Indian women shaping maritime life : early 20C

Indian maritime women are to be one of the three focuses of Rewriting Women into Maritime History later this year. This Lloyd's Register Foundation Heritage Centre initiative will also be focusing on women in Greece and Australia. 

As a historian of gender at sea, who has studied many countries in passing, I’ve been fascinated to work on this topic as part of the team. 

What was my biggest surprise? Sumati Morarjee and Maniben Kara, two women involved in the organisation of the industry. 

They were women without UK counterparts. It’s eye-opening to find the Indian pattern is totally different to the UK's. 

Both women were born of elite families in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Both had made voyages between India and the UK.

 

Sumati Morarjee

Sumati Morarjee (1909-1998) has been called India’s first ‘first lady of commercial shipping’. Born to a Bombay merchant prince, she married into the growing Scindia Steam Navigation Company, which had been founded in 1919. She was in the managing agency at fourteen, at I923. Narottam Morajee, her father-in-law trusted her and renamed her Sumati, ‘she of superior intellect,’ not Jamuna.

Sumati was a lively leader of the SCI throughout the time when Indian shipping was being stifled by the dominance of UK companies such as the British India Steam Navigation Company (whose ships so many women voyagers to India sailed on). Between 1942 and 1946, Sumati was involved in the underground movement for Independence.

In 1946 she took charge of Scindia’s managing agency. When her friend Mahatma Ghandhi jokingly asked if she’d usurped her husband Shanti’s office she replied ‘Have you not always urged upon Indian women to come forward and take interest in life around them?’ She was involved in day-to-day managing of the company, which later extended Scindia’s routes to Europe, the US and Australia. It became India’s largest shipping firm

But Sumati was also active in the wider industry. ‘No shipping occasion in India is without her charming presence’ said the company history.  INSOA, the Indian National Steamship Owners Association, in 1956, 1957, 1958, and 1965 elected her president.  That meant she became the first woman in the world to head an organisation of ship owners.

From 1979 to 1987, she was chairperson of the Scindia Steam Navigation company, with its 43 ships. Then the government took over the debt-ridden firm. She was later appointed as the chairperson emeritus of the company till 1992. Her death at 89 followed a cardiac arrest.

How do we know about her? She left no autobiography but there are the many fragments about her in Sumati Morarjee - Felicitations Volume,  published in 1970. I read extracts of this rare book on an auctioneer’s website, to which the link is now broken.   

 No-one like her

There was never an equivalent figure to Sumati Morarjee in the UK - or initially on the board of any other Indian shipping company. Some were socially active, but not in maritime life. For example,

Elsie Mackay, centre, on Ranchi in 1925

#   # Liverpool philanthropist Emma Holt (1862-44) of the Holt family was active in progressive causes with Eleanor Rathbone

# Emerald (1872-1948) and Nancy (1896-1965) Cunard were not active in the Cunard company, but were socialite and activist respectively

# Janie Allan (1868-1968) was more involved in suffrage politics than in the family’s Allan Line. She used it to help the suffrage cause, with tickets and funds

# Shimla-born Elsie Mackay (1863-1928), daughter of a chairman of P&O (with whom Scindia were in competition), designed interiors of two new classes of steamers, including the Cathay, Ranchi and fabled Viceroy of India). She was mainly focused on being a pioneering aviator.

Maniben Kara

Maniben Kara (1905-1979) helped found the Maritime Union of India in 1939. She was its hands-on president all her life, and very involved in many unions and in social work. 

A member of the ‘Indian Renaissance’ and colleague of MM Roy, she was highly educated and had trained at the University of Birmingham, 1928-30. She sailed back (ship unknown) with a diploma course in that new subject, social work, and was involved in much activism. 

The Maritime Union of India records that, as a founder member of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, she helped forge the MUI’s international affiliations.

As World War II progressed, the MUI ‘was cut off from seafarers trade union/organizations in other parts of the world.’ Nevertheless the Union successfully achieved affiliation to the International Transport Worker's Federation (ITF) which was based in London. Ground work for the affiliation was done by Maniben, who at that time was Vice-President

In 1944, MUI were negotiating with the Scindia Company ‘demanding parity in wages and other conditions for officers on the Indian coast.’

As a radical humanist, she was a leading activist, including publisher. But she is not on record as arguing for women to become maritime officers. That cause began in the 1970s, the decade in which she died. 

She has a continuing impact via the Maniben-Kara Labour Institute. It was founded in 1980, a year after her death, to organise education programmes for union activists, conduct research and make data bank available. Its contributions have included manuals on labour laws for women workers.

In 2017 the Maritime Union of India developed a Women’s Wing, which was founded by Saleha Shaik.

