Male allies of ‘mistress mariners’: 1928

‘Should – could – a woman be given a master’s ticket? In effect, could a member of the ‘fair sex’ ever be a ship’s captain? That was the formal topic discussed at Southampton Master Mariners Club in late May 1928. By fluke I’ve just discovered this debate, while looking through online newspaper archives.

‘Thirty-one members ... laughingly voted against, and two have solemnly voted for, the suggestion that women are fit to command ships at sea,’ recorded the UK’s Truth.

The picture shows some of those Southampton Master Mariners' Club members a little later, enjoying  their first Sea Pie Supper, 1929. The founder, Captain SN Braithwaite, is fifth from left on the back row. 

Why does one local discussion matter? Because it was so well-publicised. And it reveals contemporary thinking about the gendered sea, in one of the most significant ports anywhere.

'Women’s Place on Board Ship' was the first debate the club had, after it was founded in February 1928.

And the SMMC's members’ words had a global impact in the English-speaking world. Newspapers in the US and Australia announced the decisions taken by these Hampshire captains of some of the greatest ocean liners.

Although the articles didn’t make the front-page, many  ran along the lines of the Lowell Sun’s: ‘Old salts object to women mariners.’

Equality in context

At that point in the UK women’s equality was anyway a hot topic. The Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act was due to come into effect in only four weeks’ time, on 2 July. This law meant that, at last, all women had the vote.  

And a yachtswoman, Lady Rasch, (c1880-1944) (pictured) had just been awarded her yachtmaster’s ticket. Katherine’s feat was greatly acclaimed in the society pages of newspapers, including in the US, that month. 

Actually the British Board of Trade had, since 1907, been allowing women to be awarded yachtmasters’ certificates, although it may only have been an honorary award before Lady Rasch’s time. 

Lady Ernestine Brudenell-Bruce (1871-1953) had begun the fight for that right in 1898, when she was not allowed to take her ticket at the end of her course at a Liverpool Nautical College. She leaked the BOT correspondence to newspapers as far away as New South Wales. 

Mr Ingram R Walker of the BOT told Ernestine ‘I am directed by the Board of Trade to state that they have always considered and held that a “master’s certificate” clearly implies that it is confined to men.’  

She carried on sailing anyway. So did some other unticketed yachting stars such as Mrs Grace Schenley (pictured, courtesy of Classic Boat Museum, Isle of Wight).

Furthermore, women officers were already on liners. Since 1919 ships had conductresses who acted as social workers for solo female emigrants. And nursing sisters had been accorded officer status on ships for two decades.
 Victoria Drummond (pictured, courtesy of Catherine Drummond-Herdman)) had become the world’s first female marine engineering officer in 1922.

What a question

So why weren’t women fit to command ships – or even work on them as deck officers – according to the conservative, and possibly tongue-in-cheek, chaps of 1928?
There’s much confused reporting, which ignores – ahem – the slight difference of scale in the business of commanding a yacht as opposed to that complex cluster of operations, the ocean-going ships.

But the two main reasons appear to be:
1. ‘The life of the sea breeds characteristics, particularly in the way of vocabulary, not best suited to female comradeship’ went one argument in the Truth. Presumably this was a metonymic way of saying that women belonged to a separate and more refined culture. Therefore mutual intelligibility was impossible.

 2. Sex-segregated space on board would be required, as the women worked their way up the ranks. ‘Whether they enter as apprentices or ordinary seamen, women would have to be berthed apart from the rest of the crew ... I cannot imagine shipowners relishing such an additional demand upon space’ was another obstacle raised in the Truth. The same argument was still being used to exclude women from ‘men’s jobs’ in the 1970s.

Bossy boots

The Truth’s writer thought the discussion in the press which led to the Master Mariners’ vote ‘started from the wrong end.’ He focused on unladylike bossiness:

‘That women have the mental ability to take an extra-master’s "ticket" nobody will doubt. That a large type has fitness to command men anybody with knowledge of boarding house landladies will readily agree.’  (Such  businesswomen were stereotyped as the epitome solo female tyrants). The H  Ryder Haggard characterisation of a woman as ‘She who must be obeyed’ had been jocularly circulating for 38 years by then.

