From Cabin 'Boys' to Captains E-Book

Jo Stanley

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 552

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Traditionally, a woman's place was never on stormy seas. But actually thousands of dancers, purserettes, doctors, stewardesses, captains and conductresses have taken to the waves on everything from floating palaces to battered windjammers. Their daring story is barely known, even by today's seawomen. From before the 1750s, women fancying an oceangoing life had either to disguise themselves as cabin 'boys' or acquire a co-operative husband with a ship attached. Early pioneers faced superstition and discrimination in the briny 'monasteries'. Today women captain cruise ships as big as towns and work at the highest level in the global maritime industry. This comprehensive exploration looks at the Merchant Navy, comparing it to the Royal Navy in which Wrens only began sailing in 1991. Using a wide variety of interviews and sources, Jo Stanley vividly reveals the incredible journey across time taken by these brave and lively women salts.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated, with respect, to all women seafarers, and in particular to Akhona Geveza, Victoria Drummond, Edith Sowerbutts, my great aunt May Quinn and Lucy Wallace.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many women seafarers shared their stories, at length and with generosity, and enabled me to better understand their successors. There is no bank of stories ready made and accessible for any internet browser, no archive full of paper life stories, no countrywide network of offices full of hordes of video tapes awaiting the researcher of seafarers’ lives. The real live seafarers themselves have to speak. They did, generously, and thereby provided the bricks for this book. As the mortar-supplier and the architect I’d be unable to act without them. Thank you. They include Judie Abbott, Ellie Ablett, Mary Anne Adams, Julia Ashton, Kathy Atkinson, Nina Baker, Jackie Banyard, Leslie Barnes, Hilary Beedham, Sally Bell, Joy Bennington, Denise Bonner, Freddy Bosworth, Una Brown, Arleen Cameron, Barbara Campbell, Carol Cole, Lesley Cox, Sara Coxon, Jill Coulthard, Sarah Craig, Sara Coxon, Carole Critchley, Clare Cupples, Sue Diamond, Rachel Dunn, Caroline Eglin, Becky Elliott, Marjorie Ellison, Linda Forbes, ‘Nancy Foxley’, Sadie Grist, Susan Godding, Anita Hellewell, Robina Herrington, Muriel Hocking, Gloria Hudson, Lisa Jenkins, Fazilette Khan, Rose King, Inge Klein Thorhauge, Val Lawson, Lynn Littler, Christine McLean, Victoria McMaster, Margaret Mace, Ann Madsen, Tina Maude, Frances Milroy, Sabine Machado-Rettau, Maud McKibbin, Louise Merrill, Frances Milroy, Tina Mobius, Susie Newborn, Margaret Newcombe, Jane Nilsen, Caroline Norman, ‘Belle Norris’, Irene Organ, ‘Alice Pickles’, ‘Caroline Pritchard’, Margaret Rennison, Pat Rickard, Joan Roberts, Maureen Ryan, Fiona Rush, Denise St Aubyn Hubbard, Lesley Schoonderbeek, Rosemary Selman, ‘Madeline Shurrocks’, Linda Simkins, Sue Spence, Freda Taylor, Sally Theakston, Sue Thomson, ‘Sally Townsend’, Carol Peacock, Jessica Tyson, Ros Vallings, Debbie Wilson, Katy Womersley and her colleagues at Clyde Marine, Jane Yelland, Jean Washington, Barbara Wells, Sue Wood, Eve Wright and Sha Wylie (quotation marks indicate a pseudonym).The brevity of their stories in these pages in no way reflects the extent of their helpfulness; they infuse the book in all sorts of subtle and huge ways.

I also thank the seawomen I’ve been interviewing since the mid-1980s. Many enriched this book. Those directly quoted include Margaret Arthur, ‘Merry Black’, Dianne Drummond, Edwina Parcell, Norah Rivers and Marie Smith.

Some of the modern seawomen who helped me with this specific book are now reluctant to be named, or even anonymously quoted. I appreciate them very much, including for what their reticence taught me.

Some seawomen have left written or spoken records that have been invaluable. I hope others will be inspired to follow suit, and put their accounts in archives. My thanks go to writers and story-givers such as Edith Sowerbutts, Joan Phelps and Ida Digweed for their efforts and for allowing public access to their stories. Relatedly, I thank the interviewers (especially those at Southampton’s former Oral Heritage Unit) for their good interviewing, and the Southampton City Archive for making the records available.

Many family historians have posted stories about women relatives on websites. These have enriched maritime historiography. So too have the websites where seafarers chat to each other relatively unguardedly about sea life (I’m sorry, but yes, I am listening). Thank you for posting.

I offer immeasurable thanks to all those women and men who linked me up with seawomen they knew, or who gave me background information. They include Colin Atkinson, Colleen Arulappu, Dave Baker, Colin Banyard, Mark Barton, John Butt, Tim Carter, Don Cockrill, Peter Collinge, Zak Coombs, Vera Corner Halligan, John Crosbie, Peter Cutmore, Godfrey Dykes, Pam Farmer, John Goddard, Henrietta Heald, Graham Hellewell, Martyn Hird, Bob Hone, Derek Ings, Terry Kavanagh, Alston Kennerley, Jan Larcombe, Natalie Lashley, Peter Lay, Stuart Le Fevre, Louise Miller, Tony Morris, John Mottram, Brian and Lisa Murray, Maurice Onslow, Bob Redmond, Denise and Martin Reed, Michael Robarts, Martin Robson, Albert Schoonderbeek, Tony Selman, Colman J. Shaughnessy, Sitling Tull, Debbie Snaishall, Bernard and Sally Stonehouse, David Sweet, Gary Hindmarch and Danielle Ronaldson at South Tyneside College, Southampton’s Retired Stewardesses’ group, Fred M. Walker, Derek Warmington, Brian White, Martin Wilcox, D.G.A. Williams, Willie Williamson, Tony Winder, Robert Wine, Kevin Winter, Mark and Keith Winterbottom, Stuart Wood. Of course, any mistakes are my responsibility, not theirs.

Relatives and friends of deceased seawomen have been invaluable in sharing pictures, documents and stories. Those who’ve kindly done a lot of searching in attics and grappling with scanners include Ros Balfour, Jan Buttifont, Jeremy Chandler-Browne and Susan Browne, Sue Freeman, Mrs Hobbes, Ian Hugh McAllister, Bob Proudlock, Edith and David Ross, Peter Smith-Keary, Cathy Spratlin, Frank and Heather Taylor, Lindsay and Bruce Urquhart and Susan Young.

Some hub people invited me to reunions or connected me to their retired seafarers’ newsletters and websites. They include Sue B. (who was almost my agent), John Butt, Pam Farmer, Robina Herrington, Janice Jefferies, Jill Jones, Peter Mayner, Brian Smith, John Squires, Graham Wallace, and several anonymous hosts.

