10/30/2024
Ethel “Sunny” Lowry was born in Longsight in 1911. Her dad was a fish wholesaler and she was a 2nd cousin of the artist, LS Lowry.
From an early age, she loved swimming. She would swim regularly at Victoria Baths and Levenshulme Baths. She went to Manchester High School for Girls. The school thought that Sunny was rather too much focused on swimming. Sunny later said: "The headmistress was a rather stern woman and she looked at me from over her half-moon glasses and said 'Lowry, what is your ambition?' I replied immediately, 'To swim the Channel' and she said, without another word, 'Dismissed!'."
By her late teens, Sunny had developed into a strong distance swimmer. She took advantage of family holidays to swim the length of Windermere and along stretches of the North Wales coast. She often liked to wear a two-piece costume, which was very daring for those days. On more than one occasion she said she was "branded a harlot for daring to bare her knees".
She entered an X-Factor style competition in which the winner got to be trained by a top team for a cross-Channel swim. Out of 300 applicants, Sunny was chosen. So, in 1933, at the age of 22, she caught a train from Manchester down to the south coast to begin rigorous training. Her trainer was tough - the first thing he said to her was "'If you say the water's cold, you may as well get off home".
On her first attempt to swim the Channel, she was defeated by strong currents. She tried again the next day, and got to within sight of the French coast. But then a storm blew up. It grew so wild and dark, the team boat completely lost sight of her. She was only spotted when one of the crew caught a glimpse of her swimming cap during a flash of lightning. So that attempt was abandoned as well. After two failed attempts, the team considered giving up, but Sunny said she really wanted to give it one last go.
She set off again, this time from the French side. It was in the small hours of the morning and was still dark. As usual, she had to be covered in grease to protect from the cold. In preparation, she'd been eating up to 40 eggs a week (mostly in omelettes) and pushed up her weight to 14st 7lb, because it was predicted that she would lose a pound for every hour in the sea.
During the swim, she ate nothing, but paused now and again to drink coffee, cocoa and beef tea, which she swigged from a medicine bottle dangled over the side of the es**rt boat.
After swimming for 15 hours 41 minutes, she finally emerged from a rough sea, and crawled up the beach at St Margaret's Bay, near Dover. Her face and neck were swollen with jellyfish bites, and her lips were cracked and blue. She was exhausted. But she'd made it.
She thus became the 6th woman to swim the Channel and the 3rd British woman ever to do so.
After her successful swim, Sunny returned to Manchester and was she greeted by cheering crowds at Central Station. She accepted that her moment in the limelight would not last and she dedicated her life to teaching swimming. She later married and her husband, Bill, was also a swimming teacher.
She was later awarded an MBE. Sunny was described as a wonderful, gentle, kind lady. Her great niece said: "She was as fit as a fiddle, as sharp as ninepence, and she kept on swimming well into her 90s".
Sunny died, aged 97, in 2008. S