Flying Angel Xmas cheer: trans at Vindi, 1951.

Researching gender and the sea - at the moment through Mission to Seafarers archives - I keep finding the ways that this Protestant charity inadvertently helped people struggling with their gender and sexual idenity.  

So here's s heartwarming story of accidental queer support, one Christmas. It's complete with refreshments and kind ladies in jolly paper hats, but sadly not the usual little gifts that staff presented to residents at some mission centres all over the world. 

It happened at Sharpness, near Bristol, in 1951. April Ashley was the one of beneficiaries. Twenty years later this would-be deck boy became one of the most beautiful British super-models of her time. 

I have a soft spot for April because she was born in the same Scouse hospital as my dad, just yards from my Nana's Smithdown Road terrace. They, too, were poor. My nana, like April's mum, was a Catholic married to a Protestant in that divided city. Those were grim times and you learnt to be tough and to pretend to conform.

HEADING TO MANLINESS AT SEA 

April wrote 'At fifteen I... I was constantly taunted for being like a girl and yes, I wanted to be one .... I would have long conversations with God each night, asking Him to make me wake up .... whatever it was proper for me to be. Instinctively, without knowing why, we all knew me to be a misfit. 

'Therefore I decided to take myself in hand. It was no longer any good wanting to be a girl. I wanted to be a man .... I privately determined to go to sea ... It seemed to be one of the things that made you a man.'

She managed to get a posh introduction to a merchant navy training school near Glucester and 'On a damp November morning I found myself at Lime Street Station with a small brown cardboard suitcase, waiting for the train to Bristol and the cadet ship  S.S. Vindicatrix.'

I myself happen to know from Mission to Seafarers archives that, in the period just before April went there, the old premises on the River Severn were being partly  replaced because merchant navy labour demands were increasing. A permanent structure was being built (see pic above). Meanwhile the boys slept in Nissen huts.

LADY WARDENS' WARMTH

The Mission to Seafarers hut (unil 1952 the low black building near the centre of this picture) offered hospitality to the 'Vindi Boys', after lesssons.  It was a homely place without strict teachers around and was psychologically warm enough to stop boys absconding from the dark marshes and tough discipline. 

Miss Eileen M Kerr had been running it since 1943. The Lady Warden role was relatively new post opened up in the MtoS to about six authoritative ladies because of wartime shortages of men. 

In correspondence Miss Kerr makes clear she had a pastoral, almost almoner-like role, looking up train tables for home-bound boys, dressing light wounds and listening to problems. (Vindicatrix at that point seemed not to have a matron or women teachers.)  

She would have seen April come in hating the ill-fitting uniform  'I looked like a vaudeville act' and unused to social life. 

Each day of the six-week intensive course it was 'Up before dawn, ablutions, tidy the bed and locker, polish buttons and boots, clean the washroom, marching, breakfast, formal classes, lunch, potato-peeling and floor-scrubbing, physical jerks, dinner, lights out at 9 p.m. There was no time for conversation.

'The second three weeks were more romantic. We moved on to the S.S. Vindicatrix herself, a three-masted hulk slurping up and down alongside the River Severn, where one was taught the practical skills of seamanship. I dashed up the rigging, out along the yard, and shouted 'Land ahoy!' with both lungs.

'At night we fell asleep exhausted, soothed by the creaking of the ship and the sound of water. I loved it all, especially this new experience 'companionship', even when the others bragged about girls and I went peculiar inside ...

CHRISTMAS ABOARD

' Shore leave came at Christmas  ... those unable to afford the fare home were allowed to stay on board. It promised to be glum until an extravagant food parcel arrived from John and Edna. Included was a huge fruit cake. I cut myself a slice and passed the rest on. 

'In return, back came a hunk of haggis which I tasted for the first time and found not unpalatable. We shared everything, cracked jokes ...

'In the evening [we] ambled over to the Mission House where the tea ladies in flimsy paper hats made a sense of occasion out of lemonade and buns. 

'On Boxing Day three of us slipped away to the Bristol pubs and got tiddly: strictly against the rules and therefore essential to do. 

'It was the most delightful Christmas I've ever had'.

NEW YEAR 1952

Back in Norris Green, Liverpool, two months later, April got work as a deck boy. So in February 1952 'I picked up my cardboard suitcase ,.. took a deep breath of air, coughed, and set off on the road to Manchester to join the S.S. Pacific Fortune.' (Pictured).

Life on the Furness Withy refrigerated cargo ship to Jamaica wasn't a happy time. April was bullied, tried suicide, and eventually left the MN. The rest is history -  of the high-profile glam trans kind. Google it. 

Meanwhile, life in the Mission House by the Vindi went on. And who knows how many GSRD (Gender and Sexual Relationship Diverse) gained from the warmth of women who knew support mattered but may not have had  a clue about what identity issues? 

A number of Assistant Lady Wardens left after only a few months, so it must have been a challenging job. Or maybe the strict Miss Kerr put assistants off.

INFO

• April wrote three autobiographies; Odyssey, The First Lady and Inside Out. Two were pulped. For detailed comparisons see Aprils biogs. I took the above extracts from April Ashley's Odyssey, by Duncan Fallowell & April Ashley, Jonathan Cape, London, 1982. ISBN 0-224-01849-3. It bears a strong resenblance to James Hanley's novel, Boy.
• The Sharprness Mission info is to be found in archives within Hull History Centre. MtoS archives 
• The Vindi and its accompanying mission went circa 1967 but are remembered on social media. (April is not mentioned there). Over its 28-year existence 70,000 boys had trained there.

Selina’s troubled Indian voyages

By guest contributor Paul Martinovich

I'm delighted that museologist and author Paul Martinovich has agreed to share his knowledge and images about the different voyages of Selina Du Charles Shee Holwell (1783-1825). The stories are important, not least because having extra-marital sex at sea, with an East India ship captain, changed her life.

Many young women experienced romantic episodes on long journeys aboard ship. But few can have both met and married their spouses aboard ship. 

Even fewer can have later had the marriage end dramatically while travelling on another vessel. However this was the case for a young woman named Selina Cordelia St Charles around the end of the 18th century, on East India company ships.

SELINA SAILS FROM QUEBEC

Selina Cordelia was almost certainly the illegitimate daughter of William Henry Birch. He was a British Army engineer stationed in Quebec City in the early 1780s. Her mother is an enigma. On Selina's baptismal certificate she is shown as Elizabeth DunReid, though her 'natural daughter' is given the surname DuCharles. 

At some point 'DuCharles' became ‘St Charles’.  And Selina St Charles travelled across the Atlantic, without her mother, to live with her Birch grandparents, at Pinner just outside of London.

FROM PINNER TO CALCUTTA: 1796 

In 1796, possibly as a result of the death of her father, it was decided to send Selina to India, even though she was only 14 years old. There she would live with her Birch uncles. They were prominent businessmen with the East India Company (see coat of arms above). She would be expected eventually to find a husband. 

The dispatching of children to live with relatives in distant countries was not unknown in Georgian times. And the annual flow of young women travelling to India to seek a husband was so regular that it came to be nicknamed ‘the fishing fleet’.

'The dispatching of children to live with relatives in distant countries was not unknown.' 

Selina travelled on the East Indiaman William Pitt  via the Cape of Good Hope. She was ‘under the protection of the captain’ (Captain Charles Mitchell). Such patriarchal care was normal for ‘unaccompanied’ women. 

Stratfield Saye Preservation Trust

They made the  journey south and then headed north-east to Calcutta (modern Kolkata). Another passenger was John Shee (pictured) a British Army officer going out to join his regiment (the 33rd Foot) in Bengal. 

Their shipboard acquaintance led the young Selina (she was still playing with dolls) to marry the 26-year-old major when the ship stopped at Cape Town.  (See image from ships' log).

Marriages of 16- or even 15-year-old girls were not unheard of in the Georgian period. But it is difficult to understand how, under any circumstances, a child of 14 could be allowed to wed a man of 26.

The Shees lived, apparently happily, in Fort William, India, in 1797. 

Image by Zoffany, fourteen years earlier, representing  a much wealthier British household  in Fort William: Sir Elijah Impey, the first Chief Justice of the new supreme court at Calcutta,  Lady Mary Impey and his legitimate children

.

GOING TO ENGLAND: 1798 

In 1798 Selina returned to England alone, supposedly because of her health. She sailed on the East Indiamen Lord Hawke, arriving in February 1799. 

John Shee had made no provision for her support while she was in England. He also failed to communicate with her in any way, for more than two years. 

GOING BACK FOR HER MAN: 1801

And yet in 1801, against the advice of friends and relatives, she returned to India. On the East Indiaman the Duke of Montrose, under Captain Patrick Burt, she sailed from Portsmouth in March and arrived at Madras in July. (See pic of women arriving Madras, which had no harbour for large vessels, in 1856, detail, by JB East.)

John Shee had meanwhile risen to the rank of brevet lieutenant-colonel in the 33rd, which happened to be the regiment of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington. There is ample evidence that Arthur Wellesley considered John a brutal officer, and 'a species of assassin', who practiced with a pistol in order to be able to kill his opponents in duels more efficiently. 

After reaching India in July Selina did not stay long, since John (probably partly because of Arthur’s enmity) decided to return to England and sell his commission. 

RETURNING IN MONTHS

Just six months after her five-month voyage she accompanied her husband back on this December 1801 journey. The marriage was now breaking down. It seems likely that her husband was physically abusing her; ‘intimate partner violence’ is now recognised as more prevalent in military populations.

'The marriage was now breaking down.'

Captain Pulteney Malcolm (left) of the Royal Navy was a tall, handsome Scotsman who had spent four years commanding ships in Indian waters. He offered the couple passage from Cape Town to England in his ship of the line, the Victorious. As part of the naval reductions during the Peace of Amiens, it was returning home. 

A number of other passengers and several hundred troops were also crammed aboard the ship, which was in poor condition and urgently needed repairs. During the passage, the captain and Selina had sex in his cabin, despite the proximity of her husband in an adjacent compartment. 

She had sneaked out of the marital cabin when she thought her husband was asleep. John found out about the adultery, pulled her out of her hiding place, and threw her towards his rival, saying 'There, take your strumpet, and a pretty bargain you have of her'. 

'There, take your strumpet,  and a pretty bargain you have of her'.

SPOUSE AND SELINA SUNDERED, 1803

After abusing the lovers, John left the Victorious to complete his journey on another ship. The Victorious was so unseaworthy that it had to limp into Lisbon. The Admiralty decided to break up the ship on the spot. 

Pulteney Malcolm and the crew arrived in England several months later in hired ships. How and when Selina got back to England from Lisbon is not clear.

At this point John Shee brought a legal suit for ‘Crim.Con.’ (Criminal Conversation) against Pulteney Malcolm. In such actions, the plaintiff sued for damages as a result of the harm ‘done to him’ by the defendant's adultery with his wife. 

The London trial was reported in a number of papers. The most detailed version appeared in The Sporting Magazine of 1803, Vol 23, pp.125-127.Sporting Record. 

Selina’ is extremely unlikely to have been present, so her views in her own words were not reported in these articles.

DISSING THE ‘BURTHEN’

Several witnesses testified to the coldness of John Shee towards his wife and the events on board ship. The evidence suggested that John had been both mentally and physically abusive to Selina. 

But she was denigrated. Another witness said her conduct ‘was very bad in public; she was fawning on men in general.’ A surgeon on board attested to her ‘levity’. He had treated her for ‘hysterics’, which ‘she told him was owing to her husband’s conduct.’ 

After John’s confrontation with Pulteney Malcolm, he was quoted as saying that Selina 'was a foolish, depraved, vicious [bitch], and he was happy he had got rid of such a burthen'. 

Pulteney did not deny the accusation that he had had adulterous relations with Selina. But his lawyer entered letters into the record that showed that the differences between the Shees were long-standing, and not a result of the captain’s attentions to her.

Newspaper reports give the impression that the judge and jury were unsympathetic to both the wife and the ‘wronged’ husband.

In his summation, the judge Baron Alvanley (pictured) found that John Shee 'had not used due diligence to prevent his wife ... from throwing herself into the arms of the defendant'. 

He admonished British husbands to refrain from using excessive 'correction' (physical abuse) to curb their straying wives. 

The jury believed John to be legally in the right and  found Pulteney guilty. But the plaintiff was awarded the derisory sum of 40 shillings in damages (about £187 in today’s money). 

LATER SUPPORT

After these five voyages Selina’s subsequent life seems to have been relatively happy. John Shee went to an early grave. Pulteney married in 1809 and became an admiral. 

Selina’s liaison with Pulteney resulted in a child: Benjamin Basil was born in November 1803, and baptised two months later with the surname Shee. In March 1804 John Shee died at Dover, probably of alcohol-related problems. Selina was left the single mother of a four-month-old infant. 

Within a couple of weeks of John’s death, she married haberdasher James Martin Holwell, her second cousin. They began to make a new life in the west of England.

James and Selina raised the boy along with their two later children. Pulteney acknowledged Benjamin as his son, and visited the Holwells at least once. However, he kept his paternal relationship secret from the boy. Both his wife, Clementine Elphinstone, and his sister, knew of his ‘by-blow’. He occasionally mentioned Benjamin in his letters. 

After James Holwell went bankrupt with £400 debts in 1809 Pulteney found him a job. He also paid for the lad’s education at a good public school.

Later he used his Indian and family connections to get Benjamin into the East India Company’s Madras Army as an officer. There Benjamin had an interesting career (much of it in Persia, now Iran) before his early death at age 37.   

Selina and family emigrated to Montreal, where Selina died in 1825. (See burial record). 

For more information about these individuals, see my book ‘The Sea is my Element: the eventful life of Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm, 1768-1838.’  Sea

In these days of exploring narratives about mobilities and sexualities I thank Paul for this insight into a version of domestic violence at sea, and seemingly consensual sex between the ship's patriarch and his married passenger.

Caribbean maritime courage: quarter-master Lionel Licorish on the Vestris, 1928.

As part of  Black History Month I'm celebrating a maritime hero from Barbados, Lionel Licorish  (pictured) and the intersectional story of his rescue work in a shipwreck sometimes compared with that of the Titanic. 

You can see brief YouTube footage of him at  British Pathe, The Tragedy of the Vectris (1928).

There's a troubling racist pattern in the story of shipwrecks: white passengers denigrating 'cowardly' black seafarers in lifeboats, accusations of cowardice were common. 

The bitter xenophobia is shocking. And it’s noticeable that white British crew’s lack of courage seldom gets mentioned.

But the white-authored story of Lionel Licorish refutes the standard hostile narrative. This quarter-master became a hero in 1928 for rescuing 20 shipwrecked people from the Vestris off Norfolk, Virginia (pictured). 

Lionel is possibly the black crew member most acclaimed in maritime history for his courage. 

This blog entry adds genealogical and maritime labour information to the usual accounts of Lionel's feat, contextualising it. Women are also in the picture. 

 

WHAT HAPPENED ON THE VESTRIS? 

Erica Wheatley tells the story well and in full here. I won’t repeat all the outraged discussion of the unsatisfactory vessel and the chaos when abandoning ship, which lead to at least 108 of the 328 dying. 

The ensuing inquiry was critical and many sued. The ‘WomenandChildren first’ policy had yet again proved disastrous. All 13 children and 28 of the 37 (or 38)  women died. This was mainly because they weren’t dispersed but put in the same lifeboats, which then couldn’t be properly launched. TAt least one of those boats bashed into ship’s side as they were lowered, inhabitants were tipped into the sea. 

It's not known if Lionel brought in women. But wireless brought swift rescue from nearby vessels. Luckily the sea was warm too. 

The  passengers were very angry when they came ashore from the rescue ships. Often survivors deal with grief and shock by blaming. The disproportionately high survival rate of crew, by comparison to white children's fatalities, caused resentment. 

There were rumours of a 'Negro mutiny,' having happened too. It seems many race-related matters have been covered up.

WHO WAS ‘OUR HERO?

The Barbadian was serving on a Lamport & Holt ship heading from Hoboken to Rio de la Plata, South America. He was 23, only 5 feet 6 inches tall, and very unassuming.  

Born in the parish of St Lucy, Lionel's surname wasn’t a colour-related nickname. It wast derived from an English doctor after whom Licorish village had been named a century earlier.

Before Barbados became a tourist destination jobs were scarce.  At 15 Lionel became a merchant seafarer, initially on sailing schooners. He’d then switched to steam-propelled vessels c.1926. 

Often seamen choose not to learn to swim. But on small  islands boys commonly played in the sea, and Lionel had learnt swim. This enabled him to be such an effective rescuer on the Vestris.

He’d been working at sea for about seven years, previously on Lamport & Holt’s Voltaire and then made a number of trips on the Vestris, rising to Able-Bodied seaman status.

African-Caribbean men from Barbados (which was then the British West Indies) were 49% of the crew on the ship’s voyage the previous month. So it’s likely that the percentage was the same on this trip too. 

Barbadian men were the biggest national group aboard: others were Welsh, Scandinavian, Dutch and German, but not Lascars. White people had the higher-status jobs. Bajans were mainly doing engine room and catering jobs. Deck officers tended to be English.

One of the surviving stewardesses on Lionel's ship was Clara Gorn Ball (46) of New York (pictured). She was praised for swimming for 22 hours and hailed as the 'bravest woman in the world.'

MODEST TALE  

For at least three months afterwards public authorities in the US feted Lionel for saving lives.  

The Times said that when he spoke on the arranged tour, he did so with “an unvaried absence of exaggeration:”  He simply explained “I saved 20 passengers, all that I could, which I thought was my duty.” 

Boston’s Globe reported that Lionel had ‘no stage tricks’… [but]  tells of his heroism much as if he were making a report of everyday activities, and he looks very much embarrassed while facing his audiences.’

‘NEGRESS STEWARDESS’ REJECTED

The lesser--known story is that while a black man was rescuing white people, white people had refused to rescue a black woman from the Vestris  

The British United Press syndicated a story about a black stewardess (unnamed) who was initially rejected by those in a viable liifeboat. Very downplayed, the brief article quotes English passenger Mr EM Walcott as saying that he was floating in the water when a lifeboat came along. 

‘Some of the occupants were willing to take him on board, but not the negress stewardess’ who he was helping. ‘“I had to argue with them... but finally they agreed to take both of us on board.’” 

Survivors in lifeboats sometimes refused to take others on board, for fear of swamping. But usually men, not women, were refused. Is this Vestris story about racism trumping gendered chivalry? Or is it about status: passenger hostility towards a lowly worker?

BLAMING ‘NEGROES’

The main Vestris story, though, is the feel-good praising of this black seaman who went out and swam people back to the lifeboat he'd secured.

He was especially celebrated in the weeks after the event. New York mayor James J Walker publicly said to Lionel ' When you left that ship and reached out your hands to save someone else’s life, it is fair and reasonable to suppose that no one asked what race you belonged to ....That was as all right out there in the raging waters. That was fine when the ship was going down.' 

But initially 'negro' crew were villified. I’ve done some digging to see who complained about People of Colour 's (POC) behaviour. 

Image courtesy of Gare Maritime. Mrs Marion
Calvinl Batten.;un-named man; Mrs Blanche
Smith Devore with Speedway Lady.

One of the ten women survivors was Blanche Smith Devore. She was married to racing driver Earl, who was going with his racing partner Norman Batten to racetracks in Argentina. 

Both men were with their wives. Both men died. The Devore dog, Speedway Lady, was saved, as was oddly under-mentioned son Louis/ Billy.

In one version of the story Blanche said she was standing on deck with her husband when the crew began belatedly launching the life boats. 

‘Three negro members of the crew took charge and the lifeboats started away. The passengers pleaded to be taken on board and some were finally admitted. 

'Her husband stepped over the side to follow, when the negroes pushed him away. The water was full of drowning men.’ 

The Birmingham Post reported Blanche as saying ‘I begged the crew to go their assistance but they refused….The last time I saw Earl he was standing on the edge of the ship screaming for aid.’

The story shifted a lot. Sharks became included in the sensationalist versions. Earl’s arm was said to have been eaten by a shark. 

AND AFTERWARDS?

1928. Trail-blazing journalist Lorena Hicock (pictured) of the Associated Press agency covered the sinking. Her story was one of the first in the New York Times to carry a woman’s byline.

1929. Such was passenger alarm about whether to trust the company that in late 1929 Lamport & Holt had to discontinue the NY-South America run. However it switched to crusiing

1930. The London inquiry went on for 40 days, longer than the Titanic's inquiry, with which the sinking is compared.  

Possibly the celebration of Lionel's action was an orchestrated diversion from the concern that there had been much cowardice shown by people in lifeboats – an unknown number of whom were Barbadians – and at all the company negligence.

1930. Lionel went back to Barbados and married Carlene Hunt (pictured) (1912-2008) in 1930. It’s not clear how much he carried on sailing.  

In autumn  that year, 1930, the progressive campaigner Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn wrote a poem ‘Ballad of the Golden Hands of Lionel Licorish.’ See it here.

1933. Three years later Lionel lost his golden status when he was jailed for smuggling in British Guiana. Bangor [Maine} Daily News report has a gloating tone along the lines of how the mighty have fallen. 

I can’t find further news about prison or his being unable to get work afterwards. Smuggling was a common crime for seafarers, not least because opportunities were so temptingly to hand and gatekeepers colluded.

Late 1930s. Blanche Devore ‘was still bitter about the crew, and about the amount of hate mail she received as ‘the woman who saved her dog and abandoned her husband.'’’ 

1940. Lionel became the father of Sybil. By WW2 he was at sea again.

1942. In January  his unescorted cargo ship, TJ Harrison’s SS Traveller  (pictured) was hit twice by a German torpedo from U-106. East of Boston, all 52 people on board were killed. Some were Barbadians. The ship was carrying explosives.

1950s. Carlene and Sybil Licorish, who had lived in St James parish, Barbados, seemingly emigrated to Ottawa, Canada.

TODAY. Lionel’s life is commemorated at London’s Tower Hill memorial, along with other merchant seafarers.

" Steamboat Ladies": ferried to academic certification 1904-07

A ferry to and from Ireland by Norman Wilkinson, 1905.

‘The journey was a remarkably pleasant one, and the entrance to the exquisite Bay of Dublin forms a fitting conclusion,’ wrote Lilian Haigh of her June 1905 ferry ride over from Holyhead to Ireland. (pp246-7) 

But she was travelling to appropriate a far more interesting ‘conclusion’: a piece of paper that would act as her passport to professional respect - a move towards DEI in education.

Lilian had studied at Somerville College, Oxford (pictured, right) and was one of the 300-odd ‘steamboat’ ladies’. 

Why were they so called, and with slightly mixed feelings?  Because of their reason for briefly hopping over to Ireland in the 1904-07 period. 

These Oxbridge women had already studied for and gained MAs and BAs. Over  250 were from Girton College, Cambridge (pictured left). 

However, women were excluded from formal membership of universities at that time. They had the substance (all the knowledge gained by studying)  but not the bit of confirmatory parchment. 

Steamboat ladies’ solution? They took the opportunity offered by Trinity College Dublin to award them – for a fee of £10, about £1,500 in today’s money –  ad eundem degrees. The term means the honorary granting of academic standing or a degree by one university to another. 

Trinity College Dublin was already friendly to the right sort of ladies. The college (pictured right) had begun admitting 40 female students in January 1904. 

But this degree-granting connection with women who’d graduated from other universities was controversial.

Susan M Parkes, the world expert on the steamboat ladies, explains that at the time some people considered this selling of ‘“the Dublin degree” as a “betrayal” of the women’s cause …

'They argued that instead women] should keep up the pressure and hold out for their own universities to award degrees.‘ (p248).  

Routinely by train and ferry

What was their trip like for those who decided to proceed? In early summer 1905 Lilian Haigh, like the two previous tranches of steamboat ladies in June and December 1904, would have ridden the Irish Mail train from London’s Euston up the North Wales Main Line to Holyhead on the Isle of Angelsey. The rail trip took about eight hours. 

Trains and the linked ferries were operated by the highly successful London & North Western Railway, which had been carrying passengers and mail profitably across to Ireland in a very routinised way for decades. 

Ferry operations had been long-established. Staff were used women passengers, including elite ladies with agency, even with imperious attitudes, who’d already been travelling the world.

The vessels the steamboat ladies used were almost certainly the newish LNWR railway steamers the Anglia, Cambria, Hibernia or Scotia. 

From Anglesey (pictured) some steamboat ladies sailed overnight, so as not to lose time off work. 

The 108-mile crossing to Dublin took eight to twelve hours, depending on conditions.  Passengers were in the hundreds, not thousands. I believe there was a communal Ladies’ Cabin, as on ocean liners, at that time, as well as smaller private cabins. 

Susan M Parkes found that many steamboat ladies sailed with a group of colleagues set on the same goal. They joined ships that were male-majority crewed. One or two stewardesses were routinely employed (see picture of one on the Hibernia.) 

As usual stewardesses, uniformed like maids, attended to any woman passengers  suffering debilitating seasickness en route. I devoutly hope that none of our steamboat ladies needed such ministrations before their big day.

But could any passenger confidently predict that she would have a standard voyage and arrive in fit shape for the award ceremony? No. The sea creates uncertainty. Irish ferries had sunk before, drowning people in gales.  

300 tickets to transformed status

What did this 45-hour-plus excursion, that enabled such an official transformation, cost women?  The total would be at least £50, or £7,600 in today’s money. Costs included: 

• £3 12s 6d to rent a cap, gown and hood
• £27 for the train and boat ticket
• 9s for one night in a Dublin hotel 
• £10 3s for a Batchelor of Arts fee, or £9.16s for an MA (over £1,300 today).  

It was an investment. Could women afford it?  Fortunately, many were from wealthy backgrounds. Graduates already in prestigious jobs were not necessarily well-paid: in 1905 a headmistress got roughly £85 pa. Her ‘Dublin degree’ would therefore cost at least half her annual salary.  

What was the money used for? Trinity spent £10,000 of the controversial fees as the principal funding for a hall of residence for the new women students: Trinity Hall, 3 miles away in Dartry. 

Miss E Margaret Cunningham became the first warden of the hall, 1907- 40. She’d graduated from Girton in 1891 and been a steamboat lady. The picture shows her  in 1911, in black with her academic hood, fifth from left, front row. She's next to Miss Gwynn, the first lady registrar (from 1908), who is in a grey costume with dark collar and white blouse. 

They're outside the Hall, which still stands today. Male students were admitted after 1972.

Destination Dublin

Once arrived at Dublin North Wall Lilian and other steamboat ladies would have taken some refreshment, and perhaps settled their bodies after all the ship’s motion. 

Maybe in a quayside hotel like the London and North Western railway hotel (pictured) they’d have left ther luggage. 

Then they’d have taken a cab south west across the River Liffey towards the college, about 27 minutes walk away. 

Somewhere they dressed in the rented regalia for the ceremony. 

Miss Lucy P Gwynn, the Lady Registrar, (pictured, later) then escorted the steamboat ladies to the College Examination Hall, in an all-female posse that attracted attention. 

These were by no means girlies out strolling in a rudderless way: Emily Penrose, for example, the famous women’s education campaigner, and a steamboat lady of the 1904 vintage,was 46, the distinguished principal of Bedford College and a professor of ancient history. 

There at the Halls  the women attended the long ‘commencements’ ceremony (which also included doctors, such as steamboat lady Dr Ellen McArthur,  and people being awarded honorary degrees). 