Other writers on relevant subjects shared knowledge with astounding generosity. They include Ros Barker, David Davies, Joan Druett, Henrietta Heald, Terry Kavanagh, Sari Mäenpää, Rebecca Mancuso and Louise Miller. M.A. Fish kindly shared invaluable statistical work on the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS).

I would like to thank my family, who were Liverpool seafarers in both the Merchant and Royal Navies. Their legacy, partly interpreted by Vera Stanley’s lively curiosity about seafaring’s subjective meanings, was a cornerstone in envisaging this book.

For decades and all over the world my network of generous maritime historians made this encyclopedic foray possible. I especially thank Skip Fisher, Marcus Rediker and Greg Dening. I’ve been supported by being part of several intellectual communities. In the UK they include the institutions where I am Honorary Research Fellow: Lancaster University’s Centre for Mobilities Research and Hull University’s Maritime Historical Studies Centre. Belonging to the Women’s History Network and the oral history community has been crucial. I especially thank Joanna Bornat, Mary Chamberlain, Anna Davin and Sheila Jemima for helping shape my thoughts and for discussing methodological issues.

Professional archivists, librarians, press officers and statisticians who have helped me include Celia Saywell at the Association of Wrens, Ben Davis at the British Medical Association, Alice Marshall at the Department for Transport (DfT), Maureen Whatry and Sian Wilks at Liverpool University’s Special Collections Library; Mark Jackson at the Marine Society, Lloyds Register public relations staff including Anne Cowne; Lloyds List staff, including Nicola Good; Robert Merrylees at the Chamber of Shipping; Merseyside Maritime Archives and Records; Mike Demetriou, Kate Patfield and Richard Lavender at the Ministry of Defence (media offices); the Modern Record Centre at the University of Warwick, especially Carole Jones; Jane Owens and Vanessa O’Sullivan at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency; Glenys Jackson at the Merchant Navy Training Board; The National Archive; staff at the National Museum of the Royal Navy especially Victoria Ingles; Caird Library staff at the National Maritime Museum; headquarters staff at Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers’ Union, including Jessica Webb and Dan Crimes; Jo Smith at Southampton City Archive; Morag Bremner and Margaret Urquhart at Tain and District Museum; and Lesley Hall and colleagues at the Wellcome Institute. Special thanks go to Nautilus International staff, including Andrew Linington, Sarah Robinson, Debbie Cavaldoro, June Cattini, the Women’s Forum team headed by Maryanne Adams, Lisa Carr, the equalities officer, as well as Carole Jamieson and Steve. They’ve been supportive, efficient and hospitable.

It’s always a pleasure to write a book that includes many pictures, because it means I can create a mini exhibition to delight readers. For their part in this I thank Val Mitchell, John Blakeborough and Ron and Joan Druett. Hazel Sedel kindly sponsored an expensive photograph. Over the years many have kindly loaned or given me pictures for my Eve Tar Archive. Others have kindly waived or reduced the permissions charges. Thank you. You have enriched this book.

Grants from the Society of Authors and the Society for Nautical Research enabled me to meet some interviewees, not just phone them.

I also thank my successive volunteer helpers: Emma Watson, Harjot Hayer, Teresa Stenson and Ailish Woollett. Hazel Seidel and Janet Perham helped the cutting-back process and provided some wise arguments. I appreciate the help of everyone at the publishers including my commissioning editor Amy Rigg, copy-editor Jessica Cuthbert-Smith, Glad Stockdale on the design team and Helen Bradbury, who did the marketing.

Regrettably this book will probably have minor errors; because it breaks new ground there are few predecessors to check against. Books covering long periods – 250 years in this case – are also more prone to errors. Everything that can be checked has been. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and should be notified of any corrections. They can then be incorporated in future editions of this book. The interpretations in this book are my own, although based soundly on many seafarers’ versions of what happened and what they recall. People’s inclusion in the book does not mean that they agree with me or my interpretation.

Even if some people’s help isn’t visible in this book, it will enrich later articles and conference papers. Nothing is wasted. Some people rightly belong to more than one category in these acknowledgements, but to save space I have only included them once. They know they are valued for multiple kindnesses. Thank you all for helping me build this book.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction

  1    Britain’s Forgotten Women Seafarers

  2    Different Times, Different Possibilities

THE VESSEL

  3    From ‘Boy’ to Captain: Working on Deck

  4    From Sail-Shifter to Chief Engineer: Propelling the Ship

THE HOTEL

  5    From Steward’s Wife to Chief Housekeeper: Doing the Domestic Tasks

  6    From Loblolly Boy to Surgeon: Caring for Health

  7    From Convict Matron to Cruise Director: Supporting the Passengers

  8    From Stenographer to Administration Director: Doing the Ship’s Business Afloat

  9    From Candy Girl to Retail Expert: Working in Shops and Hairdressing Salons

10    Women in Many Roles

11    Conclusion: Progress and Prognosis

Appendix 1    A Note on the Thinking Behind this Book

Appendix 2    Chronology of Selected Landmarks in Women’s Seafaring History

Appendix 3    Women Seafarers Who Dressed as Men

Appendix 4    Between Navies

Appendix 5    Ships as ‘She’

Glossary

Further Reading

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

Anne Jane Thornton and Barbara Campbell, pictured on the cover, illustrate this book’s theme: real and inspiring seafaring women from 1750 who wanted to find adventure at sea and explored themselves and the world. Anne Jane Thornton (1817–77) was one of those pioneers who had to don breeches and pretend to be a boy in order to sail; others chose to be married to a helpful man with a handy ship attached. Today a modern captain, Barbara Campbell, is one of scores who worked their way up and command ships in their own right.

In the next pages of this chapter you will find an explanation of some basics, including the historical roles of women at sea as ‘boys’, ‘wives’, ‘maids’ and finally as equal human beings; the different types of ship and services in which they worked; and the difficulties they faced and still face as women in a traditionally male world. Chapter 2 gives a period-by-period summary of what seawomen faced, over all.

Each of the next chapters then shows what happens in a cluster of jobs. I start with the traditionally male jobs of making the vessel work. Chapter 3 describes the breakthrough of women in deck (sometimes called ‘navigation’) work. Chapter 4 details the impressive story of their boilersuited counterparts who toiled in the ship’s ‘magical mystery garden’, the engine room, and in other technical jobs at sea.

Subsequent chapters deal with the women who worked with passengers in the hotel side of ships. Chapter 5 explores housekeeping work. Chapter 6 reveals women’s roles in health care. Chapter 7 explains how the role of emigrant matron became transformed into the authoritative conductress and eventually segued into entertainment director. Chapter 8 describes the progress of women from stenographers to hotel managers. Chapter 9 introduces the story of hairdressers, beauty therapists and shop staff. Chapter 10 tackles the many other jobs that women have done at sea – some new, some now extinct. My conclusion attempts to draw together this story of puzzlingly patchy progress and examine how seafaring changed women’s sense of their potential to traverse the world, metaphorically as well as literally. Finally, the Appendices offer more detailed information for those interested in going further.

