D-Day’s first women to sail June 1944: exploring questions

It's the 80th D-Day anniversary on June 6. And it's important to recognise that women were initially and deliberately excluded from this major maritime operation. It involved 156,000 allied troops, an unknown number of merchant seafarers, and less than a handful of women at first.

Timeline of first women to sail to France after D-Day 1944
6/7 June overnight: Journalist Martha Gellhorn (36) (stowaway) and 6 US nurses, un-named. On the hospital ship Prague from a south coast port to Omaha beach.
11 June: Joy Taverner, QA nurse (22). She and her colleagues had to first wait 3 days on an LST  (landing ship tank) in the Solent
11/12 June overnight Princess Mary’s Royal Air Force Nursing Service sisters, part of No. 50 Mobile Field Hospital. Iris ‘Fluff’ Ogilvie (nee Jones, later Bower) (29) (pictured)  and Mollie Giles, sailed on HMS LST 180  from Gosport to Juno beach, to found a  field hospital. 

The captain gave up his cabin (with ensuite lavatory, for them). Men were hostile to women's presence. This was obliquely expressed by one commanding officer who warned ‘We can’t cater for you to have toilet facilities on your own.”
19 June: Matron Sally Wade and group of QAIMNSs arrived on HMS Duke of Lancaster

August: Six Wrens went over. They included WRNS Petty Officer telephonist Ena Howes (25) , who was Admiral Ramsay’s telephonist
September: FANYs, including driver Monica E Littleboy, went with motor ambulances, by landing craft
Date unclear: ATS went across to run mobile canteens

MARTHA'S STORY
War correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s story of her D-Day+1  landing in France, on June 6 1944 reveals five interesting truths as well as raising  at least two fascinating questions about women on wartime ships. Martha (1908-1998) was a leading US  writer and is one of my heroes.

TRUTHS
1.DIVERSITY. Actually D-Day was not a totally male military business. 

On the evening of June 6/7 the woman who was to become one of the most female journalists of WW2 stowed away on the Prague, a Great Eastern Railways Harwich to Hoek Van Holland ferry that been converted into Hospital Carrier number 61. 

Her cover was the six US nurses also on board. Good at sweet-talking her way into situations, Martha pretended she was going to interview the sisters for a magazine. You can read the story of what she said she really did in the 29 choppy hours to Normandy and back at ‘Martha Gellhorn, D-day: 60 years on; Second world war’, Guardian, 28 May 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/28/secondworldwar.features116.
2. WOMEN.  She was one of the first seven women in the D-day invasion. British nurses were only allowed to go several days later.
3. UNCHALLENGED. The presence of this civilian female with no right to be there was oddly unquestioned. Reasons for that include:

• she too was American, so she fitted in 

• she was a pretty, plausible, personable blonde

• as a Bryn Mawr girl and seasoned journalist she had agency and confidence  

• her dad and brother were medics so she knew the hospital staff's cultured

• on the confused ships nobody understood enough to challenge her

• she had already travelled so much that she was a ship-savvy able traveller and could fit in well. (From 13-27 May she’d sailed, precariously, as the only passenger on a convoyed Norwegian cargo ship from the US to Liverpool; it carried dynamite, forbad booze, and had no lifeboats. She read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, enjoyed iceberg sightings, and, sighting the English coast in the 4am dark felt ‘such a feeling of wild happiness.’)

4. HANDY. As someone who could speak French and German she was useful for translating in communications between European casualties and US medics. Also she distributed cigarettes, emptied urinals, and worked with cabin boys creating corned beef sandwiches.
5.  DESPITE SEXISM. She achieved this feat in the teeth of official opposition and ‘curious condescension’ towards women journalists excluding women from this key moment in WW2, and despite the opposition of her own husband, writer Ernest Hemingway.

Her double whammy success was:

• to get there anyway

• to actually land in France, on Omaha beach, trumping her husband who was confined to watching from a landing craft out at sea.

 

QUESTIONS
1.  Lasting impact.  What effect did this 29-hour voyage have on Martha’s feelings about the war, and women’s place in it? She was to go on to do so much more, especially in Italy. She had already done so much
2.  Emotion handling. Martha was dealing with a hostile husband. The day after her arrival at Liverpool docks, ten days before D-Day,  she had just told Hemingway their four-year marriage was over. His cowardice, lies, bragging, selfishness and philandering had finished her. (They were to divorce in 1945.)War meant brought many relationship heartbreaks, some about masculinity and sex. With what other personal preoccupations did other women, like Martha, sail into the post D-Day events? In other words, we don’t participate in war as 100% single-minded warriors. So how do all our emotional preoccupations – especially sexual betrayal and anger about misogyny – effect our efficacy? Martha was private about this.

