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.

Gay mystery on liner, 50s-style fiction

PRIDE MONTH. Here’s some authentic fiction for those wanting to lite-ish holiday reading about queer maritime history in the 1950s. 

It’s about the time when passenger ships were increasingly becoming the main workplace where a working-class man could be out and camp; tourists were just starting to cruise; and emigration to Australia was waning. 

Try Stuart Lauder’s un-deservedly long-lost 1962 literary novel, Winger’s Landfall . The picture shows him six years earlier.  

Old copies of the book can be found in on-line bookshops. Mine’s foxed but still has this great dust-jacket.

 WHO WROTE IT?  I've done some genealogical sleuthing and found that Stuart (other name David Stuart Leslie) (1921-99), was the writer of at least 19 published novels. He was the British son of doctor. 

He grew up in Australia, went home to London with his widowed mum on P&O's Narkunda, then headed back to Oz to serve in the RAF in WW2. He was indeed a ship’s steward. 

Googling newspapers I've twice found reports of groups'  petty crime that someone of his name were tried for. But they don't seem to fit.

 

THE PLOT. Insightful and sensitive but puzzling, Winger’s Landfall is about a butch-ish gay steward’s voyage on the Cyclamen from Sydney to Tilbury. His ports of call include Colombo.

It’s seemingly set just after the seminal 1957 Wolfenden Report, which ten years later led to liberalizing consensual same-same sex: the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.

The publication of a Panther paperback edition
in 1966 suggests the hardback sold well
 and that a gay market existed.

Hero Harry Spears, 29, is an experienced seafarer, no fan of queens’ frippery, and a determined avenger trying to track down what might be a queer paedophile crime against his vanished half-brother. 

We're unsure about his sexuality initially. But the on-board gaydar quickly spots him, and he also has furtive liaisons wth the young and secretive Prince.  

Below stairs on the Cyclamen is a bleak dog-eat-dog ‘community’. Afloat and ashore, women are objectified. They are life’s second most important consumable commodities, after booze and its numbing effects.

THE CAST. There’s a substantial gay cast, including elegant Diamond Lil/Derek, an officer’s beloved, and the vessel's uber-queen he dethroned, ‘Patience Strong’; Marilyn, an amorous bell-boy; and senior hotel staff, all of whom seem to enjoy immunity from any employer homophobia.

THE SHIPPING LINE. This permissiveness exists despite ‘homosexuality’ still being illegal then. I’ve got a hunch the employers were based on P&O. 

The giant transport operators were then one of the most- gay-tolerant companies (but not because it was ethically pro-Pride. It was just keen to keep some of its on-board domestic labour white.)

I don’t say this novel is fun. Stand by for racism about Goan and Lascar shipmates. This is a book that implicitly proves the long-standing need for DEI.

 Why is this book a rare classic?

Because other fiction and non-fiction books about hotel-side life in the merchant navy, by former stewards,  don’t mention the extensive and out queer culture among stewards 1950s-1980s. 

 •           The most famous is Coming Sir, The autobiography of a waiter (1937). Despite the cheeky title, writer Dave Marlowe (real name Arthur H Timmins) doesn’t refer to gay life. That's not least because his focus is the late 1920s and 30s, before that culture became so prevalent and performative.  He also wrote a novel, Gangway Down (1939) which I've yet to find.

•           The next most famous memoir,  Ken Attiwill’s Steward (1932) is also gay-free memoir of stewarding 

•           My late friend, steward Ron Whitworth, self-published  A Voyage Round My Oyster in 2008. But it’s not only long out of print, it’s also non-transparent. When he was writing it I repeatedly begged him to be frank but he kept insisting, ‘No, people will be able to read between the lines.’  

READING ON

1. However, you can read the fuller story and see the pictures in a social history Prof Paul Baker and I wrote, Hello Sailor! Gay life on the Ocean Wave (2003 and 2018). Hello Sailor!

This was based on many stories gay seafarers told us. That's why I know that Winger's Landfall is the most authentic queer maritime novel of all time.

2. See also the only queer discussion I've ever found, of Winger's Landfall .  It puts the book, and two other works by Lauder, in the context and queer spaces of the 1950s. 

Catch the fascinating online Leeds Ph.D thesis of Simon DR Ofield: An investigation of the resources available for interpreting visual cultural production related to male homosexuality in Britain; 1940 to the present.  (1998). Get it free at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/43526.pdf

Empire Windrush's voyage from the Caribbean: 1948. White expat women among would-be residents

Voyage stories can be told from many vantage points. Often 'the Windrush story' is told simplistically, mono-racially and omits women.

So let me offer you this unusual version, which I've melded from the letters of a veteran travel writer escaping her new husband (who's turned out to be tedious), plus passenger lists, and extracts from the Kingston Gleaner. 

Two footloose white women are the focus. Their voyages begin separately, in Barbados, late April three years after war’s end. Boredom is their trigger.  

Barbados 1948

On the Anglicised island nicknamed ‘Bimshire’ and ‘Little England’  (Barbados) ennui is inevitable for these visitors whose usual lives involve voracious discovering in new location after new location.  

After three months Freya Stark (left), the famous travel writer, has exhausted her capacity to play the diplomat’s wife there. She wants to escape to her home in Asola.  

Her cabin mate, scandalous writer-publisher and black rights activist Nancy Cunard (right), is similarly bored with the Bridge-playing world at her cousin Edward’s  beachside house in Glitter Bay. She’s been recovering there for two months after a Horrible Holiday in Mexico where a cactus pieced her cornea and her latest lover careered away.

Perishable berths going begging

So here's the story. Around Easter-time in 1948 Caribbean newspapers offer a batch of one-way cheap passages to Britain. The shipping company wants to avoid loss by filling up perishable berths, just as tramp ships traditionally take on non-human cargo too 'as inducemnt offers'.  

Carpe Diem, the women say. They each. separately, book a bargain basement ticket that costs as much as five cows, or forty weeks' wages for a banana loader.  It’s £43, because females are all, by definition, 'ladies' and must therefore travel 'A' class, in cabins. By contrast men prepared to rough it in 'C' class dormitories pay only £28.10s. 

In May Freya tells Jock Murray, her London publisher, that she is unfortumately leaving just as all the frangipani are in flower. The Caribbean Sea is ‘emerald green because of the Orinoco waters.’ As she starts the 251-nautical miles crossing it’s strange to see Bimshire ‘vanishing back into the waves and clouds from which I saw it emerge so few months ago.’ 

Via Trinidad and Xaymaica 

Port of Spain, six years earlier). 

Like the other Britain-bound passengers from British Guiana, Grenada and St Lucia, Freya goes to a hub: the nearest embarkation port, Trinidad. 

According to Nancy’s biographer, Daphne Fielding,  Nancy waits for  ‘three suffocating days ... in evil-smelling Port-of-Spain after which she felt she really knew what it was like to be a poor Negro living in one of those wretched wooden shacks in Cock-Crow Alley or Barking-Dog Lane.’  

The passengers are joining the ship for the last two legs of its outward voyage from Southampton: Jamaica, then Bermuda, before it heads north east and back home to the UK.

Just after 20 May, Captain John Almond’s under-full ship bears them away from Trinidad. Passing the French West Indies and British Virgin Islands they make the 1,299-nautical mile journey north to the island once called Xaymaica (the Taino word for ‘land of wood and water’). 

Man-free ladies at their typewriters

Is it a recipe for ructions, to coop up two headstrong, grand public figures - one radical, one conservative? Impeccable manners and busyness help.  Nancy is writing about Mexico. Freya is doing her autobiographical Traveller’s Prelude (published 1950). 

Maybe they share personal stories as both are struggling with failing relationships with younger bisexual partners.  Nancy, age 52, has been ditched by wealthy wanderer William Le Page Finley. 

