Article Channel Swim Hoax
Summary: In 1927 Dorothy Cochrane Logan claimed to have swum the English Channel. She later admitted she had only swum the first and last miles.
Text excerpted from The Fresno Bee, September 7, 1955:
The famous channel swimming hoax, carried out to show how easily such a thing could be faked without proper supervision, took place October 10-11, 1927. Dr. Dorothy Cochrane Logan, a young British physician, disappeared into the surf at Cape Gris Nez, France, and reappeared 13 hours, 13 minutes later at Folkestone, England. Her record apparently had beaten that of Gertrude Ederle set the year before and the young woman was given a prize offered by a British newspaper. A few days later, however, she announced that the whole thing had been a fraud, that she had swum only the first and last few miles and that she and her trainer had plotted the hoax to prove how simply the world could be fooled. Both she and her trainer were fined, but for perjury not fraud.
Another Account
Text excerpted from the Syracuse Herald, Friday October 21, 1927
Escort Charges Dr. Logan Revealed Channel Swim Hoax Only After Threats
Claims Woman Kept Secret of Receipt of Cash Prize and Her Statement She Broke Record
London, Oct. 21. (AP)—The Daily Sketch today quoted Lieutenant Commander L.S. M. Adam, retired naval officer who acted as pilot for Dr. Dorothy Cochrane Logan in her “hoax channel swim” as declaring that she only confessed to the fake when he and another member of the party, which convoyed her, demanded that she do so. Dr. Logan claimed that she had deliberately perpetrated the hoax in order to show the necessity of supervision of such swims.
Dr. Logan gravely compromised his honor by continuing to withhold certain facts about the swim, Commander Adam edeclared and he therefore decided to make a full statement to the paper.
“As I found lies were being told to support her claim that she swam the English Channel, I decided to insist that she make a full confession,” he said.
Dr. Logan concealed fromhim the fact that she had accepted Baron Riddell’s prize of 1,000 pounds for the English woman who broke the record held by Gertrude Ederle of New York of swimming the channel in 14 hours and 31 minutes, Commander Adam claimed. He also stated that she did not tell him that she had signed a document stating that she had made the swim in 13 hours and 10 minutes.
he learned of these acts, he said, when he read stories about them in the newspapers. Then he and George Woodward, another member of the party which convoyed her, went to see Dr. Logan in London and demanded that the misstatement about the swim be withdrawn.
Commander Adam declared that the fact that he and Woodward were under grave suspicion and theatened with serious consequences induced him to make today’s statement.
------Dr. Dorothy Cochrane Logan, in confessing that she had not swum the channel, said that before she set out it was determined that if she perpetrated the hoax she would make public the full facts within a month after the swim.
She started the swim Oct. 10 and her confession was printed in the news of the World, Baron Riddell’s paper, last Sunday.
She also returned the 1,000 pound check presented to her for the swim.
She said that before starting for Cape Gris Nez, France, she wrote a letter stating that if conditions were favorable she hoped to swim the channel in a straightforward manner. If they were not favorable, she wrote, she intended to “get across somehow with the purpose of proving the necessity of providing independent umpires to prevent possible abuses.”
This protective letter was found in the hotel safe at Hythe, where she had left it before going to Cape Gris Nez.
Her trainer, Horace H. Carey, supported her in her revelation.
The log kept on the convoying vessel showed that of the 13 hours and 10 minutes of the “swim,” Dr. Logan had spent eight hours and 50 minutes aboard the vessel. During a large part of this time she was seasick.