TWO AMBITIONS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 459, 14 September 1928, Page 11

TWO AMBITIONS

London Nursemaid Realises the First MAY COME TO N.Z. NOW With two ambitions—to swim the Channel and emigrate to Australia or New Zealand to take up farming—a London nursemaid, Hilda Sharp, realised the first last month. Starting from Cape Grisnez (France) at 12.50 a.m., she landed at Dover at 3.55 p.m., taking 15.5 hours, and was thus nearest among the women Channel swimmers to approach Miss Gertrude Ederle’s record of 14 hours 39 minutes. LOOKS LIKE A BOY Sturdy, fair, freckled and Etoncropped, she is nick-named “Laddie” owing to her resemblance to a boy. She wore boy’s clothes when training in France, and deceived the whole village, including a girl who wanted to become her sweetheart. Hilda says she became a nurse maid in Brighton to spend her spare time training to swim the Channel. IS DOUBLE-JOINTED “I am double-jointed, and able to swim my own double-scissor kickstroke with 25 full strokes a minute,” she says. “I can' keep that pace all through, the swim.” Her weight is 11 stone. She is particularly proud of her calf, which is 16 inches, the same as Gene Tunney’s. She smoked an occasional cigarette during the swim. [The last girl to succeed in swimming the Channel was Miss Ivy Hawkes, 25, of Brighton, who crossed from Grisnez to Kingsdown on August 19. She took 19 hours 32 minutes. Miss Sharp is the sixth woman to have swum the Channel.!