You will be able to read more about women in Indian maritime life when my findings appear on the Rewriting Women into Maritime History website later this year. https://www.lrfoundation.org.uk/news/rewriting-women-into-maritime-history-enters-a-new-international-phase

Celebrating women who map the world's oceans

 

World Ocean Day, June 7. Despite all the gendered (and racist) obstacles, women cartographers of the world's oceans have indeed made a contribution. World Ocean Day is a good day to remember them, including:

• Penelope Steel
• Marie Tharp

On June 7 2025 Greenwich's National Maritime Museum UK re-opens its new Ocean Court display area featuring the radical Spilhaus World Ocean Map projection. NMM

 Created in 1942 by oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus, the projection (see pic) shows just how central the ocean is. 

I will be celebrating Spilhaus's vision. I'll  also be raising a glass to his many overlooked female predecessors and counterparts who have informed us about the world's oceans.

PENELOPE WINDE STEEL IN 1803-19

Jamaican-born Penelope Steel (c1768-1820), a woman of colour, was a success in the field over 200 years ago. 

Penelope seems to have engraved, as well as overseen map production and sales, from 1803 to 1819. Her charts weren't a radical challenge to the standard Mercator projection, like Spilhaus's. 

But they were so useful and accurate that the Admiralty supplied the fleet with these aids. Ironically, this daughter of an owner of enslaved people created maps that would have been used by naval ships fighting the slave trade in Caribbean waters. 

Penelope Winde Steel was the mother of five. Her own mother, Sarah Cox, was a freed negro slave', possibly a 'mulatto'. Sarah partnered a wealthy white merchant, judge, and slaveowner. He made Penelope (their natural daughter) one of his heirs.  

Penelope, a wealthy Afro-Caribbean woman, became successful in London partly because she was working in collaboration with three successive husbands. Her first, who she married in 1786, was David Steel. He inherited a nautical publishing and bookselling business. It might also have been useful that her (mixed-race) half-brother and his wife were London merchants; they could network. 

 MARIE THARP IN 1950s

In the 1950s oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp (1920-2006) produced the revolutionary first map of the ocean floor. (See pic, above).

The American accidentally got into the profession partly because of WW2 shortages of experts in petroleum technology. Her father had given her some early informal training. 

She collaborated for decades with geologist Bruce Heezen. (Both are pictured).

WOMEN'S CONTRIBUTION

Earlier women were not allowed much power actually on ships. Indeed, as a woman, Marie Tharp was not allowed on ships to do her fieldwork. 

But women cartographers certainly enabled well-informed voyaging. I feel so aware of what more could have been done, had there been fair DEI opportunities for women who wanted to chart the oceans.

WANT TO KNOW MORE? 

# About women in maritime 

• Lloyd's Register Foundation Heritage Centre, Rewriting Women into Maritime initiative.RWM

# About Penelope Winde and her business 

• Penelope
• Susanna Fisher, The Makers of the Blueback Charts, A History of Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson, 2001.

# About women cartographers including Marie Tharp  

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_cartographers
• women cartographers
• Tharp and others

# About slavery and mixed-race Jamaicans in British history, including Penelope's family 

• Jamaicans
• Winde

The gloryhole queens' heroes: US maritime union activism 1930-1955

LGBT+ seafarers in UK really have no maritime union heroes. I've looked hard. 

By contrast, in the US the National Union of Cooks and Stewards (known as the  MCS for short) had a number of out activists who were 'queens.' The term was less rude than 'queer'.

The main two heroes, who remain legends, were Frank McCormick (1891-1980) (right) and 'Mickey' Blair (1917-1997). Mickey and Frank were life partners too. And they both loved dressing up and performing as women when informal theatrical opportunities were on offer.

Frank was an official and on the MCS executive. Mickey (Stephen) was a rank-and-file activist. Both were stewards, who lived in ship's gloryholes (cramped dormitories), worked 90-hour weeks, and believed in justice. 

Both had been dismised for 'homosexuality'. In Frank's case the US Navy dumped him in the 1920s. 

Among the ships Frank and Mickey worked on were Matson Line passenger vessels from California. such as the Lurline (pictured). Matson ships were known to be sites of camp subculture. 

Matson, like some UK companies, liked having gay stewards because of their perceived “feminine touch". Also companies didn't want to employ black stewards. As heterosexual white stewards wouldn't work for the low pay on offer, so willing white GBT men provided employers with a solution.

UK similarities 

• The nearest UK equivalent to Frank and Mickey is an unnamed member of NUMAST. In July 1994 this person tried to start the support group, Shore Leave. They appealed via the union's journal. Nothing seems to have got off the ground.
• The UK's main ex-seafaring activist was Mick Belsten (pictured far right, below) (1934-90). A former P&O steward, Mick became a Gay Liberation Front media worker after he'd left the sea. GLF was influenced by some of its founders' visits to the US. If Mick did ever try to encourage his union to be more progressive his efforts don't appear in any National Union of Seaman records. Mick Belsten NUS GLF

Why no progressive LGBT+ heroes?