However, the Truth also added somewhat sensibly ‘‘But command of a ship is a goal at the end of a long and very hard  road ...  and the real question is whether women have the physical and temperamental endurance to travel that road.’

Leaking Pipeline Syndrome is still a problem today. The obstacles to women ‘flowing on’ in a lifetime career are now recognised as including that:

• the on-board social climate can be hostile to women, even on passenger ships
• shipowners’ non-family-friendly working arrangements  force women to choose between motherhood and career.

How to solve the problem?

So what was to be done, in 1928? In a world where all training ship cadets were male the Truth’s reporter suggested ‘A training ship for women might meet the case up to a point ...  but at the end of their probation the same difficulty of "mixing" would occur.’

‘The real solution would seem to lie in an all-woman "manned" ship,’ (something partly attempted in 1960s China).

The Truth then mentioned precedents: that women disguised as men had got on quite successfully in the maritime past: ‘celebrated examples of successful disguise [included] ... Hannah Snell, Mary Read, Ann Bonny, and Mary Ann Talbot.’

He did not deduce that these disguised women’s success (in low-ranked shipboard roles) proved that the problem was not women’s actual lack of intrinsic competence.

Rather their feats were proof that trouble only occurred because men imagined that any woman who was visibly female must somehow be too cowardly to climb up masts or to survive bad voyages without going into hysterics over the wet chintz cushions or possible damage to her nail varnish.

Male allies

It’s no surprise that the elite Southampton gatekeepers protected their professional enclave.  But it’s telling that two men voted for in support of women - if only for the pleasure of playing devil’s advocate. Today women recognise that male mentors are important. In 2017 the Women’s Engineering Society instituted the Men as Allies Award.

But who were those two enlightened masters mariners nearly a century ago, who deserve retrospective awards?

 1.       The first can barely be traced. Captain SN Braithwaite, MBE, was at that time the Marine Superintendent for the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company and seemingly in his 50s. In WW1 he had been honoured for his part in the Dardanelles campaign, as captain of the troopship Cardiganshire, which took soldiers out to Gallipoli. 

He had organised the founding meeting of the SMMC, in the RMSPC staff dining room, just a few months earlier. He later went on to become Staff Captain, then Captain, of the Club. In 1933 he became president of Southampton Shipping Golf Society. So maybe his opinion carried some weight.  In other words he was popular and a networker. Often male supporters of maritime women were fathers of lively daughters, but his family life is not known.

Captain Braithwaite declared to the press ‘We have women mayors and councillors, women lawyers, women doctors, why not women master mariners? Personally I should not mind serving under a woman master.’

 2.    Maritime women’s second ally was John Archibald Rupert-Jones, the hydrographer to the Southampton Harbour Board. Then 54, he had been decorated for his RNR service in WW1. And he was esteemed for his survey of St John’s harbour (1912) and Chronological Order of the Introduction of Steam-Propelled Vessels into the Royal Navy’ (1927).

He was married to a farmer’s daughter, and had grown up in an applied intellectual and taxonomic situation: John’s father was the distinguished professor of geology and palaeontologist Thomas Rupert Jones (1819-1911). Thomas had been teaching at Sandhurst when John was born. This background may suggest John was a person who would not have readily tolerated untrained, undisciplined people ‘interfering’. In other words, he wouldn’t be someone to gallantly support just any women fancying herself in gold braid. But he would be able to make space respectfully for those who were competent. 

Beatie Fry: mutiny ‘absurd’

John Rupert-Jones named Mrs Beatie Fry as a ‘living example of a woman who would be a capable master mariner.’  The Press Association journalist on the story gathered some quotes from Beatie Fry (formerly Holme Sumner, 1842-1966). Then aged 66 she was one of the best known female authority figures in Merchant Navy circles as, effectively, the head of the training ship Mercury for three decades. 