Freya, three years older, has recently married the Hon. Stewart Perowne, Colonial Secretary to Barbados who has metamorphosed into ‘the perfect Civil Servant.’

When they get to the Royal Mail Lines pier at Kingston, Jamaica  they find that, like all freshness-hungry newspapers in any small port, the Gleaner details all arrivals and departures. 

In this case it records the many disembarking: 57 A-class passengers;  175 of the homeward-bound second Gloucester Regiment who'd been based there; and 215 demobilised Jamaican RAF men, who had recognised there are absolutely no opportunities in the UK for Caribbean men, now that the war is over. 

Nancy as anthropologist-celeb in Ja

Miss Cunard, ‘whose affinity for the cause of the coloured peoples of the world caused such a furore in the middle 1930s’ is one of the celebrity arrivals who is scooped: ‘During her [two-and-a-half-day] stay, short though it is, she hopes to see as much of the island as possible. 

'She is particularly keen to observe at close hand the mental and political changes which have taken place in Jamaica’ since her 1932 visit. 

What the ladies see - differently

So Nancy notes the new and quotidian, thinking about what could happen politically, including the forthcoming West Indies Federation 1958-62.  

And Mrs Perowne gazes upon evidence of much older colonial glories.  A brigadier whisks off Freya  and shipmate Lady Ivy Woolley, a veteran of her husband’s postings in Nigeria and Cyprus. They use the official residence of the Governor, Sir John Huggins as their day base.  

Freya visits Port Royal with a Nelson-revering naval guide. She finds it's no longer a swashbuckling buccanneer base but near-derelict waste land.  Determined to make the most of every opportunity, Freya obtains passes for a jaunt on an ordnance boat. Out in the waters round the Palisadoes it’s bliss, admiring the accompanying pelicans and dreaming of enjoying walks and wayside inns in those distant Blue Mountains. 

Back on board the troop ship - desolating and miltarised 

Then, bump, it’s back to the ship’s ‘desolating efficiency’. 

By the evening of 24 or 26 May 1948 (the accounts vary) tentative newcomers are finding their feet with the established communities in cabin and deck class. It’s full.  

And the atmosphere is more militarised. The public address system ‘blares’, Freya haughtily complains. ‘One’s time and thought taken up forcibly in listening to things one doesn’t want to hear. And [yet one has] only life in this world.’ 

Underway, luscious grapevines are a much more welcome form of communication than tannoys. Soon gossip reveals that one of the six stowaways who got on at Kingston is – gasp – a female! 

She’s dressmaker Evelyn Wauchope, aged 27. (pictured).  Enter gallant rescuers who collectively pay the fare for what the Gleaner calls ‘this adventurous woman [who would otherwise] be imprisoned on arrival in England. Jamaican musicians including Delroy Stephens give a benefit concert for her. 

‘From then on nothing very exciting happened,’ wrote one student passenger.

To Tampico for Poles, regimented

Detouring east, to Tampico to pick up Poles, makes Freya chafe:  ‘It seems wildly extravagant to send a huge ship, 2,000 on board, eight days out of its way for sixty passengers who could have been flown or taken by schooner to Bermuda’. 

Throughout the war she had coped overseas with distant Whitehall bureaucracy. Now she believes ‘it is just that someone in London was unable to realise the difference made by looking at a small-scale map ... [They must have] thought this was all on our way.’ 

For four days and 1,436 nautical miles there’s confinement, ‘chugging through the Mexique Bay, cutting its dark flat waters in swelter of heat and noise.’ Freya writes to her husband  ‘I hope I may never have to travel in a troopship again; regimented from morning to night... It really is sordid.’

No punkahs here

Perhaps it’s privation that intensifies British upper-crust solidarity. ‘It is a godsend to have Nancy Cunard. We omit breakfast and lie with very little on in our cabin till lunch, and then sit in hot shade with typewriter or Russian. Heat really exhausting.’  

