Pioneering trans ex-Wren dies: Mark Rees WRNS

Trans rights advocate and author Mark Rees, who died 26 July, was the second former Wren  (member of the Women's Royal Naval Service) to transition.* The funeral was 23 August.

Mark used the pronoun 'he' later. He was first trans person to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights. While not successful in 1987, his campaigning in Press for Change had a major impact for decades.

Christine Burns, trans actvist, was the first to make the announcement on social media. She's interviewed Mark too.

# hear her very moving interview at  https://lgbtplushistorymonth.co.uk/2008/02/interview-with-trans-pioneer-mark-rees/. 

# see chapter 7 of her book Trans Britain. 

--

Mark (1942-23) was known for activism much later, not for being a 'lady Tar'. He was a WRNS driver 1962-64: a 'Motor Transport Wren'. **

I tried to interview him, for my book, Women in the Royal Navy, and then for an article on Trans seafarers. He never replied to my correspondence. I respected his choice - but regretted it. 

His dad Hubert Rees, known as William, was a merchant seaman who became an officer. Mark wanted to go to sea too. But women in the WRNS were not allowed to do so in until 1990. It appears that he didn't consider joining the MN.

Mark's career as a Wren included being interviewed aboard Captain Scott's Discovery at the Embankment; trained at Burghfield, then at RNAS Culdrose, Cornwall; and later drafted to HMS Excellent in Portsmouth. 

Mark was treated as a 'homosexual' when in the WRNS. At the time it was a homophobic organisation. The word 'trans' was barely used.

'I explained that it was my lack of femininity which posed more problems than my supposed sexuality,' Mark said in his autobiography (p56). 'Because of the lack of information, I regarded myself as some kind of "deviant" lesbian. I couldn't find another label.'

The Navy was far from understanding about diversity at that point. And some WRNS friends and officers were troubling too. But he was helped to a degree by:

# Ken, the RNAS Culdrose chaplain, with whom he remained in touch for 40 years

# the Senior Medical Officer at Culdrose, who nevertheleess 'was unable to offer any other hope regarding a "sex change". "No doctor would do that; he would regard it as a mutilation" .  The doctor was obviously unware there had been two female-to-male changes in the 1940s UK.

# a kind psychiatrist at the Portsmouth naval barracks who wanted Mark to do psychoanalysis twice a week for two years. 'I couldn't understand what the point of it all was. They'd not succeed in making me feminine unless they gave me a brain transplant.'

# warmly supportive WRNS Second Officer Nancy Thomson 'was probably of more help than the psychiatrist . I remain indebted to her.' (Nancy went on to become Deputy Director of the WRNS in 1977, active in WRNS Benevolent Trust, and was always renowned for humanity).

# Netley Military Psychiatric Hospital, who labelled Mark 'homosexual' and recommended a medical discharge as 'I was never going to settle in the service ... [so] it was almost a relief.' 

He transitioned in 1971 and published his memoir, "Dear Sir or Madam" (Cassell) in 1996. https://www.abebooks.co.uk/.../Dear-Sir-Madam.../plp. The WRNS bit is on pp50-67.

Other Wrens and diversity

*The first known Wren to transition was Stephen Davis, in 1961. Born in 1936 in rural County Durham. On marriage to a navy artificer this Wren found they could no longer pretend all was well in terms of identity. They and their husband split up. Stephen re-joined the WRNS, left again, and later transitioned F to M in the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne. Later they worked as a market clerk and planned to marry their cis girlfriend. No more is known.

**  Other path-breaking 'Motor Transport Wrens' were the famous lesbian WW2 Wren Nancy Spain. (top pic). Later a broadcaster, Nancy(1917-64)  was never formally out. 

Her partner was another Wren driver, publisher Joan Werner Laurie 1920-1964.  (Middle pic) For a time Nancy and Joan had a triangular arrangement with racing driver Sheila Van Damm. (Lower pic). 

If only Mark could have met them back them. His 1960s would have been a little easier.

High camp, ships, snaps, Cunard' s Green Goddess and the future of archives

For seafaring men who liked donning glam frocks Cunard’s Caronia II was The Ideal Place To Be in the 1960s. 

