All along the River Cam, nicknames and earmarks bear the memory of past swimmers. Around the corner from Paradise Island, “Aunt Sally” is a deep spot reserved for diving. Further along towards Grantchester are Otter’s corner and Deadman’s Bend – the latter named either after a grisly hanging from a tree overhanging the river or, more prosaically, for being one of the few nooks of the Cam too deep for a punting pole and therefore an unideal spot to fall in. After a few swims I have my own landmarks: fifteen minutes upstream from the Riverbank Club is a tree we would jump off in the Summer; fifteen minutes again and you reach the only bit of the river too shallow for swimming. Richard Deakin called it ‘The People’s River’, and it has many children.
Before swimming was an established part of the river’s history it was thought to be too dangerous. The Vice Chancellor in 1571 felt sufficiently strongly about the issue to ban students from swimming in ‘any river, pool or other water’ in the whole county of Cambridge, on pain of being ‘sharply and severely whipped publicly’, if not clunky death by adverb. Some still think the water is too treacherous today; when a friend and I first started swimming in the river the summer before last, our college porters were keen to scare us off with a cast of horrible diseases. In Byron’s time, the river was perceivedly dangerous for different reasons. A slew of drownings left the poet’s friendship group markedly depleted and attached to the river fears of weedy tendrils and heavy mud that linger to this day.
For all its danger, outdoor swimming is usually as safe as the swimmer and in fact, the Cam is so notoriously calm that for years children learnt how to swim in it. Before the public pool was constructed in 1923, a small side stream called the Snobs was used as a testing ground, before fully fledged swimmers were released into the main river. The water is not as clean as it used to be (as recently as the 1950s Deakin reckons the water was clear enough to see the riverbed’s golden sand catching the light from the bank), but I’ve never gotten ill from it. And the spate of drownings may have had slightly more disingenuous legal causes. At the time, deaths by suicide defaulted the deceased’s property to the crown. Swimming historian Charles Sprawson reckons, therefore, many of the Cam’s “drownings” may only have been labelled as such by friends after the fact, in a bid to bagsy the departed swimmer’s belongings for themselves.
Returning to Cambridge after lockdown and six months away, then, I was keen to get back in the river and swimming. The Backs have been closed to swimmers since the 90s for reasons that are not entirely clear, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of one of the Cam’s greatest swimmers, Jack Overhill. Always looking in at the University swim team from the Amateurs and the ‘New Town Water Rats Club’, Jack was the first student to bring front crawl to the river. He learnt it from a visiting Londoner and perfected his technique from illustrations in an encyclopaedia, before using ‘the crawl’ to enthral spectators and match the university champion, J. T. A. Temple in a 1924 race. In 1934, Overhill organised a new race from the mill-pool in Grantchester all through the meadows and into town, stopping at the lock before Silver Street. It’s the only stretch of river still open for swimming and Jack even left a time to beat: the 56 minutes and 42 seconds that won the first race almost nine decades ago.
After a few trial swims at the start of October, I realised death by unseeing punt was a rather ignominious way to go. So I enlisted the help of a friend to pilot a “support boat” of sorts. The only issue was finding a boat. After reaching out to the Cambridge Canoe Club and the Cambridge *university* Canoe Club (very different groups, I’m told) we hadn’t gotten anywhere. Toby and I even did some quick maths – rubbing together the combined brain cells of a Classicist and English student – to work out the max speed of a punt, with no luck. With the river water getting colder everyday it was starting to look like the swim might have to wait till May. Until a Facebook ad popped up for paddleboard hire from Grantchester. Would a paddleboard be quick enough? Would Toby be able to navigate the narrower stretches of the river without clocking me on the head with a paddle himself? The water was starting to peek under 12 degrees so we decided to go for it and two days later and we were picking up the “support boat” from Rasa by the Mill.
I love swimming in the Cam. From Grantchester the river is shallow and narrow enough for a stern stream and just enough of a push to feel like I’m flying along – under fallen branches and around weedy grasses at the bends. Turning a corner the trees on the river bank fall away and the skyline opens up onto Grantchester meadows. We glide past a tire swing and the jumping-off tree. We’re moving parallel to footpath along the riverbank, but it feels like a privileged perspective of the river. Another tree that looks stern and formidable from the bank shares its hollowed interior with the river – a fairy-tale home for badgers or gremlins.
In Autumn the river is a place slowly dying. The cooler water bites back at weeds and grasses that have grown over the summer so that everything beneath me is a mottled green, white and brown. In March the water is clear and cool but today its thick with a beautiful decomposition. Not that the river is dead, just changing. Only half an hour ago on my walk to the swim’s start I struck up a conversation with a man on the bank, angling for pike.
After the meadows, I swim into a darker stretch of river. The bank is too thick for a footpath here, and trees lean over the river until they form a tunnel keeping light for themselves and off the water. After swimming with shafts of sunlight catching my goggles over the meadow banks, the water suddenly seems much quieter and more pitchy. Nothing has really changed; the wetland world of fish and muddy weeds remains indifferent. I’m just reminded how out of place I am, splashing around clumsily in the wrong element.
It’s a momentary calm, interrupted on the final stretch into town by an impasse of punts. The tunnel of foliage emerges onto Sheeps Green: past the ruined old bathing houses where Jack Overhill trained and dived; past a paddling pool where the footpath re-joins the river; past the picnics and baby strollers and towards Silver Street. The last hundred metres is particularly hectic, but Toby springs into action – forging a path between an unwieldy armada of punts. It comes to pushing one out of the way, when Toby realises a paddleboard is much lighter, so he’s actually just pushing himself away from a punt which isn’t going anywhere.
Its only a few more strokes and we’re there in 56 minutes, 54 seconds – 12 seconds slower than Jack Overhill, 86 years ago. I’m looking forward to another race with Jack when the water starts to turn again in April, but for now it’s the season for shorter dips and more time reading about open-water swimming than time actually spent in increasingly icy water. Jack wrote such a book, Swimming for Fun, based on his swimming in the Cam, but it was never published. It’s just one of over thirty books written (only three were ever taken up) by a strong candidate for the patron saint of open water swimmers. Never the fastest, but still going, after everyone else was out of the water, Jack put it best himself: "Don't forget that first and last in life – and it takes precedence over everything – writing, reading, sex and the rest of it – I'm a swimmer right to the marrow in my bones."
Much of what I know about the Cam – that I haven’t learnt from swimming in it – I learnt from two excellent books:
Haunts of the Black Masseur by Charles Sprawson
‘The People’s River’ in Waterlog by Roger Deakin
The Cam is not a happy river. Read more about why here and how you can help: