Gertrude Ederle: Ruling The Waves

History's Heroes

BBC

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.8 • 704 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A nineteen-year-old American woman sets out on an extraordinary feat of endurance. Will Gertrude Ederle become the first woman to swim the English Channel?

Stories of bold voices, with brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Historian Alex von Tunzelmann shines a light on remarkable people from across history.

A BBC Studios Audio production.

Producer: Lorna Reader Series producer: Suniti Somaiya Written and presented by Alex von Tunzelmann Executive Producer: Paul Smith Commissioning editor for Radio 4: Rhian Roberts

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Sing Sing and I'm Simon Jack. And Good Bad Billionaire is back. It's the podcast
0:06.2	exploring the lives and livelihoods of some of the world's richest people, but this time there's
0:10.6	a twist. On Good Bad Dead billionaire, we are looking back on the lives of some titans of
0:15.6	US industry. Like the first ever billionaire, John D. Rockefeller. The founder of the Ford
0:20.3	Motor Company, Henry Ford.
0:21.9	And the First Lady of Wall Street, Hetty Green.
0:24.3	And Simon and I are asking you if they were good, bad or just another billionaire.
0:28.4	Good bad billionaire.
0:29.5	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:33.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:37.5	The 18th of August, 1925, late afternoon.
0:43.9	Six miles off Dover, a 19-year-old American woman was in the sea.
0:49.3	Her eyes stung from the salt water that seeped in behind her goggles.
0:54.1	It's the tides, it's the waves. It's also a commercial thoroughfare.
1:00.5	So you have these gigantic boats coming through, creating even more waves.
1:05.8	There's all kinds of floating wood that's debris that can knock into you.
1:11.4	She'd been treading water for hours.
1:14.6	She was disorientated and off balance.
1:17.3	The debris from shipping wasn't the only threat.
1:20.8	She knew that there were sharks around.
1:22.5	She knew there were jellyfish.
1:24.0	They would sting you and, of course, your body body would swell up and there were lots of them.
	...

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