Elder Dempster - and its seawomen's history

One of the things that Liverpool shipping company Elder Dempster inadvertently did for women in the mid-twentieth century was that it gave them the chance to go to West-Africa and back, for free, as stewardesses.

Now the project Homeward Bound: A Liverpool-West Africa Heritage at Liverpool John Moores University has gathered the stories of 20 Elder Dempster seafarers, including their oral testimony. http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/elderdempster

The launch party on Friday (11 Nov) was a really great opportunity to not only meet the lively, joke-cracking elders of the company nicknamed Elder Shysters. We also enjoyed a West African band + story-telling presentation there, and heard the story of what the research process found.

Heritage Lottery-funded, this project was led by two key people Professor Nick White and Dr Ailbhe McDaid(pictured).

PROUD TO BE PART OF IT
I'm really pleased to have been involved in this project in several ways. I hope other shipping companies will follow suit while its veteran seafarers are still with us.

May Quinn, my great aunt, was one of the stewardesses (see picture of her against some of the scraps of fabric she worked with as a dressmaker after her retirement, in the 1950s). She sailed on the Apapa, which was where she met the steward she would marry, Bill Sullivan.

NOT ALOFT, BUT DUSTING THEIR WAY ROUND THE WORLD
It's because of May, really, that I came to be an historian of women's maritime pasts.

After her death I realised that stewardessing was the way adventurous working-class women managed to see the world for free. They dusted their way round it.

But no-one seemed to have written anything about these dynamic women, then. Someone should, I thought. Then I realised that person would have to be me. And so in the 1980s I started interviewing veteran stewardesses. And I went on, and wider...

You can read the stories of May, and of Julia Andrews (whose descendents I interviewed way back) via the link above.
To read about Liverpool JMU's version of the launch event see:
https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/news/future-proofing-history#Find

But here today are pictures of the women, some of which will be eventually posted on Homeward Bound's website. Julia is pictured here with passengers in the late 1920s.

Her friend, another ED stewardess, name unknown, walks with a West African woven shopping basket.
Objects change countries. Seafarers were important transmitters of culture knowledge - of which souvenir objects are a material symbol.

The basket lid to the side of her photo is from my old and similar sewing basket. It may indicate the colours of her original basket: this material evidence that she had indeed ventured far away to the country that was called the White Man's Grave - and come back.

Elder Dempster - and its seawomen's history

One of the things that Liverpool shipping company Elder Dempster inadvertently did for women in the mid-twentieth century was that it gave them the chance to go to West-Africa and back, for free, as stewardesses.

Now the project Homeward Bound: A Liverpool-West Africa Heritage at Liverpool John Moores University has gathered the stories of 20 Elder Dempster seafarers, including their oral testimony.

The launch party on Friday (11 Nov) was a really great opportunity to not only meet the lively, joke-cracking elders of the company nicknamed Elder Shysters. We also enjoyed a West African band + story-telling presentation there, and heard the story of what the research process found.

Heritage Lottery-funded, this project was led by two key people Professor Nick White and Dr Ailbhe McDaid (pictured). (Sorry, I can't find a picture of Nick)
.

PROUD TO BE PART OF IT
I'm really pleased to have been involved in this project in several ways. I hope other shipping companies will follow suit while its veteran seafarers are still with us.


May Quinn, my great aunt, was one of the stewardesses (see picture of her against some of the scraps of fabric she worked with as a dressmaker after her retirement, in the 1950s). She sailed on the Apapa, which was where she met the steward she would marry, Bill Sullivan.

NOT ALOFT, BUT DUSTING THEIR WAY ROUND THE WORLD
It's because of May, really, that I came to be an historian of women's maritime pasts.

After her death I realised that stewardessing was the way adventurous working-class women managed to see the world for free. They dusted their way round it.

But no-one seemed to have written anything about these dynamic women, then. Someone should, I thought. Then I realised that person would have to be me. And so in the 1980s I started interviewing veteran stewardesses. And I went on, and wider...

You can read the stories of May, and of Julia Andrews (whose descendents I interviewed way back) via this link with Liverpool JMU.
https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/news/future-proofing-history#Find

But here today are pictures of the women, some of which will be eventually posted on Homeward Bound's website. Julia is pictured here with passengers in the late 1920s.

Her friend, another ED stewardess, name unknown, walks with a West African woven shopping basket.
Objects change countries. Seafarers were important transmitters of culture knowledge - of which souvenir objects are a material symbol.

The basket lid to the side of her photo is from my old and similar sewing basket. It may indicate the colours of her original basket: this material evidence that she had indeed ventured far away to the country that was called the White Man's Grave - and come back.

Dates for your diary 2015-16: my talks and papers

I will be speaking about maritime history in its broadest sense at the following events in late 2015-2016.

9 Nov 2015, Marsden, West Yorkshire.
Ayahs who travelled: Indian nannies’ voyages to Britain 1850s-1920s.
Marsden History Society, Mechanics Institute, Peel Street, Marsden. 7.30 pm. Cost £2.


14 Dec 2015, Turn, Italy.
When the ‘ladies’ took to loading: a preliminary survey of gendered stevedoring practices in history
and
Pioneering sea women: what helped them break through – and climb to the top.
At the maritime section of the first Conference of the European Labour History Network (ELHN), afternoon session.

Jan 11 2016, Hull. Women on the bridge: 150 years of patchy progress in equal opportunities in maritime work, 1855-2015.
Maritime Historical Studies Centre, Blaydes House, High Street, Hull, 6pm. Cost free.

4 Feb 2016, London. Hilarious Seasickness: Comic Postcards' Take on Travel's Costs, 1900-1950.
At King's Maritime History Seminar, at 17:15 in Room K6.07, Dept of War Studies, Kings College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS (6th Floor, King’s Building). Cost free.

26-27 Feb 2016. Manchester. Cabin ‘boys’: cross-dressed women seafarers and their sexualities
and
a master class jointly with Emma Vickers:Doing Oral history with LGBT interviewees at Imperial War Museum North.
LGBT History Festival. Exact slots tbc. http://lgbthistorymonth.org.uk/

Asian seamen

Today I've decided to expand this blog to include race, as there is so little information available about black and Asian seafarers, and because I am so interested in how socially excluded groups get on in that exceptional space, the ship at sea.

I've just been scrolling through a Commonwealth War Grave Commission CD that lists Merchant Navy seafarers who died in WW2. There are hundreds, if not a few thousand, of 'Lascars'. It took me hours to get just through the section for those surnamed Abdul. Asian jobs included Tindall, Topas, Seacunny, Serang, Bhandary, Paniwallah, and Cassab.

If you search on-line bookstores like Amazon just using the search term 'Asian sailors' or 'Lascars' you may have found it hard to uncover any books on Asian seafarers on British ships. So I've just compiled an initial list (all other suggestions welcome), and posted a review of the most overlooked book: Sons of the Empire: Oral history from the Bangladshi seamen who serve on British ships during the 1939-45 War. Compiled and edited by Yousuf Choudury and published by the Sylheti Social History Group in Birmingham in 1995, it's now quite hard to find.

My review for Amazon said "This collection of interviews with 16 Bangladeshi seamen is so valuable, as very little information is available about the thousands of Asian men who worked on British ships. I've just been investigating the (unsung) numbers of them who died in WW2, and this book is great because it shows the human story behind the statistics. It's complete with photos of the men as they were in later life when settled in England. I particuarly liked seeing pictures of the white and Asian women they married, even though I'd have liked more text about such women."

Books on Black and Minority Ethnic Seamen include:

UK

Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers: Life stories of pioneer Sylhetti settlers in Britain, (no editor listed), Tower Hamlets Arts Project, London, 1987.

Yousuf Choudury (compiler and editor) Sons of the Empire: Oral history from the Bangladeshi seamen who serve on British ships during the 1939-45 War. and published by the Sylheti Social History Group in Birmingham in 1995.

Neil Evans, ‘Regulating the Reserve Army: Arabs, Blacks and the Local State in Cardiff, 1919-45’ in Race and Labour in Twentieth Century Britain, edited by Ken Lunn, Frank Cass, 1985, pp.68-115.

Michael H Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600-1857, Permanent Black, 2005.

Laura Tabili, ‘We ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Justice in Late Imperial Britain, Cornell University Press, 1994.

Laura Tabili, ‘ “A Maritime Race”: Masculinity and the Racial Division of Labor in British Merchant Ships 1900-1939,’ in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920, edited by Margaret S Creighton and Lisa Norling, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1996, pp 169-188

US
W Jeffrey Bolster, ‘ “Every Inch a Man”: Gender in the Lives of African American Seamen,’ in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920, edited by Margaret Creighton and Lisa Norling, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1996, pp 189-203.

W Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail, Harvard University Press, 1997.

Bernard C Nalty, The Long Passage to Korea: Black Sailors and the Integration of the U.S. Navy, Naval Historical Centre, 2003.

Martha S Putney, Black Sailors: Afro-American Merchant Seamen and Whalemen Prior to the Civil War (Contributions in Afro-American & African Studies), Greenwood Press, 1987

John Darrell Sherwood, Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet During the Vietnam War Era, New York University Press, 2007.

Adolph W Newton and Winston Eldridge, Better Than Good: A Black Sailor's War, 1943-1945, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis. Naval Institute Press, 1999 (re WW2)

Women at sea in the Falklands War

Over recent years the stories of eight women who I’ve talked to about being at sea in the Falklands conflict have all been fairly different - predictably.

But this last month the narratives of three women who were on the QE2 (which acted as a troop carrier in summer 1982) made me see how very different a ship seems to each individual. War artist Linda Kitson and civilian nurses Jane Yelland and Di McLean told such different versions that I sometimes wondered if we were talking about the same ship.

The difference is not just in the way the stories are narrated, but the activities in which the women engaged (Kitson drawing rapidly [see her work, above left], Yelland and McLean dealing with crew injuries, then later wounded troops) and the way they saw their social situation and options. Yelland was on ‘her’ ship, McLean on ship for the first time, and Kitson – an experienced traveler - enmeshed in a floating world of young military officers.

Indeed, they barely knew about each other. Even today McLean has never seen Kitson’s drawings of what was going on on deck while she was nursing below. As for the laundresses’ experience, I fear it is lost to history.

Similarly, women on other ships (nurses and admin workers), such as the Uganda and Canberra, had very different experiences – the Uganda because it was a hospital ship and the Canberra because it was attacked.

I’m listening to these women for my forthcoming book on women and the sea in WW1 and WW2. But it seems like women’s experience of sailing to and from the Falklands also deserves a book. It was both the last of the traditional wars and the first war in which civilian women were so close to a combat site.

Lesbians in Navy: new story

Ex-Wren Jacqui De La Maziere – and over 80 other gay service personnel - fought against unfair dismissal for 16 years. Now they have just lost their case. Jacqui tells her story in an interview she gave me for the Sailing Proud Archive on Nov 19 2008. You can hear it yourself by visiting the Archive at Merseyside Maritime Museum. www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/archive. And read online her letter to the Guardian, Nov 13 2008, ‘Sacked for being gay, we deserve better.’

Really, the early 1990s were the worst time to be a dyke in the Navy. It was bad enough that women were being newly allowed to enter this very male insitution. It was even worse that they were setting foot on men’s hallowed ships. And it was more affronting again if they were not going to be (heterosexually) available.

This ex-Sea Cadet also gives an interesting insight into the puzzle of why some Wrens didn’t grab the chance to sail when it first came in 1991. After 70 years of frustratedly living with the motto ‘Never at Sea’ maybe some did not appreciate that they would get less leave than male shipmates. She wanted to sail with equal rights.

PARTNERS OF ROYAL NAVY PEOPLE

Have you ever wondered what it's like to have a partner in the Royal Navy? Now you can find out, via the Royal Navy Museum. In June and July I recorded 18 interviews with partners for the museum's web-based resource and the archive. They include:

• wives of submariners and men on surface vessels from the 1950s to today
• a member of a gay male civil partnership
• a male partner of a naval woman. He copes with the kids while she's at sea
• naval personnel from the Caribbean, which is one of the new places where the navy recruits

Images, and extracts from their stories, will soon be available on-line within the Family Matters section of Sea Your History at http://www.seayourhistory.org.uk/

And you can listen to entire interviews by visiting the Royal Naval Museum, Historic Dockyard, Portsmouth, PO1 3NH. Phone 02392 727 562. http://www.royalnavalmuseum.org/index.htm . Make an appoinment, to be sure the information is ready to be accessed. It's just being processed as I write.

What interested me most in recording the interviews? It was finding out about the way wives were so incredibly supportive of seagoing husbands. I can't see how the Royal Navy could survive without this dedicated back-up.