‘She who must be obeyed’:  Beatie with her friend Admiral Sir James Somerville to her left. These images are from Ronald Morris’ biography of her, The Indomitable Beatie (2004).

From girlhood she had been notorious for her ‘manly’ disregard for feminine conventions: she rode astride, wore masculine clothing and had been involved in a sex scandal.

Beatie Fry joined this SMMC debate by asserting she would ‘have liked to see women given the chance of becoming master mariners. The necessary qualifications which she named, nerve [“not nerves”], comprehension, self-control, and stamina were, she considered, present in some women as in some men.'

‘She herself frequently led the boys of Mercury aloft, a feat which she considered presented no difficulty to the average woman. Like [Prime Minister Stanley] Baldwin, she was convinced you cannot cheat the sea: competence for the job, and competence alone, can save a skipper’s face and make a skipper’s reputation.’ 

‘Such competence would, she considered, be recognised and reverenced by a crew as readily in a woman as in a man skipper. Mrs Fry’s robust and generous faith in her own sex is both convincing and refreshing’ opined The Woman’s Leader.

‘Asked “What about mutiny?” Mrs Fry said “There would be no fear of mutiny if a woman were in command. As for sea-sickness, a woman is no more liable to sea sickness than is a man," reported the Nottingham Evening Post.

Two weeks later Captain Thomas Luther Evans, who had 29 years’ experience, told the Western Mail her claim was ‘absurd and impracticable.’ He ‘would strongly advise her to drop a subject for which she is totally incapacitated.’

Women today

‘Today thirteen of the club's 250 members are women,’ says SMM Club membership secretary Barry Peck. 'Of these, five as Master Mariners  and one is a Younger Brother of Trinity House. times have moved on since 1928. '

Captain Rachel Dunn NMN, is an example of this. ( Pictured above on the Admiralty pilot boat after bringing in HMS Dauntless, Portsmouth 2015.

She joined in 2000 when five month’s pregnant with her twin girls.
‘It’s a great place to have knowledgeable collective discussions about how to create a comradely happy ship.’
She found the members were still so unused to female captains that they mentored her and saw her as a novelty. But they respected her endeavour.

When she became the first female captain of the Club in 2019 she did not want her gender to be commented upon in the media. ‘I was a ship’s master and my qualifications were just the same as those of any other captain of the club,’ this STEM ambassador told me this week.

 What does it mean?

This SMMC debate, and its global publication, is not only a really useful way of understanding gendered social ideas about women in authority in the maritime past.

 It’s also a way of figuring out which women were being seen as significant in the maritime world of that period: the notorious Beatie Fry, Victoria Drummond, and Lady Ernestine Hunt (nee Brudenell-Bruce). Their aristocratic backgrounds helped them rise.

By contrast their forbears, such as Hannah Snell, succeeded despite being working-class, because their gender was invisible to their shipmates and because they did not seek authoritative positions.

 --

(The author is grateful to Barry Peck and Terry Clark of the SMMC, and to  Rachel Dunn, for their co-operation over this article).

Victoria Drummond! You're in a P&O exhibition.

An open letter to the late Victoria Drummond (1894-1978).
Good morning Miss Drummond,
You don’t know me. But I know of you. First of all may I say what a privilege it is to be addressing the world's first woman marine engineer.

Women on the Waves: courtesy of P&O Heritage

This letter is to tell you about a new online exhibition that includes you, in the context of your former employers, P&O. The exhibition is WOW – Women on the Waves. P&O’s Pioneering Women Seafarers: Past, Present and Future. https://www.poheritage.com/the-collection/exhibitions/wow-women-on-the-waves.
In it 23 'boards' tell the story of how women have risen from stewardess in the 1820s to captain in the 1990s.
You are there on one of the later boards: 'Exceptional Engineer.' The information about your success in becoming an engineer despite the odds comes just after the advent of ships' nurses in the 1920s, and good way before the start of women in deck and engine jobs in the 1970s.
Yes, women who were in WW2 – like you – are visible there, being stalwart and even getting medals for it, as you were.
The exhibition mentions that you were on the TSS Mulbera. I wanted to know more, and to see those 1927-28 years in context, so I’ve been looking them up in the biography published by the Institute of Marine Engineers. You were its first lady member.