HOW TO EXPLORE FURTHER

READ. Read her novels, collected letters, and reportage, plus biographies. A good starting point is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Gellhorn

VISIT. You might like to visit the exterior of Martha’s flat at 72 Cadogan Square, London SW1X 0EA. (She didn’t write of her voyage there; she’d only moved there in the 1970s).  It has a blue plaque about her now. She had at least eleven homes in London, mainly Knightsbridge.

PASS BY: You can browse past her Welsh holiday home (1980-1994), Yew Tree Cottage, at Kilgwrrwg, near Chepstow, Monmouthshire, NP16 6DA. See purple plaque at gate. NB it’s a private residence, please respect that. The Purple Plaques campaign marks the achievements of remarkable women in Wales. https://purpleplaques.wales/

WATCH. See Philip Kaufman's  2012 movie, Hemingway & Gellhorn, https://play.google.com/store/movies/details?id=E16qPIuqr2I&pli=1. No, it doesn’t go into her voyages.

Big voyages and broad-minded Wrens. Dr Dorothy Hare's story.

Dorothy Hare c1955,
by FJH Whicker

March 15 1933 #onthisdayshe, Dr Dorothy Hare (1876-1967) sailed into New York as a passenger on one of the world’s stylish ships, the Aquitania.

Had she needed the doctor on board she's have seen a man; women did not become ships' doctors until over 20 years later. Female nurses, by contrast, had been working on passenger ships since c1900 . 

Sailing was nothing special to her, anyway, as a motility-minded person. Dorothy's sister had lived in Venice, her brother in Ceylon, her father in India. Dorothy herself might have settled overseas had she not been too busy pioneering a UK career in medicine.

She’d qualified in 1908 and worked in Malta for the RAMC since 1916, where only a tiny number of servicewomen had been posted.

And from 1918 she'd been the Women's Royal Naval Service Deputy Assistant Medical Director  (pictured, left, in WRNS uniform. Her gold stripes would have been interleaved with scarlet, for medics).  Dorothy was also a great frend of  the WRNS director. 

Dame Katharine Furse (right) was the  arts-minded, nurse-trained, former head of the VAD. Katharine prized her closeness with women friends. Her father was the pioneering investigator of homosexual love, John Addington Symonds. 

This may suggest that Dorothy and Katharine were part of a community where people felt able to live in gender-expansive, non-heteronormative ways. 

Celebrating

Dorothy Hare deserves to be celebrated because:

# She was a pioneering woman doctor

# She helped set up two interwar hostels for women with STDs (especially as  consequence of loosened wartime morality and high infection rates)  because such women were often cast out by families and rejected by homes for unmarried mothers. Her close friend, WRNS officer Berenice d'Avigdor,(1873-1937) set the hostels up with her.

# After retiring to Falmouth with her lifelong partner Dr Elizabeth 'Lesbia' Lepper in 1937 (left of Dorothy, in picture) and travelling the world for two years, she helped revive the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic for art students. 

Her hand-illustrated voyage journals delighted her friends. I would love to track them down. 

The women's voyages incuded sailing first class from Cape Town  on the Dunnottar Castle. 

The senior doctor in the WW2 WRNS, when it re-started, was a married mother.

See also

• https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/blog/unspoken-love-rcps-archive-four-womens-relationships
• https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/blog/which-never-can-be-suppressed-lgbtq-history-rcp-collections

.

 

Transitioning, the sea and surgery: Dr Michael Dillon

Ship's doctor Michael Dillon is a key person in LGBT+  maritime history. We especially recognise his significance at this point because LGBT+ History Month 2024 focuses on medicine. 

On Feb 28, Pride in Maritime Day, we can celebrate that it is 72 years since seafaring gained its first trans surgeon.

In Spring 1952 Michael (1915-62) put on his gold and scarlet braid. 'Never had I dreamed I would one day adorn myself in such glad rags!' 

At King George V Dock joined an (un-named) P&O coaster. That night 'I went to my bunk feeling intensely happy, This was the life for me. I would see the world and become a real sailor!'  

A Folkestone person, educated in Oxford, with aristocratic Irish roots, Michael Dillon was 37 and a mature student newly out of medical school. He saw himself as 'victim of a sex mix-up', which he had had rectified. No regrets. 

To use the language of LGBT+ history month 2024 he'd put himself # under the scope. He made medical knowledge work for him, despite its infancy.

 From 1940 he'd been taking testosterone. Between 1945 and 49 a total of 13 operations effected the transition.  He'd been living successfully as a man for three years, and owned to no fears of being misgendered on board. 

His fields - seafaring and medicine - were the two factors that helped Michael most with living daily with this change of identity. 

His professional context

All ships carrying over 12 passengers were legally required to carry a doctor. Michael was one of many on British merchant navy passenger or passenger-cargo vessels. Commercial flying was just beginning; migration to Australia was a popular way to evade post-war difficulty.

