell-Weiss, Coming to Miami: A Social History (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009), 65.

94. MM, January 18, 1901, 1.

95. Polly Redford, Billion-Dollar Sandbar: A Biography of Miami Beach (Dutton: New York, 1970), 79.

96. Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger, August 2, 1935, 1–2 (Missouri); MM, December 31, 1913, 7 (move to Beach).

97. F. Page Wilson, Miami: From Frontier to Metropolis (Miami: Historical Association of Southern Florida, 1956), 19.

98. R. Wayne Ayers, Florida's Grand Hotels from the Gilded Age (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2005), 9.

99. MM, March 14, 1902, 4 (lights); MM, January 18, 1901, 1 (music); ‘Royal Palm Hotel’ (no source), in clipping file ‘Miami (Fla.) – Royal Palm Hotel’, HistoryMiami, Miami, Florida (cuspidors); NYT, February 21, 1904, 7 (diving board); MM, December 14, 1908, 13 (dive markers). For photographs of the pool, see: Ayers, Florida's Grand Hotels, 82; Seth H. Bramson, Miami: The Magic City (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2007), 39.

100. MM, February 10, 1913, 9 (greasy pole); Miami Evening Record, February 8, 1906, 4 (undressing); DMM, March 4, 1904, 1 (fishing).

101. MM, January 15, 1914, 4; Miami Daily Metropolis (hereinafter MDM), January 28, 1916, 1; MDN, July 15, 1943, 39.

102. MDM, September 13, 1919; Miami News (hereinafter MN), November 9, 1920; Nassau Guardian (Bahamas), November 18, 1940, 2.

103. MDN, July 15, 1943, 39; Ocean City Sentinel-Ledger, August 2, 1935, 1–2; MN, August 21, 1965, 45. Swimmers included GA Worley, Wallace Culbertson, and Jeff Gautier: ‘Ott family’ files, HistoryMiami, Miami, Florida.

104. MM, January 7, 1915, 6 (ad); Jane Fisher, Fabulous Hoosier: A Story of American Achievement (New York: Robert M. McBride, 1947), 148–49; 168–69.

105. MM, September 2, 1914, 2. I have not been able to locate this footage.

106. Osmond, ‘Swimming Her Own Course’.

107. Sun (Sydney), September 5, 1915, 12.

108. Emily Gibson and Barbara Firth, The Original Million Dollar Mermaid: The Annette Kellerman Story (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005); Dave Day, ‘From Lambeth to Niagara: Imitation and Innovation among Female Natationists’, Sport in History 35, no. 3 (2015): 364–90.

109. A report in 1919 suggested that Cavill had invented a new stroke, in which ‘the arm movements are worked in simultaneous action’, that he was perfecting and keeping under wraps: San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 1919, 14. For later iterations of this specific claim to introduction, see: Herald (Melbourne), January 3, 1985, 23; Williams, ‘Cavill, Frederick (1839–1927)’; International Swimming Hall of Fame, ‘The Cavill Family’. For analyses of the origins of the butterfly stroke, see: Marie Doezema, ‘The Murky History of the Butterfly Stroke’, New Yorker, August 11, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-murky-history-of-the-butterfly-stroke (accessed October 9, 2018); David E. Barney and Robert K. Barney, ‘A Long Night's Journey into Day: The Odyssey of the Butterfly Stroke in International Swimming’, in Cultural Imperialism in Action Critiques in the Global Olympic Trust: Eighth International Symposium for Olympic Research (London, ON: International Centre for Olympic Studies, 2006), 65–85.