Gertrude Ederle sponsored by a newspaper, the "Baltimore Post", which tried to create a rivalry between her and Ederle in the weeks spent training off the French coast. In addition to Cannon, several other swimmers, including two other American women – Clarabelle Barrett and Amelia Gade Corson – were training in England with the goal of becoming the first woman to swim the Channel. Barrett and Cannon were unsuccessful but three weeks after Ederle's feat, Corson crossed in a time that was 50 minutes slower than Ederle. For her second attempt at the Channel, Ederle had an entourage aboard the tug (the
Gertrude Ansell every other woman would do the same." She was sentenced to six months' imprisonment but this time she was not released and, because she continued her hunger and thirst strike, she was forcibly fed. She was finally released on 10 August, under an amnesty for suffragette prisoners at the outbreak of the First World War. She had been forcibly fed 236 times. One of her brothers was the barrister J. E. Ansell, who later published a history of the family name. It was to his children that Gertrude Ansell left her small estate. She died at the General Hospital in