1970s and equality struggles

You'll remember that in the decade just before you died in 1978 there was a lot of equal opportunities legislation (and behind the scenes struggles to shape it and enforce it). That pressure enabled women engineers to start doing the job that were right for them.
They progressed, even though many men thought it was unsuitable for a woman; it was as if all your decades of work hadn’t proved anything.
The exhibition shows how much young women cadets began to do legitimately – but not easily – what you had to do solely through personal struggle and your contacts.

Your first ship: Blue Funnel's Anchises, 1922-24

Cherry Drummond, your niece, edited your words about your career. So we know about your first ship, the Anchises, which was slightly larger than your next ship and had a triple expansion steam engine.
You were the Tenth Engineer. https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/stories/victoria-drummond-inspirational-woman-international-womens-day  At 27 you were quite old to be starting in such a basic position but delighted. The Far East and Australia were among your destinations.
 You got on well with Malcolm Quayle, the permanent Second Engineer on the Anchises. I'm glad he stood up for you against the persecution by the relief Second, Mr Howard. Mr Waite, the Chief, liked you too.
You called Malcolm 'the Hedgehog'  and he called you 'Kate' because you, like him, were prickly; it was a reference to stroppy Kate in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
But then Blue Funnel Line wouldn’t carry on employing you. You guess they feared there would be a scandal about your closeness with the (married) Second. And maybe there was more to it than that, too.

Sailing on BIS's Mulbera, 1927-28

You had almost three years on land, when you passed your Second Engineer's exam (Steam). Third time lucky.
Then began the period when you were with the British India Steam Navigation Company BIS) which became part of P&O. That period makes 34 pages in your memoirs. You explain that although you'd passed your Second Engineer's exams you were unable to get any shipping company to employ you, at any level:

‘I got Mummy to write, too, to everyone we could possibly think of. Suddenly I heard that British India Line would possible take me. I rang them and [was told] "Lord Inchcape is agreeable to your sailing with the company and therefore I think I shall put you on the TSS Mulbera, 9,100 ton, turbine-driven, oil fuel burning, running out to East Africa. She goes to just below Mombasa.The Chief and Second are both very nice"' (p112) 

Finally you began on 12 April 1927, age 32. The Mulbera was a medium size passenger-cargo ship, built in Scotland like you. Under Captain WR Steadman you were one of 153 crew.  You don’t mention the cargo. Your steward was Indian and didn’t speak English, so ‘I started working on my Hindustani books.’ (p113).  I wonder if you spoke it to any other Asian crew too.
Via ancestry.co.uk I’ve seen a digitised version of the Mulbera  passenger list – which maybe you scanned in reality on that trip. The list shows us the names of the 23 passengers (some of whom were rude to you as a  WOMAN engineer). You were headed for Colombo, Calcutta, Madras, and Port Said. They were all ports you knew.

Mulbera, courtesy of P&O Heritage

You were pleased with your cabin, as you would be:  BIS ships were known for their beauty, especially the polished hardwood:‘It was a much more comfortable room than on the Anchises ... [but] there was not much privacy as both ports opened on the deck and any passenger could look in. In addition, I had to share a bathroom.’(p113)  
It wasn’t seemly for women to share with men, so perhaps you had shared it with lady passengers including two ladies travelling solo in second class: Margaret Copeland, a Tunbridge Wells nurse, and Phoebe Parsons ,a school inspector from Hornsey.

Mulbera crew, with Victoria on extreme right, second row, seated. Image courtesy of Catherine Drummond-Herdman. 

