Chinese women working with UK ships in 20C

British maritime labour history is largely a history of white and BAME men, and possibly 1 per cent white women. 
Women of other backgrounds, including Chinese, Yemeni, and African women are almost entirely absent. This is a brief introduction to Chinese women's relationship with sea mobility and British seafaring.

Adam Williams, his Chinese amah, and mother Anne at one of Hong Kong's many bays, 1956.
Chinese women accessed the sea and mobility because of their work. 
Image courtesy of https://www.adam-williams.net/2013/05/17/adams-five-generations-of-a-china-family/

Attitudes

Q. Why the absence of Chinese, South Asian, Afro-Caribbean and African-origin women working on ships? 
A. The answer is that shipping companies deliberately excluded such women, despite their potential for being very cheap labour indeed, as both female and non-white. It's not that such women didn't want to go to sea.

Despite extensive research in shipping company and National Union of Seamen archives I have not found any  records of such women. Nor have I found discussions about excluding/including them. Reluctantly, I have to conclude that in the UK in 20C there were no BAME seafaring women. it seems extraordinary. 

I've had a lot of conversations with seafarers. From that I understand that the two main reason for this racialised and gendered exclusion are likely to have been on these grounds: 

1. PASSENGER ATTITUDES. Bedroom stewardess was the main job open to women until the 1970s. Companies probably believed that BAME women wouldn't have been acceptable to white lady passengers in the intense intimacy of a cabin. 

Yet such an objection doesn't seem quite plausible. White European women living in countries such as Singapore, Shanghai, Malaya, and Hong Kong readily employed Chinese servants, especially amahs (children's nurses, even wet nurses) in their homes. 

So it may be that actually the reason for the exclusion is about  the need for stewarding staff - as warders -  to subtly wield authority, to be a female-oriented part of the hegemonic and gendered control of passenger-inmates. 

Bedroom stewardesses and stewardesses had to, to some extent, regulate the passengers in their patch - for example ensuring they didn't request too much room service, and that they attended lifeboat drills.

It may be that shipping lines thought elite white passengers wouldn't accept such regulatory pressure from 'lower' status BAME women.

Also there were not enough Chinese or Indian female passengers to justify employers taking on women servants of the same nationality to look after them during the voyage. Cash-strapped shipping companies only do what they have to do, and employ specific staff only when it pays to do so. 

(This 'appropriateness' type of justification was later used in 1970s legal battles for equality. The concept of 'Genuine Occupational Qualification' was articulated, famously in a case where a gentlemen's tailoring firm remained men-only on the grounds that women should not measure male customers for trousers.) 

  

2.  UNION. The seafarers' union is likely to have opposed BAME women, on the grounds that white men, white women and BAME men - in that order - were more entitled to any available jobs. 

Presences

The main non-British women I have found working on ships have been:

 A. Europeans. Portuguese matrons or auxiliary nurses for migrants, pre WW2. They were employed by the shipping lines, usually Royal Mail and Blue Funnel, whose ships took some passengers of Portuguese background to Brazil. a former Portuguese colony. 

Crew agreements (registers of personnel aboard each voyage) show some of these women workers have British surnames. This suggests that local shipping agents in Portugal - say Lisbon - would have sought bilingual women, probably Portuguese women who were the wives and daughters of British men living there. 

Children were an increasing presence on ships after WW2. Their nannies, including ayahs and amahs, attended as part of their working day. Image from Tim Roberts' story, http://www.archhistory.co.uk/taca/memsmisc.html

B. Ayahs. 阿媽. Children's nurses - especially from India, Ceylon and non-mainland China. They were employed by the traveller's family, not by the shipping line. They therefore travelled as passengers although they worked all the voyage long. This included the usual nursing, dressing, playing with their charges, plus attending at children's sittings for meals on ship, such as the tea party pictured above.

There are records of Indian ayahs aboard, but few of Chinese or Japanese amahs. 