That lack of inspiring figures seems counter-intuitive when some ships - like theatres - were the most camp workplaces in the world, c1950-1985. Floating "queer heavens" were key sites of proud informal solidarity and education.

But in those times trade unions were not so supportive of DEI as they are today. Men who were tough resisters of homophobic oppression at sea might well have recognised that shore-based formal trade union activity wouldn't have been effectve or as satisfying as workplace change-making.    

Attacks on activists in US

In the US the MCS was totally different to the usual pattern. The union had thrived in the 1930s and in WW2, precisely because it was  indeed inclusive. Membership jumped threefold to 15,000 from Frank's starting time. 

Then a post-war and Cold War backlash began. The rationale was that 'fruits' were a threat to national security. Race was not the issue; 'moral decay' and 'Communism' was.

As a result, the new Port Security Act said the Coast Guard must officially screen seafarers joining ships: one by one, every trip.

In Los Angeles on Monday November 6th 1950, Mickey, Frank and some comrades were hit by the anti-gay hysteria besetting the nation. They walked up the gangway of the Matson Liner Lurline (nicknamed the Queer-line), ready to work their way to Hawaii.

But in all eighteen cooks and stewards were turned back including Mickey, although oddly not Frank. That might have been 20% of the catering workers aboard. 

The ensuing fight-back focused on 'The Lurline Eighteen' case became a cause celebre. Scotty Ballard, a gay black steward, (pictured) led the multiracial Seamen's Defence Committee, which worked in conjunction with the longshoremen and the MCS. 

Scotty and his gay white friend Ted (Riff-Raff) Rolfs, created leaflets, sent letters, and picketed the Coast Guard offices. 

But by January 1951 almost every leff-wing steward from US West Coast ships had been removed. Three quarters of them were African American. An unknown number of the screened-off people were gay. All were progressives.

It was the start of the end for the MCS. Like other left-wing US unions, it was defeated, not least by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. 

UK: different focus

In the UK the progressive activism was against right-wing rectionary policies, rather than against homophobia, which was not mentioned. Race continued to be a thorny matter, during and after WWII. 

Preparing for the 1967 Sexual Offences Act meant that the NUS had to speak about homosexuality. It was not progressive.  

By then a new breed of gay activist was emerging: not apologist or apolitical, but confrontational, libertarian, and aware of gender politics. Mick Belsten in London was challenging homophobia but not with maritime workplaces in mind. 

Seafaring had taught him a transferrable skill: how to organise and enjoy solidarity. He wasn't involved in shipping now in any way but because he had travelled so much he was able to enjoy thinking as an internationalist.

In the wider UK, it took until the 1970s for unions to start backing LGBT+ rights, including unfair dismissals. This was a time of new anti-racism activism too. The developments were asymetrical. 

At the weekly Gay Liberation Front meetings that Mick Belsten attended 200-300 were there. Though the radicalism in LGBT+ politics declined in the 1980s, in the 1990s uneven action for minority rights really took off, especially in local government and teachers' unions.

Interweaving strands

Over in the US Frank and Mickey were aware of the changed climate created by the 1969 Stonewall riots, just as Mick was in newly-pink London. 

Frank died in 1980, just before AIDS changed gay seafarers' views of their sexual safety in foreign ports. 

Mick was by then a very effective radical journalist. In 1990 he fell victim to an AIDS-related illness, just four years before the attempt to initiate the Shore Leave support group in 1994. 

Mickey died in 1997. He surely never knew about Shore Leave, but would have been happy to advise on tactics. 

He was always pressurising Allan Berube, his union's historian, to make sure the full story of the MCS was told. Allan did so, many times, before he died in 2007. His records are crucial to the world knowing just how extraordinary this maritime activism was. 

FAQs

How come a union in any country could be supportive of LGBT+ in those early days? It was a time of general progressive support for justice for marginalised people, including black workers. We'd call it intersectionality today. 

What Frank and Mickey do? On their ships and in union headquarters they oranised, challenged, supported. The union even had its own hiring hall, to bypass shipowners.

Were Mickey and Frank acclaimed in their lifetime? They were appreciated. This was not a union that went in for hero worship, or for making activists union presidents.

What did Mickey and Frank do when the union was demolished? They settled in Seattle and were still involved in gay community theatre.

--

Are you looking for more information? Try:

Virtually: The Stephen R. Blair papers, including photo albums, can be seen at at the University of Washington Special Collections. This archive can be visited virtually, by appointment: Blair pics

On paper: see Allan Berube, My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community,and Labour History, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2011, Chapter 16.