Whatever their sexual, gender or relationship identity, seafarers added extrinsic pleasure to their work aboard such luxurious cruise ships.

Quirky and hilarious photos of seafarers’ extraordinary camp subculture reveal the ways men temporarily staged themselves as flashy ladies: adorable, and irrefutably right.

Fortunately such images are still readily available online. Peter Stevens’ rich Caronia website has the most – both in colour and black and white. See at Steve's site

Frisky and outrageous camp shots appear in the context of the Caronia's  huge illustrated timeline, with its parallel strands of crew life and the ship’s voyages.

Peter Stevens' take on queer Caronia life

As a mere lad, Steve, as he’s called, long before he began this website, was a commis waiter on board the Caronia 1964 into 1965. After a spell working abroad he rejoined as a first class waiter on the 1966 world cruise.

“When I left school I was so green I could have successfully hidden undetected in a cabbage patch. So, meeting effeminate men at work, and encountering their open expressions of sexual preference, came as quite a shock. I was not a little embarrassed!

“Next stage was coping with 'gay' men who were not so 'camp'. Talk about adults being totally bewildering!

“Then there was their secret language to cope with. In Polari they could, apparently, bring you down a peg or two. After a while, I treated Polari like I'd learned French, on the basis that the only point in doing so was to be able to swear back at any Frenchman, in his own language.

“If someone wants to 'clean' me, then I wanna know - exactly - what they're saying, even if I do end up a nervous wreck. Even to this day, I'd think twice before taking on any queen!

Unusual collections elsewhere too

Steve's  pictures are complemented by the Wellcome Institute’s website, which
carries a few camp Caronia pictures. See 1950s pic above:  https://wellcomecollection.org/works/yjeyjded/items

They’re part of James Gardiner’s collection, which he created for his 1996 book Who’s a Pretty Boy Then? (Serpent’s Tail, London. Sadly, it’s now out of print.)

Several LGBT+ ex-seafarers alive today have carrier bags full of visual records of their time at sea.

But seafarers were sometimes aboard a fresh vessel every trip. That means their collections reveal the gay subculture on their many different ships, including the Andes ('the Queerest Ship Afloat’).

Caronia timeline site as special resource

It’s unusual to find collections focused on just one ship. So these visual revelations of continuous life on the Caronia are precious.

And they’re extra-precious because they reveal how very high the standard of cross-dressing was. Never before have I spent so much time peering at impeccably beautiful ‘women’ and thinking ‘Surely that can’t be a bloke?’ Take, for example, waiter Lana (Allan Horsburgh) here in a photo shared by Ave Quin.

Catch 16 substantial references to LGBT life on board, including the gay scene, the crew variety shows, a mincing laundryman, a 1962 Sandringham Parade queen, and a  tongue lashing in Polari.

There’s a search option ‘LGBT’ and much rich material on the September 1965 page and the October 1960 page. You can also find gay life at:

• Crew → Assorted crew : Party Nights
• Crew → Assorted Crew : Variety Shows
• Crew → Wareham & Bergen Trophies

What’s in shot?

Professional shots of campery at sea are usually about shipboard theatricals. By contrast, the amateur shots tend to show cabin parties, frivolity in corridors, and shore excursions.  The 1960s Caronia images follow this pattern, too.

Many pictures were taken and donated by seafarers such as Roger Birch and Ave Quin. For decades Steve has also been assiduously buying Caronia images from all over the world. The result is that we can now see camp life as part of the ship’s life, not exceptionalised.

And unusually we can also see the ship’s camp culture extending – seemingly non-problematically – into life ashore.

The Caronia annually called into Bergen where football teams made up of waiters from Sandringham and Balmoral, the ship’s two restaurants, played each other on a local pitch. (Unlike aircraft carriers, cruise ships didn’t have enough deck space for matches.)

Each team had its supporters club. They planned a new theme for each year's parade through the city. The day was filled with pageant. Seafarers in crazy costumes paraded as if skirt-wearing was just innocent fun, not an exploration into gender transgression.   