Down in the engine room you were surprised at the difference it made to be on an oil-fuelled ship, unlike the Anchises. ‘This was balanced by the noise of the turbo generators, which was so strong I could not hear myself shout in the engine room. At first it made my head ache but I soon got used to it.’ (p113)
And for the next three years you sailed as Fifth Engineer, mainly to East Africa,

No paparazzi

In the 1970s P&O, like other shipping lines, celebrated the advent of young techie women. They were in newspapers, some even had their vital statistics referred to, and certainly their hair colour and prettiness.
Hardly anyone had celebrated your achievement, only The Woman Engineer, 50 years earlier. It  is  the journal of the Women's Engineering Society, which had begun just three years earlier. In 1924 it pictures you on your first ship, the Anchises. (pictured).

A couple of years later The Woman Engineer for December 1926 mentions you had popped into their London offices ‘to announce the good news that she had just obtained her Second Engineer’s certificate ...  after making six trips on the Anchises.’
Your colleagues from the Anchises, the article said,

‘have paid many fine tributes ... [including] "she was been a wonder to us. She has done everything that could be expected of a man engineer. She has taken the usual day and night watches, and has never been known to miss a watch, no matter how high the sea has been, nor how hard the work."' 

I’m glad you felt able to promote your achievements, as other pioneers did in those pages.  Of course WES didn’t mention the social costs, the price paid for the success.

Today most people don't know how hard it was for your successors in the 1970s too. Some pioneers have told me privately how much they struggled, and had grit their teeth. Some wrote home about it. Others kept schtum; they didn’t want to upset their families or risk their career progression.

Surviving bullying

Their misery is not recorded in this, or any, exhibition, so far, However, fortunately there is now much general campaigning for these women's rights, include the right to just get on with your job and not to be harassed.
Your words about the Mulbera reveal a couple of problems that are still typical today. The main challenge was hostility from your second engineer, Mr Lamb.
At 34 he was, you say, as tall and thin as the Chief was short and fat, and as hostile as your chief was fair.He seems to have taken an irrational dislike to you, bullied you, and indeed punished you.
You came to nickname him the Tiger Cat, for his vicious attacks.(p113). If he'd been fair he'd have let you have time off to recover from your injured thumb.  Instead, the problem was prolonged for years.
Mr Stuart, your ‘very Scottish’ Chief, was indeed 'nice' and stood up for you when the Tiger was cruel again.

 ‘One day he was bad I went to the Chief and told him in confidence about my trouble. The Chief was very understanding and I felt better now that he knew my position.’ (p122)

Excuse me noticing, Miss Drummond, however, that you don’t say he took any action (although you say of a later complaint, ‘The Chief fixed the Tiger Cat good and proper’’ p128.
Also you call it ‘my trouble’, taking it on yourself. Did you not see the Tiger as behaving in an oppressively discriminatory way that would have troubled any woman?
Do you think the Tiger Cat – maybe like the relief Second you’d briefly dealt with on the Anchises – felt threatened by a woman being capable of passing the same exams that he had passed?
 At the end of your trip ‘the horrid Tiger was spreading such nasty stories about me that I thought it best not to stir anyone up so that I could just get my last two voyages in.’ 
Young women today say being constantly chipped at grinds them down. You too.‘I was so unhappy. It was such a miserable world,’ you said. (p140)

The legacy of good mentors

But you had good times too, including happy runs ashore. And I'm very struck by the way your late friend and mentor, Malcolm Quayle, 'the Hedgehog' from Anchises,  helped you from beyond the grave. On the Mulbera at 2am one night close to Calcutta, when you were dog tired, you had forgotten to do a job:

‘Suddenly I heard a voice behind me say, “I say, Kate old thing, slip down and sound the settling tank.” I looked around and there was nothing, but the old Hedgehog might have been at my elbow. I hopped down to the Engine room and found the settling tank stood at 1 ton, the least amount that could be allowed before changing over. If I had not changed over then all the fires in the boiler would have gone out!
Another time I was taking a blow on top and I felt someone close behind me, and then the Hedgehog’s voice said, “Kate, a freezer engine connecting rod bearing is hot.” I ran down and it was!” (p148).  