Browsing: 

US. Waterfront Workers History Project, Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, Waterfront

UK. Roger Rosewell, The Seamen’s Struggle, Part II: The Fight for Reform, 1973, Minority_Movement

She put on his sailor gear: Hetty King, male impersonator.

It's the way she handles her pipe and acts like a jaunty Jack Tar - even when pregnant - that gets me.  And the fact that male seafarers loved it. 

Yes, female impersonator Hetty King could offer men that longed-for goodie: a glimpse into how others see us. She could also suggest that human beings have the potential to be far more than heteronormative. 

Hetty sang and posed back, doing what thousands of seafaring men had done: take on the appearance of someone belonging to a category from which they were  excluded.

In the RN and MN it was unremarkable for men to dress as  women, usually as glam stars, especially in ships' shows and in wartime. 

Les Girls, Men in Skirts, and The Kiwis are the main examples of iconic all-male touring shows in and after WW2. Usually the outrageousness (even illegaility) was sidestepped by humour.

 WHY DID SEAMEN CROSS-DRESS? 

 Putting on skirts - metaphorically over the workaday bell-bottoms - was a way for men to: 

• entertain shipmates
• express their 'feminine' aspects 
• explore heteronormativity 
• attract same-sex lovers 
• raise awareness that there was a gay community
•  implicitly make the point that gender is performed.   

Real women in the past had cross-dressed as the only way to get to sea, at a time when seafaring work was not open to women.  But for this woman, Hetty King, cross-dressing was a totally different matter again. Read on.

WHO WAS HETTY?

This music hall star born Winifred Emms (1883-1972) was a professional male impersonator who specialised in soldiers, swells and navvies as well as Royal Navy ratings and officers. 

She's most famous for being the first person to perform 'Ship Ahoy. All the Nice girls Love a Sailor' (in 1908).

For her career she travelled  a lot on ships e.g. in 1907 - to New York. It may have been on board merchant vessels that she observed MN seafaring men and thereby became adept at copying their style.

 Here are three ways that Hetty behaved differently to cross-dressing seafaring males: 

• She worked on stage on land, professionally. Not in a vessel-based workplace in the intervals of doing her proper job
• She wasn't - seemingly - exploring her sexuality and gender. Not a lesbian, she was married to men (Ernie Lotinga, 1901-1917) and Alexander Lamond (1918)-?); had at least one affair with a man (Jack Norworth); and was pregnant at least once (in 1913)
• She wasn't dressing for members of her own sex, in complex alliance  with them. She was doing it for the very men she was taking off. And they liked it.  

Many young women in WW1 posed in sailor clothes for the camera, especially if they had boyfriends who were seafarers. It appears to be an act of affinity and bold fun. It may also have expressed women's desire to live a sea life.  

SO WHY DID MEN LIKE THIS WOMAN 'BEING' THEM?

Men's enthusiasm for Hetty's shows hasn't been discussed yet, to my knowledge. 

But from my research into gender and seafaring, I believe the following reasons explain why sailors liked watching her 'be them':

• She was holding up a mirror, a flattering mirror
• It was an emotionally satisfying way of getting attention and being accompanied, known
• She wasn't trying to steal their power or be snide
• It was an ersatz way of being on stage yourself, a vicarious and safe thrill.

AFTERWARDS

Hetty carried on performing into her 90s, not necessarily as a sailor. Her songs included What Does A Sailor Care?

She sailed a lot as passenger, to New York, Cape Town and Fremantle.

in 2010 a blue plaque was erected to commemorate her at her last Wimbledon home.

In wartime her song, 'All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor' was popular, and sung in a non-camp way. The title had become a heterosexual slogan. 

Cross-dressing by men in the WW2 forces was extensive, not only on ships. Servicewoman did not crossdress for shows. 

If WW2 Wrens performed the song and cross-dressed as sailors for shows I haven't heard of that. But I wouldn't be surpised. 

Boats Crew Wrens were allowed to wear bellbottoms for their work from the early 1940s.  (See cartoon above. The watching sailors comment proudly on her neat ankles). I have not heard of any RN women who smoked pipes, as Hetty King affected to do.

Pictured left. Seafaring women pursers in the 1970s MN dress up to sing All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor in an on-board show on a cruise ship.

Women in the MN and RN today wear trousers. but sometimes skirts. Men do not have that option, except in off-duty play. 

LEARNING MORE

There's footage of Hetty King on YouTube, including an interview in 1970 where she makes up in a dressing room.

Amber Butchart has produced a fabulous anthology of women using 'sailor' fashions. See Nautical Chic, 2015.

You'll find much information about UK male seafarers dressing as women.

There's a lot on dragging up for musicals on P&O ships between the UK to Australia in the 1950s. Try our book, Hello Sailor!