(For a brief summary of amahs' role on land see 'A Lifetime of Labour: Cantonese Amahs In Singapore', 

http://www.nlb.gov.sg/biblioasia/2017/10/02/a-lifetime-of-labour-cantonese-amahs-in-singapore/

C. Gash Jennies, in port. These Chinese women in British colonies worked briefly on British ships in ports such as Hong Kong. 

Affectionate, if patronising, bonds existed between officers and well-organised teams of women who routinely serviced moored ships, doing women's work. 

The most famous 'Jenny', who died aged 92 in 2009, led  a gang who: 
took ''over the domestic economy and husbandry of each vessel. They washed and ironed, cleaned ship, chipped rust and painted, attended as buoy jumpers, and, dressed in their best, waited with grace and charm upon guests at cocktail parties.

Captains and first lieutenants would find fresh flowers in their cabins and newspapers delivered daily ...[jenny earned] by selling soft drinks to the ships' companies and scavenging every item of scrap and gash which could be found on board.' 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military.../naval.../Jenny.html

Could have been in...

1. Galleys and laundries. It never happened. But it wouldn't have been too abnormal for Chinese women living in the UK,  to be employed in jobs that didn't involve passenger contact, such as laundry and galley work. 

It would have been especially 'natural' for employers to take on those women who were part of British culture because of their family connections with British seamen, as in the Portuguese example above. 

(By the early 20th century Hong Kong-origin Cantonese men were routinely employed in the laundries of some shipping lines.)  And British women to do such work were so hard to get that in the 1930s shipping companies took on criminalised young women from penal institutions. 

One reason for women not being taken on for such backstage work may have been cultural resistance from the community. Chinese people in the UK possibly did not think it desirable for Chinese women work away from home for months on ships. Their shipboard position would have been lowly, and perhaps morally compromised.  

Amah holding Linga in HongKong, c 1919.
Image via https://gwulo.com/atom/28110

2. Ship's nurseries. From the 1930s major passenger ships had nurseries, staffed by one nursery stewardess. 

From the 1950s a hierarchy emerged, as was traditional in grand houses: a high-status 'children's nurse' supervised the nursery stewardess, who had a more maid-like status, for example cleaning up spills. 

It would not have been odd if Chinese women did this work on ship. In fact they were never employed in this capacity on UK ships. There was no transition from land-based amah to professional travelling amah, as there was with Indian ayahs.

Male counterparts

The UK history of Chinese men working on ships is as yet barely known, although this is now being addressed by some Heritage Lottery Funded projects. And perhaps men's history, in this case, is anyway not very helpful to understanding Chinese women's maritime history. It was so different.  
Any researcher wanting to go further in exploring men might try these sources, for starters:

A. 1915 crew agreements on line show brief details of Chinese seafaring men in WW1: https://1915crewlists.rmg.co.uk/ 

To search you look up the seafarer by surname. So, for example, when I inserted the common name 'Ching' I found a firemen, carpenter, and steward. See https://1915crewlists.rmg.co.uk/crew-member?crew_member_search%5BlastName%5D=ching&page=5

B. One of the recent digitally-available interviews with/about Chinese seafaring men includes this: Yew Chang (1919-2012). Pictured. From Hong Kong, he was a merchant seafarer from c1938 to the early 1950s. Initially in the engine room then a cook, he worked for the Netherlands company Shell, later Royal Dutch Shell group. Many Chinese seafarers in the UK worked for Blue Funnel.

In war BAME men were among those seafarers who were held in camps abroad. In WW2. Yew Chang was 'detained' in Calcutta for two years, and 'sent to repair damaged aircraft'.  
The British Chinese Heritage Centre has made available two interviews with him:  http://www.britishchineseheritagecentre.org.uk/interviews/seafaring/item/mr-yew-chang and http://www.britishchineseheritagecentre.org.uk/interviews/seafaring/item/mr-yew-chang-2.