Technical work: Junior Radio Officer Fazilette Khan adjusting the radio dials on her first ship in 1984. (Fazilette Khan)

Linda Grant De Pauw, an early historian of women seafarers, argues, ‘The history of seafaring women is just beginning; the golden age of seafaring, in which gender is irrelevant, is still in the future.’1 (By gender she means imposed social and cultural differences rather than biological ones. Babies are born one sex, usually. But gender is thrust upon them, starting with girls wearing pink clothes and boys being given toy trains, not dolls.) These pages show the mixed progress of British women on the waves as they – maybe – move forward towards that golden time, venturing into the most challenging of all the elements: not air with its high spaces, clouds and winds; not land with its hills and bogs and modern brigands; but the beautiful, vast, challenging sea.

I write about these women because I can’t stop wanting to understand them and I want to share my wonder at these pioneers of masculine spaces. For me it was important to grasp that the foreign parts women seafarers visited were not only physical countries but the very vessels on which they sailed. My own fascination with these floating worlds is that they’re places that are both like and unlike land. Shipboard life holds up a mirror to life on shore and helps us wonder at what we human beings do when we are away, unsecured, out there. Physical mobility is a wonderful gift: it helps us shift our thinking, our sense of all the possibilities life can offer. Working in long-haul sea and air transport is the main way that people without fortunes travel and manage to be repeatedly moving to places where they learn how very much ‘normality’ varies. I hope you will share my interest in this seafaring life that can inspire women to see they can do far more with their lives than they imagined. It can be a quest. Seafaring can mean far more than simply being the seaborne counterpart of a truck driver or flight attendant.

When my research for this book began, three women had recently been made captains of major cruise ships. Initially I celebrated that that such extensive progress had been made. After four decades of struggle, these intrepid seawomen were being allowed to do the job they wanted, regardless of their gender. This seemed to be justice. For once, it appeared that progress was linear; good initiatives cumulatively produced desirable outcomes. I wonder if the UK Navy will have women admirals before these pages finally become foxed. But recent years of researching into post-1970s developments have shown me that women’s progress in all sorts of non-traditional work at sea is more complex. It’s often a process of one step forwards, one step back. That’s not to mention several steps around and a couple of daring seven-league-boot-style leaps over an extra range of obstacles.

What starts a woman on a seafaring path? One single novel, read by chance in girlhood, inspired many such girls to seek seafaring careers, despite difficult odds. For some it was Treasure Island or Swallows and Amazons: they imagined themselves as a young Jim Hawkins or Nancy Blackett. Sometimes it was a book about male sailors; sometimes it was about a woman breaking through in a job on land, like Body Shop founder Anita Roddick. The TV series The Love Boat shaped many people’s ideas about what women did on ships. I myself probably developed the interest that led to my writing Bold in her Breeches: Woman Pirates Across the Ages in part because years earlier, I’d seen a TV repeat of Jean Peters swashbuckling in the 1951 movie Anne of the Indies.

But the dearth of practical how-to information meant girls and women often didn’t know they could go to sea. Or they went to sea without helpful knowledge of its gendered realities and history. Unnecessary difficulties added to their struggle. Far too many didn’t know they could be anything other than a stewardess, a housemaid afloat. I hope that reading this book about pioneers will inspire many young women to take to the sea, survive the problems and discover that they can be in life, literally as well as metaphorically, commanders of their chosen vessels.

This book is dedicated to someone who was defeated by the odds, and whose pivotal story reveals how hard seafaring life can be, especially if race as well as gender and age aren’t in your favour. Cadet Akhona Geveza disappeared from her ship, British-registered Safmarine Kariba, in 2010. Her body was found drifting in the sea off the Croatian coast three days later.2 It’s still not clear whether she committed suicide or was murdered, but her loss exposed a seminal situation. It opened up international concern about the extent of shipboard sexual bullying, including rape. Sex and power struggles are at the heart of too many of the traumatised sea lives I’ve heard about. If a book is to be truthful this must be said. And my biggest struggle was to know how much this was true of the past too, or if it became far worse after the 1970s. Unfortunately, as US Navy captain Edward L. Beach acknowledged, although a large part of the battle for seawomen to be treated respectfully has now been won, ‘sex and sexual customs as well as the primordial sexual urge are at the bedrock of what still must be done.’3

We don’t know how rare Akhona’s situation was, because recent and current seafaring women tell such differing stories about how painfully riven by gendered ideas (and consequent abusive behaviour) a modern ship can be. Today many keep silent for safety and their careers. Several stipulated they would only speak to me off the record. While women of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s referred with odd lightness to flirtation and gallantry and the occasional man’s ‘silliness’, their modern peers dare to use the words ‘systemic sexism’ and are clear that harassment is an institutional matter to be tackled.

Other women have chosen not to speak to me at all, because they think gender is not a germane issue. They want to be seen as seafarers, not women seafarers. This book, to them, is discriminatory. A few modern seawomen imagine that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a woman or a man these days. However, most gender-aware people think it’s necessary to be discerning about the continuing destructive power of categories such as ‘women’ and ‘men’ in the UK’s still-stratified society.

Elizabeth Louise Williams, who blogs about railways, is definite that the idea of women working in and on transport is, remarkably, still a challenge for trolls who derogate her: ‘There is an astonishing[ly] brusque, domineering, arrogant, dismissive and sexist culture which seems to revel in bullying women.’4

Just as women, especially in technical jobs, are rare in transport, so are published accounts of their experience. This sparseness is paralleled by the scarcity of histories of women as bus, coach and lorry drivers, and of women airline pilots. So it’s a pleasure to be augmenting published knowledge of all the hyper-mobile women who dared, and who deserve so much respect for their efforts.

FINDING NEEDLE SHARDS IN ODD HAYSTACKS

Women’s work at sea is a story that’s hard to piece together because so many women were unnoticed, written out of the record, or not counted. For example, when I emailed Bob Proudlock, the widower of Wynne O’Mara, one of the first female ship’s surgeons sailing in the 1950s, he said she had no idea she’d been preceded four decades earlier by Dr Elizabeth MacBean Ross. Similarly, although it was in the 1920s that Victoria Drummond became the very first marine engineer, it took another sixty years for her biography to emerge. Then the National Union of the Marine, Aviation and Shipping Transport Officers (NUMAST), the Merchant Navy officers’ union, started bringing to notice all the other women who’d made major steps in the maritime world. They set up the Victoria Drummond Award to mark their achievements.

When I tell people I write about gender and the sea they ask if I’m one of the admirable group of pioneers. A Wren? A stewardess? A would-be pirate? ‘Are you that first New Zealand woman captain, Joanne Stanley?’5 No, I’m the great-niece of May Quinn, a stewardess on ships sailing to West Africa. One of my great-grandfathers, Reg Stanley, was a captain. Another, Peter Quinn, was a ship’s barber sailing to Japan and Canada. But from the 1980s I became one of the pioneers in studying these seafaring women who took the helm, wielded the duster or slashed with their cutlasses.

I’ve made two trips as a guest lecturer on cruises (yes, you can call that work). And, dedicated to finding out the realities for women like Anne Jane Thornton, last year I climbed the mainmast as guest crew of a sail training brig, the Stavros S. Niarchos. But, the more I look at this subject, the more it’s clear that sailing is not my cup of happy tea, nor my heady cocktail. Ships are enclosed and restrictive institutions, even though seafarers are some of the most freewheeling human beings who ever did a job. I can’t easily fit into that life.

Instead I look for and listen to those who try it, with my voice recorder and curiosity switched on. Oral history is often the best way of securing knowledge of women’s pasts. Finding documentary evidence of what it was like for women at sea has been as challenging (and therefore satisfying) as finding needles in haystacks. Seasoned private eyes like V.I. Warshawski would have demanded extra fees, bourbon and a lie-down to compensate for the difficulty.

Looking through these rich pages now, you will see so many female presences that you might forget how rare women are in the formal records of maritime history. It’s a barren land with an almost total absence of women, except for one-line clues in crew agreements (mass contracts for a ship’s voyage) at the Maritime History Archive in Newfoundland and in a few company archives at the National Maritime Museum. Logicians have a maxim: ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ They cite the classic story that the finding of a single black swan disproved the previous idea that all swans must be white. Similarly, I have found much absence of evidence of women ever doing this or that job at sea. But that is not evidence that women were not there, sailing.

The evidence is scarce mainly because records of seafarers’ lives, whatever their gender, at the lower end of the scale don’t exist. Anyone below captain was seen as negligible. The problem has been compounded by space-poor shipping companies now junking their old ledgers and filing cabinets. Also women in general have tended to assume their lives are not of interest, therefore not worth writing. Publishers have previously perpetuated this erroneous idea (hence the low ratio of women’s to men’s autobiographies). Additionally Rosalin Barker, who has studied life under sail in the Whitby area, believes that the lack of extant memoirs by the many waterborne wives and daughters of masters is the result of the poorer ones being so overworked as ship’s cooks that they had no time to write, or were not literate. If women did record their story, perhaps only in letters, their descendants didn’t necessarily think to deposit the documents in public archives, which were imagined to be repositories only for grand folks’ records. Wartime bombing also destroyed several city archives.

Still, I found fragments of ‘needles’, sometimes several whole needles, in many places. And I also realised it was useful to see what they lay next to, the direction they faced and how buried they were in the haystack. For example, campaigner Charlotte O’Brien’s 1881 claims that women emigrants were not looked after on ship was initially denigrated. She really had got her facts awry, yet the government inquiry which ensued after the hullabaloo brought forward a by-product: good evidence about women crew.6

We can’t know if the thousands of tiny and diverse fragments, ‘the needles’, are representative or atypical. And so no one alive today can really be certain that this account of women’s history is anything like what the women themselves experienced and saw with such different eyes to those of today’s women. That’s why well-imagined novels about the subject, such as Linda Collison’s Surgeon’s Mate, are so fascinating.

I am proud to be part of a ‘community’ of writers such as Joan Druett, Suzanne Stark, Linda Grant de Pauw and Minghua Zhao,7 who have written about women at sea, often focusing on one of the navies, on particular roles and on particular periods. The study of gender in seafaring is sometimes implicit in such books. Other scholars, such as Valerie Burton, Lisa Norling and Margaret S. Creighton, explore gender in relation to seafarers.8 I try to write about women and gender.

In these pages you will find a largely ‘British’ story, meaning that the book refers to women and ships of the British archipelago, including Ireland. The definition is tricky today because so many ships are seen as of the UK, yet formally registered (it’s called ‘flagged’) in places such as Panama. This book is certainly the first women’s maritime history that tries to combine the past and the present, Merchant Navy and Royal Navy. Many of the women you will read about were in commercial shipping, that is, the Merchant Navy, because women rarely went to sea with the Royal Navy before 1991. Although a few books about women sailing in specific periods exist, this book is the first to attempt to give an overview of 250 years in both navies, and from a UK perspective. I have created what seems to be the best-fitting narrative of how women broke through into non-traditional jobs on ships. Many experts on the very different haystacks have discussed the puzzling needles with me. They, and I, have done our utmost to deduce carefully and hypothesise soundly, and we look forward to future writers disagreeing.

I welcome any insights that you, as a reader and perhaps a seafarer, may give. Do feel free to contact me via the publisher, so that the next broad history book about women at sea is an even richer and better-informed one.

I have deliberately written this book in popular, not academic, style in order to make the story of women maritime pioneers as widely available as possible. But every chapter was researched and initially written in a very scholarly way. The pile of discarded data on my cutting-room floor is high. Each chapter was actually at least eighty pages long, and many will become, instead, academic papers and blog entries. I have also created ‘documents’ for posterity by recording interviews with women. When I could I collected their photographs. These documents will be deposited in appropriate maritime museum archives.

If, after reading this book, you want to learn more, please use the bibliography at the back. Information about my articles and next books as they are published will be on my blog at genderedseas.blogspot.com and on my website, www.jostanley.biz. Please feel free to send me your story of seafaring.

As you read on, I hope the stories you find here will delight and inspire you. They are about a workforce that deserves huge respect. I feel honoured to bring these women’s lives to the attention they have long deserved.

Jo Stanley PhD

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society,

West Yorkshire, 2016

Notes

1    Linda Grant De Pauw, Seafaring Women, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1982, p. 212.

2    Reports appeared in the South African Times, 17, 19 and 24 July 2010. See www.timeslive.co.za, accessed 19 March 2014. Jo Stanley, ‘Sexual Harrassment at Sea – & Akhona’s Tragedy’, Gender, Sex, Race, Class – and the Sea, www.genderedseas.blogspot.com, 23 July 2010.

3    Foreword, in Jean Ebbert and Mary-Beth Hall, Crossed Currents: Navy Women in a Century of Change, Brassey’s , Washington DC, 2007, p. x.

4    Elizabeth Louise Williams, rail.co.uk, 30 March 2012, www.rail.co.uk/blog/rail-women/, accessed 13 July 2014. I am grateful to Helena Wojtczak for pointing this out to me.

5    Wong Joon San, ‘Joanne All Set to Take the Helm’, South China Morning Post, 3 March 1993, www.scmp.com/article/20478/joanne-all-set-take-helm, accessed 2 April 2014.

