Free Downstream by Caitlin Davies Page A

The annual May Day tradition of jumping off Magdalen Bridge into the Cherwell has led to numerous injuries. Recently the coroner at Oxford ruled on a case where a fourteen-year-old boy jumped into the Thames withhis girlfriend, and hadn’t told her he couldn’t swim. ‘I’ve jumped from bridges myself and it’s great fun,’ says Russell, ‘but it’s also hazardous and I never considered that people just chuck stuff in.’ He cites stolen laptops and builders dumping debris: ‘we had twenty bags of rubble at Godstow and the diver was standing on it and the water only came to his knees.’ In the summer of 2012, the EA invited the public to Pangbourne, about twenty miles from Oxford, to watch Thames Valley Police Search and Recover divers remove hazardous materials by Whitchurch Bridge. In previous years divers had pulled out shopping trolleys, motorbikes, fridges, TVs, scooters, scaffolding and traffic cones, some firmly stuck in the riverbed. One year only a small sample of objects was recovered, partly because the diver was becoming entangled in a discarded fishing line.
    The EA cites numerous possible risks associated with swimming and diving in the Thames, including falling on metal spikes, being struck by a boat or caught in a propeller, being swept along in a strong current, encountering cold water which can lead to cramp and breathing difficulties, and unstable slippery banks which can collapse suddenly. With warnings like these, no wonder people are put off and some Oxford residents, like Christopher Gray, think the idea of river swimming is crazy. ‘Though a tributary of the Thames flows at the bottom of my garden, I would never dream of swimming in it,’ he wrote in the
Oxford Times
, annoyed that the
Daily Telegraph
had just run a three-page feature on river swimming, recommending the Thames at Port Meadow and Clifton Hampden. To him this was ‘Barking mad . . . River swimming is a new faddish activity. Like motorcycling and Morris dancing, it numbers many zealots among its supporters.’
    Several well-known endurance swimmers have fallen sick around Oxford, including Lewis Pugh during his 2006 trip. ‘The upper Thames was beautiful, clean and gorgeous,’ he remembers. ‘Oxford was really grotty. I ended up in hospital there, although wedidn’t mention it to the press at the time. I had started vomiting late one night; I was rushed in and given antibiotics. The next morning I was totally exhausted, I only managed 400 metres that day.’
    David Walliams fell sick at the end of day two as he passed Oxford and reached Abingdon. ‘I had Giardia, which people in the third world get from dirty water, and it makes you very ill with diarrhoea. It lays eggs in the lower intestine. I had antibiotics before I started, and during, and I can’t say for certain how I got it.’ Long-distance swimmer Frank Chalmers also got sick with ‘the dreaded Thames lurgy’ as he approached Oxford on his four-day swim, but despite being taken to hospital he says ‘people swim here all the time and they are fine’.
    Indeed they are, and despite warnings from the EA and in the press, swimming in the Thames at Oxford is seeing something of a revival. ‘As the pound sinks and more of us stay at home instead of going abroad, such simple pleasures are being rediscovered,’ says Chris Koenig from the
Oxford Times
. ‘After all, the weather is getting hotter and the rivers cleaner.’ Swimming teacher Dee Keane has lived in Oxford for thirty years yet didn’t swim in the Thames until she took part in a full-moon swim with the Outdoor Swimming Society (OSS) downstream near South Stoke. ‘There was thunder and lightning and we were all a bit hyped up. We assembled in a field and changed and then walked through the village and a mile up the towpath, just wearing costumes and goggles, and then swam back. It was dusk, around 7