Personalities In N.Z. Sport

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 483, 12 October 1928, Page 6

Personalities In N.Z. Sport

The Man who Swain Auckland Harbour with Hands and Feet Tied !

If you want to test your confidence in the water, get someone to tie your hands and feet, and try swimming a hundred yards to so. Of course, you will need to be a pretty good swimmer, but in time you may reach the stage where you will be able to swim right across the Auckland harbour with hands and feet tied! This remarkable feat was performed by Mr. D. B. Anderson, Auckland’s well-known swimming coach, some seven or eight yeass ago. It was not done in any spirit of notoriety; in fact, so little was known about it at the time that one newspaper casually mentioned in its report of a swimming meeting that “Mr. D. B. Anderson gave an exhibition of swimming with his hands and feet tied!” Actually, this unusual swim was done in conjunction with the annual harbour race in 1921, and it was a test (and a most severe one at that) of some original ideas on swimming which Mr. Anderson was endeavouring to teach in Auckland, and which, being imperfectly understood even among Auckland’s best known swimmers, had resulted in the coach being stigmatised a “crank” and sundry other appelations, which are frequently bestowed on those who break away, from the conventional method of doing things. When Mr. Anderson, however, swam the harbour on a day when more than one competitor in the harbour swim had to be lifted out of the water physically exhausted, those who came to scoff began to realise that there might be something in his theories after all. It was an amazing example of dour Scottish courage and determination, and Mr. Anderson will carry the marks of the ropes which bound his hands to his grave. TEACHING THE CHILDREN His friends will tell you that “D. 8.” oblivious of what his detractors were saying, next directed his energies to explaining the lessons to be learnt from this swim to the youngsters of the Ponsonby Schools—five of them in all—whom he was coaching. Even his strongest supporters had misgivings when he started this work among tho schools, and week after week went by and the children seemed to be no nearer swimming than when they started. But in six weeks, over three hundred children had learnt to swim! More important, they had been given a knowledge of the fundamentals of breathing, flotation and swimming, which they had never been taught before. They knew how to breathe correctly (one of the most important things in swimming), they knew that it was impossible for tliem to drown so long as they followed one or two very simple ABC rules of flotation, and they knew why they were swimming and what muscles they were using to propel them through the water. INSTRUCTORS GAVE HIM UP! “D. 8.” himself will tell you that when he was a boy in far-away Scotland first learning to swim, three instructors gave him up. They said the bone structure of his b6dy made it impossible that he would ever be able to swim. And being a determined young Scot, young Anderson decided that he was going to swim, instructors or no instructors, and that if other boys could swim, he was going to swim, too. It is a long story he tells, but it iis the absorbingly interesting story of a genuine enthusiast, who was heart and soul in what he set out to do, and it is sufficient for the necessary limitations of space which have to be imposed here, that after 12 months of gruelling work (disheartening at times because of the long spell of non-success) that D. B. Anderson not only taught himself to swim, but became in time one of Scotland’s greatest swimmers, whose name figures extensively in club and national championship^. He never said so to the writer, but

I think that when D. B. Anderson took up coaching work in Auckland in 1912 he set out with the fixed determination that no boy or girl should have to go through what he did when he first started to learn to swim. Even now, after the lapse of n*any years, when one might have expected that some of his earlier enthusiasm had waned, it is to find the * ame wholesouled enthusiast he always was, and he is never happier than when he is patiently instructing some little fellow who looks as if he is going to have a terribly hard job ever to know how to swim. “Nothing succeeds like success,” and Mr. Anderson has gone on from triumph to triumph. He has coached Auckland champions without number, In 1915. he had his first big success when one of his pupils, Miss Dorothy Farquhar, was the first Auckland girl to win the New Zealand Ladies’ 100 yards Championship in what was then record time. To-day, another of the girls he coaches, Miss Ena Stockley, is the 100 yards champion, an Olympic representative, and one of the finest swimmers New Zealand has produced. Ho has coached other champions, Leo Kronfeld, N. C. Stockley, C. Johnson. Miss Gladys Pidgeoh, and many other fine swimmers too numerous to mention here. I think the greatest thing about him is that he has never lost his earlier enthusiasm for swimming. He is heart and soul in the sport, and it is an education to hear him expounding the theory and practice of swimming with a clarity of thought and diction which makes it a pleasure to listen to him.