6Emigrant Accommodation on Board Atlantic Steam Ships. Report with regard to the accommodation and treatment of emigrants on board Atlantic steam ships, and minute thereupon, 1881 [C.2995] LXXXII, 93.

7    Joan Druett, Petticoat Whalers: Whaling Wives at Sea 1820–1920, Collins, Auckland, New Zealand, 1991; She was a Sister Sailor:The whaling journals of Mary Brewster, 1845–1851, Mystic, Connecticut, 1992; Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains Under Sail, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998; She Captains: Heroines and Hellions of the Sea, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1999. Suzanne J. Stark, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1996. Linda Grant De Pauw, Seafaring Women, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1982. Minghua Zhao, ‘Globalisation and Women’s Employment on Cruise ships’, Maritime Review, 2001.

8    For example, Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (eds), Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic world, 1700–1920, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore and London, 1996; Valerie Burton, ‘“Whoring, Drinking Sailors”: Reflections on Masculinity from the Labour History of Nineteenth-Century British Shipping’, in Margaret Walsh (ed.), Working Out Gender: Perspectives from Labour History, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1999, pp. 84–91.

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BRITAIN’S FORGOTTENWOMEN SEAFARERS

Challenging huge Japanese whalers, Susi Newborn’s brief time life at sea was sometimes as exciting as that of women pirates 250 years earlier. For mobile women, wanting to explore their own selves as well as the world, seafaring can be the ultimate in adventuring and acting with agency. In the 1970s this Greenpeace activist described herself as leaping accurately – glad of her T’ai Chi training – into one of the Rainbow Warrior’s tiny fast Zodiacs (rigid inflatable boats) ‘as it thrashes and jerks like a rodeo yearling’. Barefoot and braced for bullets, she sailed at her targets in the name of peace and protecting the environment.

Green Campaigner Afloat

Susi Newborn (b. 1950s) became a founding director of Greenpeace and crewed on Greenpeace’s iconic campaigning vessel Rainbow Warrior in the 1970s and early 1980s. She is from an Argentinean diplomatic family but was born in London. Like most people on board Greenpeace ships, she had many roles, from Zodiac crew to deckhand to cook. Today she is a filmmaker and the campaigns co-ordinator for Oxfam New Zealand. She is still on the water every day, taking the Fullers’ ferry Quick Cat (many of whose crew are women) from Waiheke Island, where she now lives.1

Susi Newborn on the Rainbow Warrior in 1978 during the campaign against Icelandic whaling. (David McTaggart, courtesy of Greenpeace, GP026C6)

Susi loved the challenge, and her daring was rather akin to that of the world’s most famous women pirates, Anne Bonney and Mary Read, who swashbuckled in the Spanish Main in the eighteenth century. Their sailing era ended in 1720, thirty years before the period covered by this book, but such female boucaniers whetted the appetite of potential seafaring women and influenced common ideas today of ‘lady tars’ on all the world’s seas. (‘Tar’ is short for tarpaulin, the bitumen-covered cloth garments that seafarers – so-called ‘knights of the tarpaulin’ – used to wear to repel water.)

Archetypal Pirates of the Past

Cork-born Anne Bonney (1698–1782) is probably the most famous woman pirate, and always linked to her cross-dressed counterpart, Londoner Mary Read (1691–1721). Now archetypal ‘piratesses’, these two adventure-seeking footloose women sailed on the pirate sloop Revenge in the 1710s. Anne was Captain Jack Rackham’s lover, later his wife. By contrast, Mary (whom she heterosexually fancied) was passing as a male crewmember. Both were able to succeed in this seafaring lifestyle because in their childhood relatives had disguised them as boys, as a way to make enough money to live on. This meant that they grew up bold and relatively unconstrained by ideas of normality. Anne gained her chance to sail because she was enterprising (ready for a new life, free of a feckless husband), in the right place at the right time (Nassau waterfront bars where buccaneers recruited) and attractive to a captain who had the power to keep a partner on board. Mary gained her opportunities because she was already skilled at passing as a soldier.2 Their stories reached the public through popular potted, excitingly written biographies, especially Captain Johnson’s General History of the Pyrates. It’s hard to disentangle myth and fact; they may have sailed for several years. Their careers ended when they were arrested and brought to trial. They escaped hanging by swearing they were pregnant (an unborn child could not be punished for the sins of its mother).3

Susi Newborn of Greenpeace, too, was outside the law. And she learned firsthand about opportunistic sea tactics, violent enemy ships, storms, long-haired, hoop-earringed shipmates – and tedium. The reason she, a woman without seafaring skills and without that crucial seafarer’s passport, the British Seaman’s Discharge Book, could even be on board was that she was effectively one of the owners. As a volunteer on a small ship, she could freewheel between tasks. She even did the dirty work of cleaning bilges; as the smallest person aboard, she could fit into the narrowest spaces.

Susi was unusual, like Anne and Mary. Almost all the thousands of British women working at sea since 1750 were essentially domestic employees. Like my Great-Aunty May going to and fro, to and fro, between Liverpool and West Africa, these stewardesses travelled regular routes, making passengers’ beds as routinely as any chambermaid might. Their floating hotels initially seemed more exciting, and were certainly more challenging socially and geographically, than below-stairs life in a hotel or grand house. They had few choices and no stashes of Spanish doubloons.

‘Yes, I’m a woman.’ 1720s Pirate Mary Read reveals herself to a vanquished enemy. (Image from P. Christian, Historie des Pirates et Corsaires’, 1852, engraving by A. Catel from a sketch by Alexandre Debelle)

But many elements of Susi’s experience were typical of those early women’s sea lives too. They saw the world. They seized opportunities. They defied restrictive views of a woman’s place. And they survived months on the Atlantic, Pacific, South China Seas and beyond, with male crewmembers who thought a ship no place for a lady. Unlike Anne or Mary, these women were ‘out’ as women, meaning they were visibly female (which brought them into contact with the ship’s gendered hierarchy). Ironically, they gained their freedom to rove because of the limited and confining contemporary idea that lady passengers must be waited upon by females, oceangoing maids.

Two other categories of women sailed too. There were those who got opportunities because they were relatives of the master (as captains are called). An accommodating husband who wanted a travelling wife, and had the authority to take her with him, was a ticket to ride. US wives in the nineteenth century seemed to travel far more readily their British counterparts.

A further category includes women like Anne Jane Thornton, who disguised themselves as men and did men’s jobs. They belonged to the world of the vessel, the technical machine, rather than the neat bedroom. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that it was possible to really combine being an out woman (meaning not pretending to be a man) and sailing before the mast,4 as a deck officer or engineer undisguised.