What next

In 1927 the Tiger Cat’s behaviour was the reason you left British India's Mulbera: that and the lack of enough leave. When you left

 'the splendid Chief gave me a first class reference; attentive to her duties, civil, willing, and obliging and I hope to hear of her future success. She is of an exemplary character." How Jean and Frances laughed when they read that, or had it repeated to them by me, as they often did.' (p150)

Then for 12 years you were ashore, mainly in London, initially working for the Chief's certificate, trying to scratch a living, and getting to know the new babies in the family.  (Catherine, the grand-daughter of your brother John, was later to help with this new P&O exhibition.) You went to visit Mr Stuart, who had just retired from British India, in Chingford. At his request you gave him a little black cocker spaniel like your dog, Sox. You later heard that Mr Stuart

'would sit in his chair in the dark, with the photo of me pulled close to his side, and listen to the scrape of the little dog's feet on the floor.'  

It must have been hard to lose both him and your dear Hedgehog. Engineers do die young. Did it make you wonder if your life would be brief, too, if you carried on up the ladder?
There’s external evidence that you continued to have strong identity as a woman engineer. You don’t mention it in your autobiography but WES recorded that in June 1928 you were a speaker at the Electrical Association for Women conference in Glasgow.
In keeping with the theme "Women’s Work in the Modern World", your session was on Business and Professional Women. In it you spoke about engineering and were referred to as 'the first seagoing woman engineer’. Maybe you got the chance to go home to Megginch too.

Megginch today:http://megginchcastle.com/

WW2 – anew phase

When WW2 began in 1939 you say:

'I felt it was time for me to get back on a ship. I was desperate. I wrote sending my certificates of competence, my list of voyages on the Anchises and the Mulbera, recommendations from the captains and Chiefs I served under, to anyone I could think of ... No one would have me. They might be short-staffed but that was no reason to employ a woman engineer. And certainly not in wartime.' (p177)

 You went down to the Royal Albert Docks and in a cafe you were

 'hailed by a cheery voice, my old donkeyman from the Mulbera', who you had last seen 11 year earlier. “Hullo, Fifth! Come and have a cup of tea on us’ he urged. When you explained about your futile job search he offered ‘” I tell you what I would do, sail under a foreign flag.'' And so the Mulbera donkeyman fixed it for you, telling you ‘"You got us out of a spot in Hamburg with your German. One good turn deserves another."

He introduced you to a man recruiting for tramp ships. Initially he was rather shocked – a woman! – but then saw your documents and approved: "You have been in two of the best companies ... Blue Funnel and British India.’ (pp 177-8) 

And so you began the rest of your seagoing career, never again sailing with any ships of what became the P&O group. I'm sure you would have done so, had they offered you work – work commensurate with your status.
And you became recognised as a hero in 1941, with your MBE and Lloyds Medal for Bravery.
You often worked in a lower-ranked jobs, on your many ships (which people can read about on Wikipedia). No-one persecuted you as badly as on your first two ships. And you died in 1980, finally ‘Finished with Engines’, as Cherry said.

Oil painting of VD in uniform, by Philip Agnew Lambe, 1947. Courtesy of Catherine Drummond-Herdman.

You through modern eyes

Miss Drummond, I think you'd like this P&O exhibition, including the unusual pictures your descendent Catherine Drummond-Herdman loaned to it.
Seeing you in it will mean a lot, too, to the modern women I’ve met, who’ve won the Nautilus Award named after you, and studied in the University of Solent engineering block that bears your name.
Getting this new angle on you, in your P&O context, has shown me that I'd like to go to your old home, Megginch, which is still the family's private home, to get a sense of your progress from Perth to the Orient: a woman who liked engines and travel.


Thank you for persevering with your impressive career, and for putting up with the Mr Lambs and Mr Howards of this world.
Hopefully new protocols will never mean young women have to suffer again the attacks of unfair bosses in lonely ships far from home support. Thank heaven for the Hedgehogs and Mr Stuart of the world.   
With esteem, from a woman who writes the histories of your seafaring sisters and belongs to WES because she supports women’s right to do STEM work.
Jo