Australian Dictionary of Biography

Desmond Robert Renford (1927–1999), marathon swimmer, was born on 25 August 1927 at Waverley, New South Wales, third of four sons of Charles Renford, tram driver, and his wife Vera May, née Kennedy, both born in Sydney. Not long afterwards, Des’s eldest brother, Ronald, died of appendicitis, and for a time he was cared for by his aunt. He attended Wellington Street and Maroubra Bay Public schools, and then Cleveland Street Boys’ Intermediate High School, where he failed the Intermediate certificate. In 1937 he won the under-ten 55-yard swimming championship for Randwick-Coogee swimming club, and in 1941 he joined the Maroubra Surf Life Saving Club.

On 1 February 1945 Renford was mobilised for service in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve and trained as a sick berth attendant. After only four months (from September) at sea in the auxiliary minelayer HMAS Bungaree in the south-west Pacific, he was hospitalised in Sydney with malaria. During this time he renewed acquaintance with Irene Patricia (Patty) Anderson, who was serving in the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service. They married at St Canice’s Catholic Church, Elizabeth Bay, on 20 July 1946. Having transferred to the permanent navy, he joined the cruiser HMAS Hobart on 30 August. The ship arrived in Japan three weeks later, but he was immediately admitted to hospital with chronic sinus and middle ear infections, resulting in his evacuation to Sydney in November, and further hospitalisation. Following his discharge as physically unfit on 3 January 1947, he held a variety of jobs: at various times he worked as a butcher, barkeeper, salesman, foundry worker, manager of the rock and roll singer Johnny O’Keefe (his cousin), and starting-price bookmaker.

When Renford was forty, he became a marathon swimmer almost accidentally. He rashly accepted a challenge to race across Port Phillip Bay, without proper training. After thirty-seven kilometres he was plucked from the race almost unconscious. During his time in Frankston Hospital, he decided to swim the English Channel. Between 1970 and 1980 he swam the waterway nineteen times. He was the first Australian to swim the channel from Dover to Calais, and swam it more times than any other Australian in his lifetime. Although he wanted to be the first Australian swimmer to complete a double crossing, he failed on several occasions because of bad luck and weather. His tenth channel crossing was televised by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, with the resulting program, titled King of the Channel, winning a Logie award in 1977.

In 1977 Renford engaged in an epic international contest with the Englishman Kevin Murphy, a Fleet Street journalist who was twenty-two years younger. Murphy won the first leg in Sydney Harbour, while Renford triumphed in the second, a channel crossing. The final leg occurred in Loch Ness, when Renford lasted six hours and thirty-seven minutes in the near-freezing water. While Murphy held out longer, the contest was declared a draw. Renford also had a much-publicised rivalry with another Englishman, Mike Read, over who had swum the channel the most times, thus claiming the title of ‘King of the Channel.’ Renford held the honour from 1975 to 1979, but Read completed six crossings in 1979 to wrest it from him. Renford achieved three crossings in August 1980 to regain the title, whereupon he retired from channel swimming.

Marathon swimming was expensive: Renford’s costs included travel to Britain, accommodation, engaging a pilot to navigate him across the channel, and paying entrance fees. He later estimated that ten years of swimming the channel had cost him more than $120,000. It also gave him a purpose in life: he later reflected that before he took up the sport he had been ‘prone to nagging self-assessment’ and thought he ‘hadn’t achieved much’ (Renford with Heads 2000, 8). He drove himself to extraordinary lengths to achieve his goal of being the best in the world. When he attempted to swim from Newcastle to Sydney in 1981, in a shark cage mounted on buoyancy drums, a nor’easter blew up so that he was thrown out of the cage several times before it sank. Pulled from the sea by his supporter Barry Rodgers on a surfboard, he wanted to continue, telling Rodgers: ‘I’ll swim at the side of the boat.’ Rodgers replied: ‘Don’t be fucking stupid—you don’t know how big the seas are’ (Renford with Heads 2000, 169).

Renford welcomed controversy as it enhanced publicity for his sport. In 1973 he had raced Linda McGill, the first Australian to swim the English Channel, in a race across Moreton Bay, Brisbane, that was dubbed ‘the battle of the sexes.’ He led throughout, with McGill withdrawing due to an injured hand. A celebrity in his community, he was elected to Randwick Council in 1977 for one term. Among other honours, he was appointed MBE in 1976, earned a papal knighthood in 1990, and was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame in 1998. He joined the public speaking circuit and, with Ian Heads, wrote a book on his life titled Nothing Great Is Easy (1992). Able to buy part-ownership of a racehorse, he also—with his son Terry—bought a hotel in Bathurst.

Although Renford was a generous and gregarious man, his manager and friend John Devitt observed that he could also be ‘cantankerous, difficult and stubborn—and was often wrong’ (Renford with Heads 2000, foreword). After multiple heart attacks from 1985, Renford suffered a final one on 29 December 1999, while swimming at the Heffron Park Pool, Randwick; he died the next day, survived by his wife and their three sons, Terry, Desmond, and Michael. His requiem Mass took place at St Mary’s Cathedral, and he was buried in Randwick general cemetery, Coogee. Although he had been baptised Anglican, he had become Catholic—his mother’s religion—in 1961; he often recited the rosary to help his concentration during marathon swims. The Heffron Park Pool was renamed the Des Renford Aquatic Centre in his honour in 2000. Renford’s son Michael swam the English Channel in 2007, and his grandson Christian did so in 2024.