As of the 2010s, the UK’s 3,000 Merchant Navy women were 13 per cent of the total 22,830 UK seagoing workforce. Worldwide, women made up a smaller proportion, about 2 per cent of the total maritime labour force. Seawomen in the early twenty-first century are mainly on cruise ships, in hotel-type jobs. In the UK’s case, about two thirds of all its women seafarers are on such ships, not cargo vessels.5 Women are still mainly found doing these lowly paid ‘chambermaiding’ jobs on ships.

‘The end of life as we know it.’ Jim Haynes illustrates the typical reactions that faced a woman, Sally Fodie, when she first ventured on the bridge of a ship. (Captain Sally Fodie, Waitemata Ferry Tales, Ferry Boat Publishers, Auckland, 1995)

WIFE, ‘BOY’, ‘MAID’ AND EQUAL HUMAN BEING

These women seafarers were working far from home, in a field marked ‘men only’, or even ‘ruggedly masculine men only’. Yet they managed to break through into operating the vessel and taking the decisions at the very top, rising from the lowly domestic servicing of the ship’s hotel operations. It is a complex story, but the first women who went to sea for a living did so in the following three ways.

Sea Wives

First were the women who were ‘out’ as women: the seagoing wives of officers. The ‘plucky’ wife of Martinique-bound Warrant Officer William Richardson was one. William went to say goodbye to her one summer in the 1780s but ‘found that she had fixed her mind to go with me, as it was reported the voyage would be short and the ship would return … [However] in parting from her parents [she] almost fainted … but was still determined to go with me.’6 In the King’s (Royal) Navy wives sailed the oceans, including into battle. They did support work in crises from Africa to China, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from the East Indies to Central America. Invaluable auxiliaries and undervalued support workers, they were a bit like the sutlers and vivandières (sometimes called ‘camp followers’) who looked after armies on the battlefields of France and in the US Civil War by selling services and goods including hot food and nurture such as laundering. The Navy expected husbands to share food with wives; it didn’t victual or pay them (except for some rare pensions). Naval men sometimes struggled to control this group, which wasn’t organised under the same naval disciplinary codes. Horatio Nelson, England’s inspirational naval leader, said that women on ship ‘always will do as they please. Orders are not for them – at least I never yet knew one who obeyed.’7

Whaling wife Eliza Underwood was one of at most a thousand British wives on merchant ships, in the period from 1750 to roughly 1900, whose ships were sometimes called ‘hen frigates’ (interestingly, implying that the rest were cocks; today all-male RN ships are called stag ships). US and Antipodean wives avidly sailed. It’s their accounts, popularised by New Zealand historian Joan Druett,8 that today help us imagine the far less recorded situation of British wives. We certainly know wives had borrowed status, and they often took their offspring with them: ‘The captain and his wife and children were members of the royal family of a tiny but very wealthy, kingdom,’ explains historian Linda Grant De Pauw.9 Some spouses wanted each other’s company regularly, despite the privations. Cosying up in the best space on ship was cheaper than maintaining an additional home on land. Historians of whaling wives argue that when these women sailed they were not necessarily choosing a ‘feminist’ or ‘boyish’ adventure. Rather it was often a case of ‘whither thou goest I will go’, dutifully and no matter what the hardship.

Married to the Captain

Eliza Underwood (b. 1794, probably at Lewes, in Sussex) got her opportunity to sail because she married Samuel, who was already master of the London whaleship Kingsdown when they met. She had no children to tie her to home, and at that period captains’ wives were increasingly sailing on whalers (at least in the US). By 1829–31 Eliza was sailing to the Sulu-Sulawesi Seas whaling grounds and visiting many islands in Indonesia. Her journal reveals her isolation, tolerance (of the seamen’s limited domestic skills, for example: ‘they would make sad charwomen’) and remarkable tenderness towards her irate, seemingly mentally ill, husband. Tales of encounters with Muslims and exotic ports mingle with domestic rumblings: ‘He does not much attend to woman’s knowledge,’ she remarked, but she didn’t crow when her weather predictions proved better than his, yet again. And she was always concerned about his gout. She enjoyed collecting – and assessing the value of – rare shells, which she would later sell on in London.10

On very small ships wives got their chance to sail because they were useful. As auxiliary cooks and mates they supported the family business, when and how they could, particularly with informal nursing, laundering and bookkeeping. Unwaged and undervalued, their situation was similar to that of wives in family-owned corner shops who were incorporated into ‘his work’ for ‘our survival’. Often they were seen only as assistants, or utilisable in crises, but in fact some were consistently doing non-peripheral tasks and sustained the entire family’s economy.

Situations varied, especially by the late nineteenth century. But certainly on larger merchant ships of the mid-nineteenth century captains’ wives offered emotional support to their stressed and socially isolated husbands. They negotiated a tricky path vis-à-vis agency (meaning their ability to act, to engage with the ship’s social structure). Orcadian Elizabeth Young (later Linklater), sailing with her mother, Sarah, on the family’s windjammer in the 1880s, observed:

Women on board a merchant vessel, other than passengers, were there on sufferance. They had no part in the working of the ship, and as far as he [Father] was concerned they were non-existent. It behoved them to keep their thoughts to themselves, and conceal their feelings, and show what interest they could assume in the welfare of Her Majesty the Ship.11

Families went to sea. Artist’s impression by Ron Druett. (Ron and Joan Druett)

Wives on these merchant ‘her majesties’ were far lesser queens. Only carefully and sometimes did they exert the limited authority which was conferred by their connection with the master. (On naval vessels wives’ majesty was even less.) Sailing on merchant ships, the lonely ‘aristocrats’ in their antimacassar-and-harmonium-furnished floating parlours were usually only allowed to speak to higher-level crew. They were not integrated members of the hierarchical ship’s company. Indeed, crew could resent master’s wives who ‘missioneered’, although lonely boys sometimes quietly appreciated a bit of maternal coddling.

From the 1950s big shipping companies started allowing other wives to sail, as a way to retain skilled male workers such as engineers. By the early twenty-first century husbands of women officers, and same-sex partners too, could accompany them. Seagoing wives’ stories appear only briefly in this book, which focuses on waged workers at sea, but their few accounts do illustrate what life was like for women on board.

The ‘Boys’ Aloft

If you weren’t a master’s wife then the best way to secure a job at sea was to crop your hair, don your brother’s breeks, learn to chew baccy and sweet-talk the land girls. Women in the second category of seafarers, those pretending to be men or boys, were usually much more ‘hands-on’ than wives, not least because the usual position – cabin boy – was a role for minors who were expected to be Jacks of all (lowly) trades. Disguising yourself as a male was essential when ships were men-only; it got you the job and you were relatively safe from heterosexual attention. There were probably several hundred more cross-dressed women seafarers than the forty-nine listed in Appendix 3, but they remain unknown because they were never found out or because their stories didn’t reach the newspapers and law courts.

