The Channel

Charlie Connelly

W&N £16.99

The writer and broadcaster Charlie Connelly has long been obsessed by the English Channel, so much so that he’s acquired a passion for swimming in it, despite having the ‘muscle tone of Charles Hawtrey and the co-ordination of a prop forward on ice skates’.

In this entertaining if undemanding book, he tells the stories of the places and people who have made this stretch of water one of the most famous – and busiest – in the world.

Despite its title, The Channel is less about the waterway itself and more about the coastal towns (and their many colourful residents) that abut it. Connelly visits Brighton and Folkestone, Dunkirk and Dieppe, and uncovers a menagerie of larger-thanlife characters – adventurers, aviators, balloonists and swimmers – whose destinies were bound up in this thin sliver of brine. ‘ The channel draws a range of people to it,’ he writes, ‘and the best of them by far are the dreamers.’

Inevitably Captain Webb, the first man to swim the channel (pictured in this lithograph by John Keay), features prominently. His astonishing feat took him 22 hours to complete in 1875 and the intrepid Webb nearly died in the process (such were the chafing welts in the folds of his neck that he couldn’t fasten his shirt collar for two weeks afterwards).

We also meet pioneer balloonist JeanPierre Blanchard, the first person to cross the 21 miles by air, who only maintained sufficient elevation by throwing out all the available ballast on board, including his clothes. Over a century later, Louis Blériot completed the first aeronautical crossing in a flimsy plane, described as more like a ‘go-cart with wings’. Connelly, describing this gloriously sanguine aviator, writes: ‘He didn’t so much leave things to chance as willfully abandon them to it.’

Bright, breezy, and seasoned with a beguiling poignancy, The Channel is the perfect read while you wait for your summer holiday to begin.