C.You could try searching the records of the London School of  Nautical Cookery, currently held in the National Maritime Museum Archive, London, at SAH/63.They may include Chinese men, because cooking was one of the jobs Chinese men did on ships, especailly when Chinese food became more popular in the UK. https://collections.rmg.co.uk/archive/objects/469748.html

I recently looked through to find references to women of any ethnicity. The few female applicants were usually told there was no point in training, as no shipping company would take on women cooks.

NOTE

I am grateful to Sha Zhou for inspiring this blog entry. Sha is at King's College, London, and looking for the history of amahs on ships as part of her Ph.D work on The Life Experience of Chinese Female Migrants in Britain after 1945.

Chinese women's seafaring: a history

Wafu Yang, China's first women marine engineer

This is a very brief edited extract from Pengfei Zhang’s and Minghua Zhao’s chapter, 'Chinese Women Seafarers: Past, Present and Prospect'. The full version is in Global Maritime Women: Global Leadership, Editors: Momoko Kitada, Erin Williams, and Lisa Loloma Froholdt, Springer, 2015, www.springer.com/gb/book/9783662453841.I extracted and edited the words below with their kind permission.

Chinese women seafarers in the last six decades, including women cadets in Shanghai Maritime University (SMU) are the focus of their study.

1950s and 70s.
After the founding of the communist China in 1949, the policy expressed in Chairman Mao’s strongly egalitarian slogan, ‘Women hold half the sky’ led to women being employed in traditionally male-dominated industries.
In the 1950s, women were actively recruited to maritime schools. They were trained as seafarers, primarily to sail ships on inland waters, then on ocean-going vessels. In the 1960s and 1970s, women seafarers were sailing on Yangzi River.
The world was excited to see the Fengtao, the world’s first women-officers-only Chinese cargo ship trading in international waters in 1974.

Some were considered as ‘heroines’. They included:
• Qingfen Kong, the first-ever captain in China’s ocean shipping (pictured below)
• Yafu Wang, the first, and the only, female chief marine engineer in China, who later gained a high-ranking post in the shipping industry (pictured above)

1980s and 90s
However, these women seafarers were few and their careers brief. With the promotion of market forces in the 1980s and 1990s, gender equality received less attention than before.
At the same time, demand for seafarers declined when shipping companies developed new technology and shed ‘surplus’ seafarers.
It became pointless to encourage women to take part in seafaring. Also the ‘strategy’ of placing women on board ships had not been successful. Less than half stayed long at sea.
The majority of them had to give up the career, primarily because of marriage and family.
China had 75-plus maritime education and training institutions with an annual capacity of over 30,000 cadets. But none were willing to enrol female students.
By contrast, the dramatic development of port facilities and the increasing number of vessels calling at Chinese ports led to pressure on the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) in many ports. There were shortages of telephone operators to coordinate the arrival and departure of international ship.
'Many people considered that women would be most suitable to perform … [such] duties … Compared with the stiff and harsh orders from a man, a female voice may inspire different feelings for seafarers… seafarers are more likely to follow the instructions from the VTS call centre,’ thought a senior lecturer at SMU in an interview with Pengfei Zhang.
But VTS operators need to have the background of nautical studies. They had to train.

2000-2013
So times changed. In September 2000 Shanghai Maritime University (SMU)announced that it would start to recruit females, on a tailored programme. The Women Seafarers Project had made a historic breakthrough.
Thirty female students were enrolled. They studied in ten mixed classes, to acclaim by national media.
In the subsequent fourteen years 356 female students have been trained there. But the SMU continues to be the only training institution for women seafarers.
Women only do nautical studies. Marine engineering is seen as too hard. Men outnumber women by over ten to one.

Jieying Xie, first woman deck officer of scientific research ship Xue Long.

In 2001 Minghua Zhao interviewed the then-senior manager of SMU, who made clear that desire for international prestige coloured women’s acceptance:
‘I must mention another reason for us to decide to recruit women cadets. Some two or three years ago, we attended maritime events organised by the IMO [International Maritime Organisation] in Japan and in the Philippines. In both, they showcased their women cadets.
‘They looked really smart and beautiful, really outstanding… We must catch up so that we can also showcase our women seafarersat the future IMO events.’
As of January 2014, 255 women had graduated, a completion rate of 72 per cent. Despite the high hopes only six have actually been engaged in the seafaring profession.
Others found land-based jobs as pilots, Port State Control inspectors, ship agents, ship brokers, freight forwarders government agencies, port facilities etc.

