Fearless queen of the diving boards
I WAS interested to read Tom Leonard’s article (Mail) about the achievements of Mercedes Gleitze, who in 1927 became the first British woman to swim the Channel and is the subject of a new film starring Kirsten Callaghan, Vindication Swim. My great-great-aunt was also a pioneering swimmer and diver. She was Annie Luker, born in 1870 in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
Like Gleitze, she was known for her fearlessness and performed feats in the River Thames, initially swimming long distances and later diving off London Bridge.
In August 1892, saying she wanted to ‘establish claim to the female championship of the world’, she tried to swim between Greenwich and Kew and kept going for nearly five hours, covering 16 miles before being helped on to a boat, completely exhausted. But it was high diving that made her famous in late Victorian times.
A petite figure with a calm, poised stance on the diving board, she became a noted entertainer and many newspaper articles were published about her achievements, especially at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster, which opened in 1876 and was demolished in 1903. There, despite being a ‘quiet, innocent-looking figure’ with soft, dark eyes who resembled ‘the sort of girl one would expect to scream at a black beetle’, as one newspaper report put it, she gave nightly performances to large crowds in which she would dive 70 feet into a shallow tank. She was advertised as the ‘champion lady diver of the world’ but sometimes had to share the billing with acts that included a boxing kangaroo and a ‘talking horse’. Born Hagar Ann Luker, she was one of eight children of swimming professor John Pearson Luker, from Tunbridge Wells, my great-great-grandfather. He helped train Captain Matthew Webb, the first swimmer to make a recorded, unassisted Channel crossing in 1875. Annie’s niece May Elizabeth Waters, my maternal grandmother, swam and performed with Annie and was styled ‘Baby Waters’ on posters advertising their appearances. According to family researchers, Annie probably became a swimming instructor after her performing career ended. There is also a family rumour that she was imprisoned as a Suffragette for diving off London Bridge as a protest.
Annie married a London oyster merchant named Frederick Parker, who was apparently too afraid for her safety ever to attend her diving shows. She was living in Islington, North London, in 1915 but I have been unable to find out anything about her later years.
DOUG MUSSELL, sheffield.