Margaret White-Wrixon

In the April 2013 newsletter we carried a story of Endeavour being used as an escort vessel for Margaret White, who was in training for a swim across the English Channel. Two members informed us that we had incorrectly captioned the accompanying photograph (see left). The couple with Margaret were not Melville and Doris Chadwick, but despite our best efforts we had been unable to correct our error... until now!


The power of the worldwide web led Margaret, now Margaret White-Wrixon to contact us from her home in Ontario, Canada. The couple are in fact Margaret’s mother Vera White, and her uncle Albert Smith.

She explained that the reason she had pursued this was because she had read in a book, written by Caitlin Davies called Downstream - A History of Swimming in the River Thames, that someone had claimed her title of swimming the Estuary two ways non-stop on one tide. She contacted Caitlin and sent her the information, and Caitlin was most apologetic that she had not found any mention of it, despite the fact that she had spent a considerable amount of time in Southend and Chalkwell.

In addition to the book she wrote a blog for the London Museum and gave a lecture at the museum last year, where she brought up all of those who had not been included in her book. Margaret went to this lecture, and was approached by a journalist for the Guardian who was considering doing a Wikipedia entry on both the two-way estuary and channel swims. This would include Endeavour’s participation. This is now available to view online.

Margaret has kindly forwarded her press cuttings and two of them taken from the Essex Weekly News of August 1960, are reproduced here.

Margaret knew Dave Spurgeon, a former Trustee and a previous owner of Endeavour, from some years back and also remembers David Norman, an Endeavour Trustee, from elementary school!