Greenwich, George Melly and the London Olympics 2012

Greenwich is home to the Royal Navy. The wide riverside facade of the Christopher Wren designed Royal Naval College has been greeted with fond relief by generations of homecoming sailors. It is both symbol and engine of a long seafaring tradition.

Who knows how many hundreds of books have been written about the Senior Service. Many readers will have their favorites. Maybe a biography of Admiral Lord Nelson or one of C S Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels. Mine is a wonderfully rumbustious memoir of an Able Seamen who served at the tail end of World War Two and through the early months of the peace.

George Melly never saw active service and never knowingly committed an act of bravery or self-sacrifice. But his book, 'Rum, Bum and Concertina', records that he did have a lot of fun. He spent most of his brief naval career on punishment duties or running up to London to hang out with the surrealist painters and poets among the refugees of the Parisian art world who had made their temporary home there, or having illicit sex with his comrades in the nooks and crannies of various of Her Majesty's Ships of the Line.

Not long after I read this book I was regaling some fellow dinner party guests with stories from it. When I concluded that the Navy sounded like a big gay love jamboree a rather tight lipped young man at the other end of the table said, 'Not on my watch, it isn't.'

Ooh er!

Notwithstanding George Melly's extra-curricular activities, the Royal Navy was a hugely successful organization and at one time policed the biggest land empire the world has ever known. When Queen Victoria was, as Leonard Cohen has it, 'stern governess of all those huge pink maps', Britain did indeed rule the waves.

So it made sense, when an international conference met in Washington D.C. In 1884, to agree on a Prime Meridian, a line of 0° longitude, that the British standard was chosen. And the British line goes through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Not that there weren't competitors. At various time there were meridians defined that passed through Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Warsaw, Jerusalem and Antwerp among many other cities. There was one in Kyoto. In the United States, Philadelphia had one and Washington D.C. itself had another. Mecca had one.

But in 1884 , according to Wikipedia, 'over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage used it (Greenwich) as the reference meridian on their maps'. So Greenwich got the gig. And has it for the foreseeable future.

Although, there is currently an Islamic movement for Mecca to be the Prime Meridian. To this end the world's largest clock has been built and on 11 August 2010 (1 Ramadan, AH 1431) it was started up in that city. We'll see.

Despite the maritime associations of Greenwich it won't be the venue for any sailing or boating events during the Olympic Games. However, Greenwich Park, which occupies the ground between The Royal Observatory at the top of Greenwich Hill and The Old Royal Naval College at the bottom, will host the Olympic and Paralympic Equestrian competitions and the running and shooting section of the Modern Pentathlon.

A temporary Cross Country course will be laid out in the Park and a temporary arena will built within the grounds of the National Maritime Museum there. It's not clear at the moment which of these will be in the western hemisphere and which in the eastern.

Benjamin Franklin and the London Olympics 2012

A few years ago an American friend of mine returned home after six months in Europe. In remembrance of her trip she put a poster map of her favorite European city on her office wall. The boss squinted at it. 'What is that thing?'

Katie looked at him. It had the name across the top. 'London,' she said.

'Yeah, I know. But what's that wiggly thing going all the way across?' What was he talking about? She looked at the map again. Oh, right. 'That's the River Thames.'

Katie's boss didn't get it. Atlanta, Georgia, where he had been born and raised, grew up around the railroads, and Peachtree Creek had long disappeared underground. 'They have a river running right through the city?'

Yep. They have a river running right through it. In fact the river is pretty much the reason why the city is there in the first place. When the Roman Army under Julius Caesar was marching north after the invasion of 43 AD, the Thames, running from east to west across the width of the country, was their first serious geographical obstacle.

A bridge was built, a garrison was stationed and a community flourished around it. Londinium was born.

Two thousand years later the river has a rich sporting history and a living sporting tradition.

Now and again I take a morning run along the Thames in west London. My route follows the river from Mortlake to Putney, reversing the course of the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. If I am out early enough there might be a slight chill in the air and a light mist on the water. This is a stretch of the river with boating clubs on both the north and south banks. The dull rattle of rowlocks, the slap of sculls and the megaphone of a cox will sound along the river from a keen pre-commuting crew. If it is term time a couple of boats will be out from St Paul's School which is right there at the south end of Hammersmith Bridge.

If it's a long run I might go further east towards Chelsea which, three hundred years ago, saw an early exhibition of the new sport of swimming.

In 1726 London was the world center of the printing industry and the young American was learning the trade at one of the many print shops in the City of London. But that day was a holiday and he had fled upriver, away from the crowding and the industry and the stink of the city. What is now west London was then a landscape of meadows and marshes and country houses and little villages with a sophisticated and wealthy population.

Maybe the young American was showing off to his rich friends, maybe it was youthful exuberance or that thrill you feel in a fit and healthy body that just has to express itself in action, maybe as a teetotaller he was simply bored by the boozing Brits, but at some point he stripped off and dived from the boat into the water.

He was a keen swimmer and knew what he was about. He had read Melchisedech Thevenot's 1696 book The Art of Swimming and, in his own words, 'had from a child ever been delighted with this exercise, had studied and practis'd all Thevenot's motions and positions, added some of my own, aiming at the graceful and easy as well as the useful.'

The Thames is a strong tidal river. Nowadays, in central London, the river rises and falls by about twenty two feet and the tide and currents can run dangerously fast. I'm guessing that the tide was on its way out when the American jumped in. He wouldn't want to be swimming against it. Having been in town for almost a year and a half and he would have learned the river's habits by that time. This was also before the building of the embankments, which didn't come till the nineteenth century, so the river would have been somewhat wider and slower on that day in the seventeen hundreds.

In any case, everybody had a good time. The boaters followed the youngster all the way from Chelsea through Westminster to Blackfriars, the better part of five miles. On the way he entertained them with 'many feats of activity, both upon and under the water, that surpris'd and pleas'd those to whom they were novelties.'

The sport had to stop before they reached the perilous currents at London Bridge and when he got out of the water and shook the water from his long hair Benjamin Franklin must have been wonderfully exhausted and awash with endorphins.

His demonstration had been a great success. Off the back of it he was offered the job of swimming teacher to the sons of a wealthy aristocrat and if his plans for returning to America had not been so far advanced he might have taken the gig and had a successful career as a personal trainer to the British nobility.

It's anybody's guess whose face would have ended up on the hundred dollar bill then.

Nowadays if you see somebody jumping into the Thames in London the odds are it's a drunk or a suicide. So the Olympic swimming and diving events will be taking place elsewhere.

Not that that would always have been the case. The first few of the modern Olympics had the swimming events in open water. In the 1900 Paris Olympics, for example, they took place in the river Seine.

But today's pool-accustomed athletes don't expect to be treading river weed. The Freestyle, Breaststroke, Backstroke and Butterfly, which Ben Franklin so ably demonstrated that day in 1762, in all their various solos and relays and medleys, will be seen in the specially built Aquatics Centre at the new Olympic Park in Stratford in east London. This is also where the Paralympic Swimming, the Diving and the Synchronised Swimming will be held, and the swimming bits of the Modern Pentathlon.

But here's the good news. I mean the really good news. If you want to see an open air Olympic swimming event in historic London, you can. Because the 10K Marathon Swimming event will take place in the Serpentine Pond in Hyde Park.

The Serpentine Pond, a dammed section of the now mostly underground Westbourne River, a tributary of the River Thames, may be home to wild swans, ducks, geese, the odd pelican and, allegedly, poisonous algae, but, come August, the world's elite endurance swimmers will be competing in it's waters for the glory of Olympic Gold.

Is that cool. Or what?

Ben Franklin would have loved it.