Disguised as boys and men, these mould-breaking ‘cabin boys’ or ‘lady sailors’ are significant because they prove that manual seafaring tasks were not necessarily beyond women. The cabin boy’s role was something of a cross between today’s steward and a general-purpose rating (GPR). They did ‘masculine’ work on deck, including handling the sails and the hated task of cleaning out ship’s pig sties as well as some relatively unskilled domestic work such as serving food. Their status varied. It’s thought that some officers and older crew abused them pitiably as runts while others ‘mothered’ and protected them. Rowlandson’s famous 1799 aquatint is the classic image of a cabin boy, clearly not a macho and empowered figure. Derring-do accounts of women-‘boys’ don’t mention the distasteful tasks nor that some ‘boys’, like real boys, were targets of sexual bullying.

The archetypal cabin boy. This really is a boy, even though he looks so girlish as he mops the deck. Etching by Thomas Rowlandson, 1799. (National Maritime Museum)

Female ‘boys’ began sailing well before 1750. And some women were still getting away with it in the late nineteenth century. Subterfuge like this was easier to pull off in the Merchant Service than in the more strictly controlled Royal Navy. Generally the popular reports about them are upbeat. Admiration for their daring was easy because they were exceptional, not a thorough challenge to a segregated career. Cabin ‘boys’ adapted a rolling gait; learned to swear, spit, sozzle and be lion-hearted stalwarts. In other words, they manned up, yet retained prized ‘feminine’ characteristics such as cleanliness and obedience.

Cunard steward Thomas (alias Mary Anne) Walker’s 1860s story provides a bridge between the second category of seagoing women (those passing as ‘boys’) and the third category of openly female ‘maids’; I’ll call her ‘Thomas’ and ‘he’ because that became her own preferred identity.

Thomas could be seen as someone taking gap year after gap year. Like many such ‘boys’, he lived an uprooted life estranged from his family. For me, Thomas is the most real of the ‘boys’: he cleaned engines at London’s King’s Cross, a station that I use. He sang his autobiography to a tune still played on the radio, ‘Champagne Charlie’. I walk past the Hackney building in which he sought rehab, the Elizabeth Fry Refuge for women prisoners seeking reformation; Thomas’s successors seeking a post-jail haven now go to the Elizabeth Fry Probation Hostel in Reading.12

Little is known about Thomas Walker’s two years of stewarding on Cunarders. He would have been mainly crossing the Atlantic, taking emigrants to the US. Stewards were notorious chancers involved in opportunistic fleecing of ‘bloods’ (passengers). They worked ferociously hard and slept in over-intimate proximity in cramped dormitories. A balladier celebrated ‘The She-He Barman of Southwark’:13

She Tom had been a sailor

Two years upon the main …

Three years she doffed the petticoats

And put the trousers on …

For years she plough’d the ocean

As steward of a ship,

She used to make the captain’s bed,

Drink grog and make his flip.

She could go aloft so manfully,

This female sailor Jack,

But if she slept with a messmate,

Why, of course, she turned her back.

From others’ reports it sounds as if Thomas might have, had the term then been in use, described himself as an intersex person, meaning someone then called an hermaphrodite. Certainly when he was in jail (for swindling his boss) all the warders assumed he was a man, not least because his fiancée Rosina visited him. The stories of Thomas give us clues about the other cross-dressed women on ships. They may well have been on every part of the gender spectrum, from heterosexual women who camouflaged simply to get a job usually barred to women, through transvestites loving the part-time masquerade, to people who deeply felt they were actually male and trapped in the wrong body. For all of them, being involved in itinerant and marginalised worlds such as seafaring or bar work was a way to live a less trammelled life and find communities where social norms were less rigorously imposed.

Cunard Steward Thomas Walker

Thomas/Mary Anne Walker (c. 1842–after 1880) was the daughter of a pub licensee in Westminster, where she began showing ‘a fondness for wearing male attire … and ultimately she took to the entire paraphernalia of dress adopted by the male sex’.14 Leaving home in his late teens, he did a range of casual portering jobs, then went to sea for several years. Unlike many recorded ‘boys’, his disguise was never detected on ship. Denouement only occurred after he’d worked ashore for a year or two, in 1867, when he was arrested and charged for minor embezzling.

Observer of working women Arthur Munby wrote:

there she stood alone in the dock conspicuous and central: and to the outward eyes she looked … [a] brawny young man of four or five & twenty. A broad bronzed face, fullcheeked & highboned; well-cut straight nose, sharp eyes, determined mouth: the dark hair, short as a man’s, and evidently worn in man’s fashion for a long time past. Her head was bare, and so was her strong bull neck; about the way she wore nothing but the blue sailor’s shirt, with the sleeves partly rolled up. Standing there with broad shoulders squared and stout arms folded on the dock rail, she seemed just such a fellow as one may see drawing beer at an alehouse or lounging about any seaport town; and it was almost impossible to believe that she was not a man … poor Thomas, who only said ‘nothing , Sir’ in a low tone when asked if she had ought to say, was committed for trial … [in] the crowd … one saw that she was of average woman’s height and no more.15

Women workers were rare. Three women, at least one of whom is a stewardess, and the chief steward’s staff crossing to Australia on the emigrant ship Rippingham Grange, c. 1900. (National Maritime Museum, N40880)

‘Maids’: ‘Out’ Women in Aprons

The third and main category of women seafarers are stewardesses, who like Thomas Walker did ‘women’s work’, but were ‘out’ as women, looking like nurses or maids in their pinafores. Like pirate Mary Read, they were paid workers in their own right. They were the breakthrough women whom shipping lines employed precisely because it was thought seemly that female passengers were looked after by women. Although stewardesses were formally positioned as more subordinate than the captain’s wife initially, they too tended to be married to a man on board, the steward. Such women were seen as ‘assisting’ their steward husbands rather than being the independent employees that they were by the 1830s. The earliest ones were somewhat like the disguised ‘boys’ in that they might occasionally have heaved the ropes in a gale. Everyone pulled together for the ship’s safety.

A hundred years later stewardess Denise Meldrum was one of the many women doing such domestic and emotional labour (that subtle labour described by Arlie Russell Hochschild, where transport workers, particularly airline cabin crew, help to soothe travellers and assist them to manage a range of emotions).16 When we talked in her later life, Denise definitely did not see herself as being ‘in service’, like a lowly housemaid. Most of the interwar stewardesses I listened to were proud of their agency in a job as combined hostess, nurse and experienced guide for novice travellers. They frequently summed it up as ‘We were there to look after the ladies’, whom they saw as needy visitors rather than temporary bosses.