For six years from 1952-58 Michael, who was accepted as a male by shipmates and passengers, looked after the health of people travelling the world, be they troops, holidaymakers, Ten-Pound Poms, or Mecca pilgrims, whatever their sex and gender. 

At that time hardly any women were seafaring doctors. The are women, usually newly qualified, were mainly on educational cruises working with children. Treating male crew for STDs was a cause of blushes. Gender divisions and sexuality were serious matters.  

Some male seafarers seeking to transition took advantage of different regulations in other countries to transition there, or at least acquire hormone medication there. Usually they did not share that information with their ship's doctor, so there was little help sought if the process went awry.

Four aspects of maritime life that helped Michael deal with his loneliness and conflict included:

1.That at sea he could construct an emotional disconnected way of living that suited him 

2. That in ports he found friendliness at Missions to Seamen centres. worldwide. This included Durban, Antwerp, Kobe, Singapore, and Victoria Dock Road, London. There in Whitechapel  'The Lady Warden, the padre and his wife, the girls in the office were all friends, and sometimes I would serve in the canteen if they were short-staffed.' He also enjoyed the jolly country dancing  - more than evenings in ships' stately ballrooms.

3. He was very publicly outed by the Sunday Mirror and then by newspapers worldwide in 1958. Who had made the anonymous tip-off? Probably his ex-beloved, Roberta Cowell, whom he'd helped to transition. 

But on ship collegial support when outed came from:

• Michael's captain on the City of Bath when in Baltimore. He was 'kindly and symathetic .... keeping reporters off the ship and cabling the New York agents asking for a police guard for the gangway.' 
• The Second Officer. He poured me out a gin, raised his glass, and knocked mine and then said .... [he and the Sparks]  had discussed it at length over beer the night before ... [They] had come to the conclusion that I had had a rough deal ... since they had liked me before and I had not changed overnight they saw no reason for letting it make any difference.’ 
• The Third Mate. He was ysmpatheric because he'd suffered the stigma of a hare lip until operated on. Matily he joked that they would chuck an insistent press photographer overboard.

4. His employers, Ellerman's, supported him and didn't want him to tender his resignation, as he thought honorable. The chairman of Ellermans offered ‘his sympathy’. The company's medical superintendent, Michael's line manager, said he '“still hoped I would stay with the company and would back any arrangements I liked.”’

Mixed responses to transition revelations 

The maritime industry support that Michael got was not total. 

• The Mate sneered: he'd always known there was something fishy. The Sunday Express didn't publish Michael's 'defensive' letter criticising the paper for ruining a man's career just to titillate its readers for five minutes.  
• The captain turned hostile, presumably with the stress. Michael believed that the captain had two personalities, the kind one and the one 'which was always looking for some grounds for resentment.'   Michael's decision to leave the ship at Calcutta (which meant the ship was minus one of the two surgeons) meant the captain was 'almost permanently' in his aggrieved state, wrongly imagining that he (not the purser ) would be forced to deputise. 
• This rejection by a patriachal semi-ally made Michael's last weeks in the merchant service even more miserable.
• 'Deserted', Michael mourned the limited fraternal support, quoting this Rudyard Kipling verse to the press:

Nine hundred and ninety-nine can’t abide

The shame and mocking and laughter

But the thousandth man will stand by your side

To the gallows’ foot and after.

How did being in the medical profession help Michael?

1. It gave him (although he paid privately) the operations he wanted, and some support. Harold Gillies was his friendly surgeon

2. By training, at Trinity College, Dublin (pictured)  (1945-51) he gained a kind of acceptance, a sense of active agency as a change-maker for others.  For example, he risked prosecution by giving Roberta Cowell a then-illegal inguinal orchiechtomy (castration).

3. Becoming  a surgeon at sea  (rather than a GP on land) gave him a lifestyle that worked for him, as a loner and rover. He had valued status, some privacy, and companionship in temporary non-normative floating communities.  

What happened?

• 
  Michael felt forced to leave the sea after being outed. Indeed he exited Western life for a contemplative one as a Buddhist., transitioning spiritually He died four years later. 
• At least one ship's surgeon, who'd been in the Royal Navy, transitioned to female a little later. 
• Roberta Cowell carried on motor racing and creating a cultural climate where British men were inspired to transition. 
• Today there is no transitioned ship's doctor who is visible on the internet. This does not mean they don't exist. 

Learning more

• For a quick read, see my illustrated blog item, The first ship’s doctor to transition. Go to https://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-first-ships-doctor-to-transition.html.  
• You can also ask to book my Powerpoint talk about him.
• To understand Michael's own story more fully see  his autobigraphy: Michael Dillon/ Lobzang Jivaka, 'Out of the Ordinary', eds Jacob Lau and Cameron Partridge,  Fordham University Press, New York, 2017. https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823280391/out-of-the-ordinary/ 
• See also Roberta Cowell's stories, including on Wikipedia.