Downstream

She wasn’t the only woman
to choose Putney as a place to
begin a swim. In March 1931
it was the turn of a cold-water
expert, twenty-one-year-old
Agnes Nicks, who attempted
to swim the university boat
race course from Putney to
Mortlake in water that was 35
degrees and to ‘break the
standing cold water record’
held by Dorothy Wiggin of
California. But she was taken
out ‘in a state of exhaustion’,