Denise Meldrum: Doing Women’s Work

Denise (1911–2003) sailed on Canadian Pacific ships such as the Duchess of York, Duchess of Richmond and Duchess of Bedford from 1928 to 1937. A Liverpool-based stewardess, her career was mainly spent on the Liverpool–Canada route, to Montreal and St John’s, Newfoundland, as well as West Indies cruises and whoopee cruises from New York to Bermuda. Denise got her opportunity because she was the daughter of a company employee, a catering writer on ship. After his death, the company offered Denise’s mother Elsie work as a stewardess, which she did from 1926 to 1936. When Denise was 17 the shipping company encouraged her to lie about her age (stewardesses were supposed to be 25) and she sailed as nursery stewardess and then stewardess. Some stewardesses joined for the adventure or the money, but many did this job by default and happenstance. Movingly, Denise said she sailed mainly because ‘I was miserable on land so I thought I might as well be miserable at sea.’ She married twice, both times to seafarers, and had two children; her daughter Denise Donnelly became a ship’s nurse (see Chapter 6).17

A dynasty of women who went to sea, sometimes pragmatically. Denise Meldrum (1929), centre; her mother Elise Meldrum in 1927, and daughter Denise Donnelly, later Reed, c. 1978. (Denise Reed)

Equal Human Beings

In the 1970s, the fourth category of women seafarer began. These new seafarers achieved a breakthrough: they did deck and engine work even though they were known to be women. Women officers were so unusual that initially crew called them ‘Sir’ because they didn’t know what else to call them (the correct address is ‘Ma’am’). At the time such women seemed to herald a non-gendered future. However, for some traditional male seafarers such ‘interlopers’ on the ship’s navigating bridge were an unbearable intrusion, even a disaster and traumatic revolution.

Twenty-first-century women are increasingly taking the path to the role of captain, via positions as senior officers, in both the Merchant and Royal Navies. Unlike captains’ wives like Eliza Underwood, they have authority in their own right, although to some seafarers from other cultures a woman in authority seems an anomaly and a contradiction in terms. But captains such as Inger Klein Thorhauge, master of the QueenElizabeth in 2010, are deeply and genuinely respected. No woman deck officer could now be regarded as a junior partner who’s ‘just allowed to help out a bit when we’re short of men’.

Inger: Captaining a Major Cruise Ship

Captain Inger Klein Thorhauge, formerly Klein Olsen (b. 1967) in 2010 became the first woman to command a Cunard vessel. She began by sailing as a stewardess in the late 1980s, as a way of travelling: ‘I hate cleaning,’ she says. When a friend told her about cadetships, she let the new career ‘begin to happen’. ‘Why not? At least I’m not cleaning!’ She attributes her rise not to her background in a seafaring community (the Faroe Islands) but to her liking for thoroughness. Sponsored by DFDS/Scandinavian Seaways, she went to pre-sea training school at Kogtved Søfartsskole, followed by three years on a range of ships from ro-ros (roll-on, roll-off cargo vessels) and ferries to a dredger. Although she’d had no dreams of becoming a captain, at the end of her three years she took her master’s certificate at Svendborg Navigational School, then rose to become second officer, first officer, chief officer and staff captain. Her ships included the Vistafjord/Caronia, Seabourn Sun, Seabourn Pride and Queen Victoria. Then in 2010 she became the first woman captain in Cunard’s 170-year history; she is now captain of the Queen Elizabeth, and a role model for aspiring women. Inger says, ‘It’s important to show it’s possible for women to become captains. The door is now open.’ When not travelling she lives with her husband in Denmark.18

Captain Inger Klein Thorhauge commands her ship. (Carnival Group)

THIS SHIP OF MINE

If you’re a seafarer your ship is your home, your workplace and your badge of honour. Many felt and still feel acute pride at being associated with vast icons of imperial majesty and modernity, such as the interwar Queen Mary. While some women seafarers savoured high style, surroundings like Hollywood sets and brief encounters with illustrious passengers, others simply delighted in the sea, even on plainer ships. Maritime life just ‘got to’ some women – as it did to men. Poet John Masefield, that famous fan of the sea, even relished a ‘dirty coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack’. 19 The women felt the same about their vessels, be they chic or ugly. Sara Miller (b. 1958), one of the 1970s intake of deck officers and still a recreational sailor today, explains the pull:

The best thing about the sea is the ships. I love their creaks and groans, the smell of rust and oil, the flaked paint. I like the way seafarers just get on with their lives. One of my favourite times was always when we let-go the last tug and were heading out to sea once more. I have always loved a horizon of 360 degrees of blue, grey, green, white flecked ocean topped by an ever changing sky … my years sailing on a small boat were even better as you are so close to the sea that the blowing of dolphins at night make you jump, as do flying fish hitting you! I miss the night watches most of all, especially if they included stars and sunrise.20

Sara Miller teaching a cadet how to take a sun sight with a sextant on the Galconda, 1983, pre-satellite navigation. (Sara Miller)

Many seafaring women love – and they don’t use the word lightly – their different kinds of sailings. Cook Maud McKibbin felt lucky to be on a cargo ship tramping (sailing to any obscure port where cargo needed to be picked up and delivered) in the 1950s. ‘That was the beauty of … [tramping]. It was so exciting to not know where you were going next.’ Closeness to nature delighted them, especially in tropical seas under clear skies. When Maud’s shipmate Freda Price was en route to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on the Langleeclyde in the 1950s:

I loved … [taking] our bench cushions from our cabins and … sleep all night outside. An awning was put up for us. It was lovely to lay there and see the stars and the ship gently moving, the engines just a dull thud … and the sea sounds all around you. Sometimes … I’d walk up to the bows and see the dolphins … leaping in front of the bows. They were all outlined in phosphorus … like thousands of jewels falling all over the place.21

British women work or have worked on ships which vary enormously in their power, cargo, size, ownerships, routes, smartness and seaworthiness. They range from prestigious battleships to tiny colliers, from liners to small tramp steamers, from barges sailing coastally to chic Scandinavian ferries, from state-of-the-art cruise ships with on-board surf simulators to fisheries survey ships, from heritage brigs to family tugs. There are pazzy (passenger) boats, windjammers, very large crude carriers (VLCCs), Post-Panamaxes (ships that are too vast to go through the 180-foot wide Panama Canal), and many dodgy rust-buckets.

Today the categories of merchant ship are, in descending order of proportion of women personnel aboard: Ferry and Passenger; Deep Sea Liner/Bulk; Offshore Support (taking food and equipment out to oil rigs); Short Sea Bulk; and Royal Fleet Auxiliary (which supports Royal Navy vessels, particularly with fuel). Specialist or scientific survey ships are especially popular with women because they can join in oceanographic research and work with female scientists.

Britain’s two navies, Royal and Merchant, offer two different sets of opportunities for women. Their flags are a key symbol – they sail under the White Ensign and the Red Ensign (‘Duster’) respectively. Each has their different purpose and corresponding shipboard culture and organisation. It is useful to remember that women associated with the Royal Navy only worked at sea after 1991, apart from a handful of early but significant exceptions. Like the men, they are called sailors. Women were employed at sea in the Merchant Service from at least the 1820s, and are officially called seamen.