At the back of the hall (pictured) the male undergraduates sometimes barracked. They were ‘keeping us gay with their wit. It was a lively scene, but not as distinctly Irish as I had hoped,‘ wrote up-beat Lilian. 'Banter' in the college tyically included jokes about 'Spinsters of Science' and 'Mistresses of Arts.' 

Afterwards, the male Provost usually hosted them for luncheon in the newly-desegregated Dining Hall (pictured). (The first female provost was elected only in 2021). Then women posed on the steps for a photo. 

Afterwards, divesting themselves of the vestments, most women quickly turned back to home. Women undergrads had a 6pm curfew.

It’s not known how many of the steamboat ladies stayed for a few more hours or days, acting on Lilian’s advice ‘not to leave without sightseeing’. 

Voyage over, the steamboat ladies returned to, or went on to, successful careers, especially as leaders in education. 

Emily Penrose became Principal of Somerville 1907-26. She is not recorded as having sailed again but I suspect that this is just an administrative error. 

Progressing after the disembarkation

It’s no accident that the Somerville Suffrage Society was founded at the steamboat ladies’ time, in 1907, and the Oxford Women Students’ Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1911.  Educated women wanted respect and rights. Some women won the vote in 1918; all women were awarded it in 1928.  

Painting by FW Helps, 1922
Somerville College.

Oxford began awarding degrees to women in 1920; Cambridge in 1947. Emily Penrose (pictured) was one of the five Oxford college principals to have an MA conferred upon them by Oxford University Convocation in October 1920. 

What the voyage meant personally

There had been women at Oxford colleges since 1879 and at Cambridge Colleges since 1869. Emily Penrose had completed her course in 1889, fifteen years before making the Dublin trip. She may have just regarded the trip as irksome. It was a poor use of time for a busy and established professional, and s trip only necessitated because of conservative sexism.

Somerville graduate Lilian Haigh’s details are unknown. We may never know what the journey really meant to her.  In 1905 Girton graduate Ellen McArthur,  (pictured) was the first steamboat lady to be awarded the 'Dublin' D.Litt. The follwoing years she was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). 

By contrast, one of the very first steamboat ladies in June 1904, Sophie May Nicholls, had graduated from Girton in 1892. She was already climbing Welsh mountains with male mountaineers by 1897 (see picture), the year that Cambridge women took action. By 1911 she had been to Palestine as one of early Frances Mary Buss Travelling Scholars. 

Sophie Nicholls  (not identified) and climbing party outside the iconic Pen-y-Gwryd climbing inn,  Llanberis, 1897, seven years before she became  a steamboat lady. 

An acclaimed traveller,  Sophie was an early female member of the Royal Geographical Society in 1914 (to which women had first sought admission in 1847). Misogynistic institutions and a mere ferry trip over to Dublin would have been a very minor matter to her. 

I myself feel very proud to have two slight connections to this steamboat lady, even though my principles probably wouldn’t have let me buy a ‘Dublin degree.’ 

1. Pioneer of women's education, Frances Mary Buss (pictured), Sophie’s travel funder, was my godmother’s great aunt. 

2. And I have worked in that Pen-y-Gwryd hotel, outside which Sophie is pictured. Wearing a uniform like the stewardesses on her ship I’ve mopped those PYG steps. And I surely cleaned the room Sophie used 70 years earlier, before I went off for an afternoon's mountain climbing, in her Snowdonia footsteps. 

Thanks to the efforts of pioneers like her, gender discrimination lessenned. I gained all my degree certificates without having to go to Ireland and spend half a year’s pay on it.  I am an FRHistS like Ellen - no prob. 

And my education later meant that during conferences I've dined in Trinity College’s once-segregated dining hall, as Lilian, Emily and Ellen did too. No prob. 

There is not yet a plaque to those blue-hooded steamboat ladies, to my knowledge.

References:

Susan M Parkes, ‘Trinity College Dublin and the Steamboat ladies’ in Mary R Masson and Deborah Simonton, eds, Women in Higher Education, Past Present and Future, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen, 1996, pp244-250. 

The Cunningham and Gwynn picture is from: 

Jack Kerouac on this day: rugged sea brother?

 

 

On this day, 19 August, in 1942 Jack Kerouac, one of the world’s great rover-writers, stopped writing his voyage journal. He was en route to the US army base in Narsarsuaq, south Greenland. 

He’d only been keeping the journal for just 31 days, since 18 July, when he joined his first and only ship, which was delivering war supplies.

Did stopping writing that journal matter? Was it a  momentous moment for the writer of 'On the Road', a man who saw motility as a kind of freedom? 

Or was it significant for the martitime literary pantheon, like being deprived of Joseph Conrad's insights?