July 1964. The jolly camp day that's beautifully revealed by the Caronia website is the 1964 North Cape Cruise event. The theme was Cleopatra. Not just any old Cleopatra but Cleopatra as played by Liz Taylor in the hit movie released the previous year. 

In their spare time supporters of the Sandringham Restaurant crew had made a float featuring a huge papier maché sphinx mounted on gold-painted pallets, held aloft by ‘slaves’ in togas.  Engineers' steward Denzil ‘Pagan’ Norton posed as Cleopatra. 

For Pagan it was a day of stardom. He Luckily Steve can remember it all. He was one of the poor souls in togas lugging the heavy float through the port’s cobbled streets.

Pagan saved pictures like this, below, forever.

Star shooters and camp snappers

Photos of camp theatricals at sea are relatively available because bigger passenger ships carried a ‘floatographer’, sometimes two. They were employed by agencies such as Ocean Pictures and Marine Photo Service.  

Shipping companies’ savvy public relations experts had sussed that, if happy passengers could go home and share high-quality visual proofs of fun aboard, then valuable free word-of-mouth publicity would ensue. Professional shots of fancy dress parties like this crew Hawaiian night were enjoyed.  (Pic by Ave Quin).

On and off duty, these concessionaires photographed everything that would be lucrative. Some had an anthropologist’s eye. All knew how to compose a flattering shot.

Before the age of selfies, skilled ‘floatographers’ customers included femme crew who wanted to be recorded at the apotheosis of their transformation into stars of the below-decks hedonistic world.

These many resulting professional 10”x 8” B&W shots are a fine foil to that other genre: amateurs’ colour shots. These were a low-resolution informal record, and faded all too soon.

 It’s possible that the onboard photographer also developed risqué snaps taken by gay crew, who feared they would be reported and prosecuted if they sent their photos to Boots (the usual way films were processed at the time).

SOS: Save these snaps

It’s so important that these images are kept for posterity - and restored if needs be. Steve has worked hard to make some faded colour slides viewable.

But where next? This period's general dilemma is how to ensure websites such as Steve's have a life long after he's gone. Seafarers' stories need preserving. LGBT+ stories need preserving too. Steve says:

"After 20 years of collecting and assembling a website I've realised that I've created quite an archive in its own right.

"Along the way visitors have sent me many, many instances of often heartfelt feedback. These add still further to the richness of the social history records that the site has quietly amassed.

"Then came a steady stream of growing shocks.  Several websites that I have enjoyed over the years are suddenly no more!

"Other sites are being 'rationed' as owners succumb to the inevitable process of reaching their twilight years.

"Is this the fate that will eventually befall my Caronia Timeline? At this moment the risk is very real!

"I've found that anyone and everyone will happily accept my paper archive. They would do, wouldn't they! 

"But Instead, I've found that public bodies regard making any kind of commitment to maintaining the website as a step too far.

"If almost every piece of ephemera collected brings an aspect of the ship's history to life - and if viewing images of these saves endlessly rummaging through the originals - which is the more valuable: The archive or the social history?  More on this on Wot's New on Steve's site

READING WIDER

• Paul Baker and Jo Stanley, Hello Sailor: Gay life on the ocean wave, 2003
• Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests, 1993.
• John Graves, Waterline: Images from the Golden Age of Cruising, 2004.
• Jo Stanley, section on women ship’s photographers, in From Cabin “boys” to Captains: 250 years of women at sea, 2015, pp.206-7.

Love Me Sailor: heterosexual desire on ships

Robert S Close's 1945 novel, Love Me Sailor, was banned in his native Australia and the writer imprisoned for writing something so obscene. It was a sort of forerunner to the controversial Lady Chatterley's Lover. Most entries about the book on the web say things like 'Why on earth would it be banned? It's moderate by today's standards.'

20th century pulp novels are something seldom discussed in histories of maritime labour. But I've just read it because I think it may have been a formative book for young male seafarers in the 1950s. Something so iconic might have helped construct seafarers' sexist attitudes to women on board.

