THE CHANNEL SWIM.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3363, 1 November 1911, Page 7

THE CHANNEL SWIM.

PERSONAL -SKETCH OF EURGESS.

SUCCESS AFTER YEARS OF failure.

(By a comrade of the Channel.) As one of the four men who watched his - first “round” with -the Channel in September 1904, I experienced a real sense of personal delight when the news came that Burgess had swum tho Channel at last If you imagine a man mentally and physically qualified to swim the Channel you imagine Burgess’s double. As t-lie birdman lias been evolved to conquer the air, so the porpoise-man Burgess has been constructed by Nature to master the Channel Thomas William Burgess, Yorkshireman and naturalised Frenchman, was built-to-specilicat:on for long-distance swimming. He lias enough honest fat on his body to keep out the deadening chill of the water while swimming “twice round the clock” He has an untiring, steel-springed, muscular system under his adipose armour He has a cool brain which tells him when to make a superlative effort and when to conserve his strength, and lie has the big, courageous heart to go on in the face of exhaustion, cruelly bad luck, heavy expense, and Job’s comforters. A HEARTY GIANT. “It can be done, and I’m the man to do it.” One can see the tide-torn straits gripping the Yorkshireman’s imagination with something of the call of the source of the Nile or the NorthWest- Passage to the early explorers. He spared neither himself nor his time nor his money in his determination not to be beaten. As he is a man of affairs, owning a motor-tyre business near Paris, where he lives, and as each attempt involves an outlay of anything between £25 and £IOO, his sacrifices have not been light. To meet Burgess (who was born at R-otherhani) is to get an impression of “bigness A hearty giant-, over six feet tall, everything abot him contributes to this impression. Apart from his inches and his bulk, his voice is big and his laugh, especially, is tremendous. His appetitie is big, and bigger than all is his heart. It is this same big heart which has brought him up smiling after fifteen dispiriting failures till at the sixteenth swim, when he is forty years of age and most men have given up thoughts of physical activity, he has won his doggedly-sought goal, after beating Captain Webb’s record for endurance