Who knows. Sometimes creativity flourishes in moments when writers DON'T make consistent linear records but instead explore responses - say to sea life - through poems, sketches and fragments instead. 

Jack Kerouac, aged 20 and already a prolific writer, certainly carried on noticing and reflecting all that was happening to him onboard US Merchant Marine freighter Dorchester, on which he stayed till October. 

Later he reworked the experience into a novel he didn't complete.Pengun published it only in 2011, as The Sea is My Brother; The Lost Novel. The compilation includes both extracts from the journal - unfortunatley not all - and the first 130 pages of  the novel 'Merchant Mariner'.

WHY?

Why was he sailing? Kerouac explained in his journal that he joined because ‘I need money for college, need adventure of a sort (the real adventure of rotting wharves and seagulls, winey water and ships, ports, cities, and faces & voices.’ (The Sea is My Brother,  p11) 

The usual reasons seafaring men of the time gave were sometimes consciously masculine: 'to make a man of myself, to master the oceans.' Most people wamted to see 'the world' and there was metaphyiscal yearning; 'the world was a metonym.' 

Some joined to escape un-nurturing homes, and to work somewhere glamorous. Early GBT+ men wanted to shift to a less homophobic milieu than on land. And in wartime many joined up to help the war effort.

Seafaring women are said to have sailed to follow their male sweethearts but this idea is not supported by any evidence I've ever seen. Women mainly chose to the career as a way to::

• escape domestic confinement including family care work and unsatisfactory marriages
• to slough off the feminine restraints imposed on them
• to get away from home without causing too many ructions: daughters were seen (by some naive parents) as safe if they were employees on a patrichal ship, rather than roaming free as Kerouac later did 
• to fund the travel that seemed impossible to achieve given women's lw earning power  

Unlike the new men who joined up, expereinced seawomen were urged to leave the sea and thier ships in wartime. 

RUGGED SEA DOG? 

What master of maritime motility, of hegemonic masculinity, do we find these uneven pages? Was Jack Kerouac a rugged sea dog? 

Hardly. He was employed as a scullion, an unkilled kitchen worker - possibly the most lowly and non-macho role on ships. The catering side of ships was regarded as an area where effeminate men worked, but in this volume we don't see this, or indeed same-sex relationships aboard. 

Not only was he doing 'women's work.' He was sailing with literary conscience:  this was regarded as deridably not masculine enough.  The bosun jeered at him for writing “ ’Truth brothers!’   … You doggone little pansy … with all your sissy books”.  and snarlingly sets him down to drudgery. It was, says Kerouac,  'a grim, dreary night for fratricide’ (The Sea, pp8-9) . And ships are indeed  chilling places that allow disliked people to be fatally jettisoned. 

He finds he is alienated from his once-longed-for brothers.. They ‘cannot understand me, and are thus enraged, bitter and full of hidden wonder.’ (The Sea, p6).

Was the SS Dorchester a macho space?  Of course. Ships were, although it was was far from being a warship. But there’s a stern captain (male, inevitably). And in the novel there’s an impressive gun. The crew pride themselves on eschewing namby-pamby boat drill and they enjoy public farting displays. It feels to me that Kerouac was writing as a boy, along with other boys manning a boy’s toy.

FROM SHIP TO LIT, OMITTING WAR 

Kerouac carried on at the sea, on the Dorchester (pictured) until the start of that October, 1942. Then he went back to Columbia University to do his literary studies, and play football.

 At Christmas (1942) he joined the US Navy Reserve, ready to serve in WW2 if necessary. The US had joined the war in Dec 1941, after Pearl Harbor. 

Kerouac had said he said he wanted to join the Reserve for the brotherhood with American and Russians: For their danger to be my danger; to speak to them quietly, perhaps at dawn, in Arctic mists; to know them, and for them to know myself.'  See https://www.beatdom.com/the-beat-generation-at-war/

But naval pychiatrists regarded his lack of desire to marry as dodgy. The Reserve may have wanted personnel but they didn't want queers - although many service personnel later had same-sex experience with each other. (See for example Allan Berube's Coming out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two.)  Quickly the Reserve discharged him as unfit for service.

Kerouac never worked at sea after October 1942. Instead he went on to become a founder and 'reluctant icon' of the Beat Generation. See https://www.beatdom.com/the-beat-generation-at-war/

NEXT

I will be writing soon about the autobiographical (-ish) works some of the other seafarers including: 

• non-heterosexual US writers doing 'women's work' on ships, who were not necessarily, such as Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg
• heterosexual UK women who had a domestic role at sea and observed their male counterparts: Maida Nixson and Violet Jessop
• heterosexual stewards who got along with their GBT+ colleagues such as Ken Attiiwill and John J Mahon.