That impact is yet to be explored. But after reading these 218 pages through my particular lens, what strikes me is:

1. the book's great literary merit. This is fine writing, especially about men's romantic idealised notions of women (Ern, the violin-playing Third Mate) versus butch Bill Hawkins, the Second, who just want to get into the solo woman passenger, Emma Miller.

2. that sex is so associated with violence and power. Almost everyone on board the Annabella is focused on 'rutting' Miss Miller as magnet/object. They all have different reasons, none of which include a desire for profound and equal communication.
It is as if her presence there is both a challenge and a taunt. She is 'matter out of place' (Woman on Man's territory)and therefore has to be punished and 'rutted' into a relegated place, back in order.

3. that sexual conquering seemed to be even higher priority than saving the (sailing) ship full of nitrate in a hurricane. Why did the writer suggests such unlikely prioritising?

4. that it is so binary: Emma Miller entirely loses her charm for the men the minute it's found out that she has gone 'all mad' (she was, it seems, always a bit 'mad', which means too sexy and anxious, the result of her father abusing her).
The final lines show that, after the storm is successfully survived, thanks to Bill's toughness, this once-alluring figure is bundled off the ship onto a steam ship that will take away her polluting presence. The once-temptress is now just in a makeshift strait jacket tied with curtain wire: 'Furled in the grey blanket, she looked as stupid as a booby bird in its next...[we] looked at her ...then we moved away from her. We went over to the rail and spat.'
Insanely penetration-focused men, it seems, only want partners who are certified sane and also desire-less.

On reflection I wonder if Close (who was himself at sea) wrote this as an exploration of emotions at sea? Or a critique of machismo in a place (an old-fashioned sail ship, not a namby-pamby steam vessel) where the ultimate rugged masculinity rules and where the most Alpha male inevitably gets to be top man? After all, Bill (who was fond of young Ern) smashes Ern's violin after his death, ie he tries to symbolically banish this token of tenderness and 'civilisation'.

Or is just literary porn-come-derring-do?

I'd be interested in what other readers think.

Patsy Adam-Smith - first Australian woman seagoing wireless operator, 1950s

In looking for information about seagoing women Radio Officers I found this touching and lively memoir of a woman sailing round the Bass Strait and Tasmania area 1954-1960. Patsy Adam-Smith, There was a ship, Ringwood, Penguin, Victoria, Australia, 1995 first published 1965.

She was cook, she was on the wheel and she also operated the wireless on the small Naracoopa serving the remote Cape Barren Islands.It's rare evidence of women's seafaring work, because so few women were sailing coastally on cargo ships,in any country, at that time. She wrote:

‘To get a radio operators' certificate [Third Class] didn’t require any excess of intellect, but it did need a lot of courage to get going. The very first time I gave [our]...call sign the Melbourne operator said , "I'm imagining things today, chaps. I thought I heard a woman’s voice calling then, ha ha." It was difficult to call back after that...In time they all got over the shock’ and the operator referred to her as Mam’selle Naracoopa and ordered "Ladies first" if several senders spoke at once when Patsy was trying to transmit. (p171)

By contrast, there seems to have been only one British seagoing 'brass-pounder' at that time:Angela Firman. And she had to sail on Scandinavian vessels as British ones didn't allow women in such roles. Although women could readily acquire the skills to operate wirelesses on land, on ships it was seen as men's high(ish)-tech work

Patsy Adam-Smith (1924-2001), then the mother of a young daughter, became a prolific author. She writes well about life on board, where privacy was so respected that no-one ever asked her 'where's your husband?'

Perhaps the bonus is that she draws attention to a long-forgotten novel that seems to be the seafaring equivalent of DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Robert Close's Love Me Sailor was prosecuted for obscene libel in 1945, in Australia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Close).

It describes a lone woman's passenger's experience on a windjammer full of men. Adam-Smith comments from her own experience as a lone but affable labourer on a ketch full of men: 'There is little scope on small ship for dalliance. Lack of privacy is one dissuading factor; another is fatigue. When I read Robert Close’s Love Me Sailor I laughed and laughed'.(p143).