Zhengrong Li, the first woman pilot

Even those who applied for posts as VTS operators have seldom succeeded. The problem is that only people who pass the national civil service examination can apply. It’s extremely competitive. Just two females have become VTS operators in Zhenjiang port.
And the six women seafarers are all employees in the SMU, not in shipping companies. As lecturers they have work on board regularly, but that is just to maintain and renew their certificates. They often only work on training ships.
Similar to the ‘heroines’ in the 1960s/1970s, some of them have been ‘drafted’ to perform duties primarily for national prestige. For instance, two were on the well-known scientific research ship Xue Long (Snow Dragon) (pictured below, Sino Ship News.com). They navigated through the Antarctic and Arctic. These expeditions make them very famous in China.
An instructor of SMU explained to Pengfei Zhang in 2013, ‘the majority of them [women graduates] have to participate in professions which are not relevant to maritime. Accordingly, the nautical knowledge they have studied would become totally useless in their daily work ….[it has] been suggested [that we] cancel the WSP programme.’

In the same year another lecturer in SMU said
‘Every year we would visit many shipping companies …Unfortunately, the result is always disappointing. The shipping companies seldom reject our request directly, because [they] want to take in more male graduates from us. However, they always let us wait until the girls give up their hope and find other land-based alternatives.’

Why are shipping companies unwilling to recruit women seafarers?
1. There are sufficient male seafarers.
2. Women are seen as increasing costs. Shipping companies are legally required to supply separate sleeping rooms and bathrooms, and women-specific materials and supplies such as sanitary towels and family planning pills.
3. The number of qualified women seafarers is too small for shipping companies to recruit competent women seafarers regularly as a normal practice.

Besides, in the eye of many ship owners and shipping managers, said a senior crewing manager in an interview by Pengfei Zhang,‘Women seafarers would bring about extra troubles for crew management on board… The management of [an] all-male-crew is much easier than to handle a mixed-gender crew ...
‘We do not know what may happen if a women is working on board among a group of male seafarers. We have heard some incidents in some other shipping companies which were associated with women seafarers on board. We do not want to make same mistakes.’
Chinese cadet officer Wang Chung-Hai, proceeding in 2008 despite the problems, on the YM Orchid. Picture by M Crozet, copyright ILO.

Indeed, shipping companies expressed concerns as they believe that ‘women seafarers at sea sometimes may also cause troubles and inconveniences to other male seafarers.’
They reported, ‘(W)hen the crew members are male only, the relationship between crew members are relatively pure and simple. The relations may change significantly when a woman join the group.’
A thirty-six-year-old third engineer, who worked with a Singapore female second officer, complained,
‘Before the lady joined us, everything on board was fine and peaceful.However, after her coming, many things changed, and troubles occurred.

'For example, all crew shared the same laundry room. We normally put the washed clothes on the clothes lines in the laundry room with a heating facility.
‘However, the lady always put her underwear together with ours. Many colleagues reported that they felt nervous and uncomfortable about that.
Furthermore, we could no longer strip to the waist in the common rooms.
‘In addition, afterwards two senior officers were jealous of each other because of the lady. Therefore, the matter was reported to the crewing manager as an incident, and she was called back to the company immediately.’

**
Women seafarers’ difficulties in gaining acceptance exist despite the 1992 Law on Protection of Women’s Rights; Chinese Labour Law, 1995; and Chinese Employment Promotion Law, 2008.
No legislation explicitly rules against women’s participation in seafaring. However, a number of regulations intended to protect women’s rights and interests exist. In practice, they tend to deter many employers from recruiting females.
There is, therefore, much to improve in the Chinese legal system to enable and empower women’s participation in shipping and seafaring in China.

**