Crossing the Channel by balloon? Keep it light
THE CHANNEL by Charlie Connelly
As any publisher will tell you, if you want to make it as a writer you have to find your niche. That’s certainly been Charlie Connelly’s guiding principle. Best known for his book Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast, the author and broadcaster has since written books on Britain’s obsession with the weather, the British countryside and the history of radio.
So it feels almost inevitable that Connelly has now trained his sights on another British preoccupation: the English Channel. A “silver streak” of choppy brine, singularly capricious in its tides, the Channel defines us as an island nation, keeping the Continent at arm’s length (even if it is so narrow you can see the street lights of Calais, Gravelines and Dunkirk from Kent).
Throughout our history, we have argued over whether it is a vital bulwark against invasion or a geological twist of fate that leaves us isolated. And, of course, there is an almost unlimited number of stories one could tell about it, from Julius Caesar’s invasions of Britain in 55 and 54BC, to the “miracle” of Dunkirk in 1940.
Connelly’s solution to this surfeit of information – for good and for ill – is to focus mainly on the superficial and the quirky. The 50-year-old, who lives in Deal, Kent, and swims in the Channel every morning, does not profess to be a historian. Nevertheless, reading The Channel is like eating a P&O cheese sandwich when what you really crave is chateaubriand.
There is fun to be had, though, if you are willing to accept the book on its own terms.
Connelly’s account of the first aeronauts to cross the Channel, for example, is a hoot. Jean-Pierre Blanchard and his co-pilot (and chief investor) John Jeffries made history when they flew a boatshaped gondola, attached to a green and yellow silk balloon, from Dover Castle to Guînes, just outside Calais, in January 1785. But what that bald fact fails to record is the hilarious squabbling between the two men.
First, before take-off, Blanchard attempted to stop Jeffries from getting on board (and thus claiming the record for himself) by locking him out of the castle grounds. Then, once the balloon was inflated, the Frenchman tried to convince Jeffries they were too heavy – and that he would have to let Blanchard go on alone – by secretly tying a belt of lead weights beneath his overcoat.
Eventually, Blanchard was forced to accept that Jeffries, a successful American doctor based in London, was coming with him. But that was far from the end of the farce. Realising, halfway across the Channel, that they were too heavy, even without Blanchard’s lead weights, the men cast out first their ballast, then their food, then the gondola’s cloth lining, and, finally, their clothes, so that when spectators, who had been following their progress on horseback, galloped up to offer congratulations, they were met by the sight of two men standing in their underwear, cuddling each other to keep warm.
There are plenty more anecdotes where this one comes from. Connelly’s cataloguing of the repeated crashes suffered by Louis Blériot before he successfully became the first pilot to fly a plane across the Channel confirms, if the story of Blanchard had not already, how much luck and vanity play a role in the completion of great endeavours. (Blériot was, Connelly says, a “terrible” pilot and had no right to have made it across the water alive.)
The author revels in the bloodymindedness of Jabez Wolffe, a huge Glaswegian, born in 1876, who tried and failed to swim the Channel an extraordinary 22 times.
Connelly can do serious. He writes stirringly about the heroics of the Dunkirk evacuation and tenderly about the little-remembered sinking of the Amphitrite, a ship on its way to New South Wales, which ran aground on the coast of northern France in 1833 and went down with more than 100 female convicts on board.
But, in the main, Connelly prefers to keep it light. One gets the impression that he also prefers not to do any first-hand research. His stories come from other histories, and even when a living person is available to be interviewed (such as Sarah Thomas, the American cancer survivor who became the first person to swim the Channel four times without stopping last year, well in advance of this book going to press), Connelly does not deign to talk to them. It seems the most work he is prepared to do is to wander around Calais or Dieppe, perhaps sit at a café where someone famous once sat, and recount the words on plaques or statues he comes across.
It’s rather lazy and extremely frustrating. Nevertheless, as a collection of whimsical anecdotes, it is entertaining enough. The best fact in the book? That Ho Chi Minh once worked as a pastry chef on the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry. If only there had been a bit more – any more – information on that.
A huge Glaswegian called Jabez Wolffe tried (and failed) to swim it 22 times