At night the ship is ‘as bad as Delhi’, where she had enjoyed the Viceroy House’s elaborate hospitality. With not so much as a punkah to waft her now she finds: ‘the sheets scorching; and poor miserable people are down below in decks that descend to E without a breath of outside air.’

Going west, up the Pánuco River towards the lush grandeur of the ‘New Orleans of Mexico’ they’re dismayed at not being allowed ashore. Instead the sixty Poles join the ship by boat.  

Having been placed in Mexico for the last few years of the war the Polish women are now on their way to being reunited with their demobbed husbands in the Resettlement Corps in the UK. 

Diverting to Havana

Fresh water supplies are low. The ship’s desalination system isn’t adequate and currency problems mean no water can be bought in Mexico.  So there’s a new interim destination: Cuba, 93 nautical miles away. 

Over the next few days they head east past the tip of the Yucatan peninsula, then across to Havana on 3 June. Four years before the revolution, the city – ironically, architecturally similar to Tampico  –'gives a glance of opulence: wide, straight streets; porticoes, and shops; shiny rich cars: the waterfront finished off with a low parapet of stone and backed with gardens...  one has a feeling of a metropolis standing on its own feet.’  

Frying like the Ancient Mariner

But they are not allowed ashore in this city either:  ‘just frying like the Ancient Mariner on a painted ocean... how maddening not to be able to land,’ Freya tells Stewart. 

Water obtained, they can start heading north east, 4,310 nautical miles to Tilbury. 

Bermuda is a scheduled stop. However, they have to wait two days because of engine failure, which is handled at the British Royal navy dockyard. And they are held up again in Hamilton, the capital. 

The Royal Gazette reports that ‘Bermudians went all out to show hospitality to passengers and crew ... A major social event, with plenty to eat and drink, was a dance on the old Unity Patio in Happy Valley’. 

The calypsonians aboard oblige with extra music.  However passengers are shocked at the apartheid on the then-racist British imperial fortress colony island. Discrimination is especially visible in the education system. 

Posh hospitality

As in Jamaica, Freya manages a brief civilised respite ashore in Hamilton, thanks to her elite network. Vice-Admiral William Tennant (pictured). A WW2 veteran, he is briefly Commander-in-Chief of the America and West Indies Station, and hosts her overnight. 

She enjoys ‘a bathe before breakfast...  slipping down barefoot over the wet grass and finding the little cove all pure and quiet from the night and swimming out among the white birds in an almost waveless sea.’ 

On 11 June she calculates: ‘This depressing boat, eleven more days to go’. Then, as they cross the North Atlantic, two days out the weather changes from hot to cold and dry. They have rough weather for the first time. 

This is the Thames. You lot are a problem

Finally, after a thirty-two-day trip, the two women arrive at Tilbury on 21 June 1948. There they discover that their ship is being seen as not just another vesel but a floating political problem in a cash-strapped UK dis-inclined to support Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DEI) . 

The rest is known history – and modern spin. Nancy and Freya’s Caribbean shipmates disembark absolutely believing they have arrived as British subjects. That’s what the label says. 

But the post-2018 scandal about citizenship rights was to up-end that. See https://jcwi.org.uk/reportsbriefings/windrush-scandal-explained/

More info from me

• A version of this article was published in Maritime Quarterly. 
• See also my 'Women of Windrush: Britain's adventurous arrivals that history forgot,' New Statesman, 22 June 2018.   https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/06/women-windrush-britain-s-adventurous-arrivals-history-forgot
• Re Nancy Cunard. See my 'The nonconformist who sailed on Empire Windrush,' Morning Star, 22 June 2018. https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/nonconformist-who-sailed-empire-windrush

Reading more from various refreshing authors

There's much unusual reading about Windrush and its aftermath at Historycal Roots: Windrush: https://www.historycalroots.com/the-empire-windrush/