Centenary of a Remarkable Channel Crossing

Friday, 23 September 2011, is the 100^th anniversary of a remarkable crossing of the Channel by Guy Mannering of the Dover milling family who, in his 13-foot clinker-built rowing boat the Helianthus, completed the two-way crossing in 12 hours and 40 minutes.

He had spent the summer months preparing for this by rowing along the coast towards Deal or Folkestone and by the early autumn must have felt in shape for the trip. A three-day window with advantageous tides and a quiet spell of weather settled the date for the crossing and he set off on the evening of the 22 September. Rowing through the early part of the night, he arrived at the beach at Sangatte before midnight and there stretched his legs and drank a bottle of beer that he had under the thwart before heading back. The wind rose on the return leg and, making little or no progress, he was on the point of giving up before a further change in the wind allowed him to row the last miles back to Dover Harbour in the early morning of the 23rd.

On walking up the beach he was met by a man from a lemonade company who offered him a sizeable sum if he endorsed his product but Guy replied that he hated the stuff – ‘I rowed there on beer and came back on brandy’, he said.

Earlier in the month a Reverend Sidney Swann from Crosby, Cumbria, had rowed from Dover to Sangatte in a racing skiff in 3 hours and 50 minutes, but Guy Mannering’s two-way crossing in a heavy rowing boat remains unchallenged a hundred years on.

Guy Mannering with some of the crew of the motorboat that accompanied him across the Channel in 1911. The Helianthus, after some recent restoration work, is now stored at the Dover Museum.

Guy Mannering rowing Helianthus in Dover Harbour, with the very oars used for the 1911 crossing, in September 1961 to mark the fiftieth anniversary. He was then in his eightieth year. The oars, still in the possession of the family, have the details of the voyage recorded on the blades. At an average rate of 24 strokes a minute, he rowed some 18,240 strokes – a Herculean effort by any standards.

Pumphrey H, Conquering the English Channel (Abelard-Schuman, 1964) Contains a short mention of Guy's feat along with descriptions of eighteenth-century balloon crossings, Blériot's flight in 1909, and many others.