Big voyages and broad-minded Wrens. Dr Dorothy Hare's story.

Dorothy Hare c1955,
by FJH Whicker

March 15 1933 #onthisdayshe, Dr Dorothy Hare (1876-1967) sailed into New York as a passenger on one of the world’s stylish ships, the Aquitania.

Had she needed the doctor on board she's have seen a man; women did not become ships' doctors until over 20 years later. Female nurses, by contrast, had been working on passenger ships since c1900 . 

Sailing was nothing special to her, anyway, as a motility-minded person. Dorothy's sister had lived in Venice, her brother in Ceylon, her father in India. Dorothy herself might have settled overseas had she not been too busy pioneering a UK career in medicine.

She’d qualified in 1908 and worked in Malta for the RAMC since 1916, where only a tiny number of servicewomen had been posted.

And from 1918 she'd been the Women's Royal Naval Service Deputy Assistant Medical Director  (pictured, left, in WRNS uniform. Her gold stripes would have been interleaved with scarlet, for medics).  Dorothy was also a great frend of  the WRNS director. 

Dame Katharine Furse (right) was the  arts-minded, nurse-trained, former head of the VAD. Katharine prized her closeness with women friends. Her father was the pioneering investigator of homosexual love, John Addington Symonds. 

This may suggest that Dorothy and Katharine were part of a community where people felt able to live in gender-expansive, non-heteronormative ways. 

Celebrating

Dorothy Hare deserves to be celebrated because:

# She was a pioneering woman doctor

# She helped set up two interwar hostels for women with STDs (especially as  consequence of loosened wartime morality and high infection rates)  because such women were often cast out by families and rejected by homes for unmarried mothers. Her close friend, WRNS officer Berenice d'Avigdor,(1873-1937) set the hostels up with her.

# After retiring to Falmouth with her lifelong partner Dr Elizabeth 'Lesbia' Lepper in 1937 (left of Dorothy, in picture) and travelling the world for two years, she helped revive the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic for art students. 

Her hand-illustrated voyage journals delighted her friends. I would love to track them down. 

The women's voyages incuded sailing first class from Cape Town  on the Dunnottar Castle. 

The senior doctor in the WW2 WRNS, when it re-started, was a married mother.

See also

• https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/blog/unspoken-love-rcps-archive-four-womens-relationships
• https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/blog/which-never-can-be-suppressed-lgbtq-history-rcp-collections

.

 

WW1: remembering the women serving at sea to and from India

On this key day for remembering war's end, 11 November 100 years ago, it's good to recall the many women seafarers  who sailed. 
Yes, at least 1,700 British women were at sea in the war years. The commercial navy was not male-only.
And some 53 died at sea, about 3 per cent of all British seafaring women in that war.
They didn't look like the rosy-cheeked young stewardess in this advert. Many were over 45, even over 50. Some were mothers or motherly-looking. Many were buxom, and even tough. 
And they were white, because shipping companies thought white lady passengers would feel it appropriate that their temporary female 'servants' were not brown-skinned.

STEWARDESS CONSTANCE RICHARDS' STORY 

Who were these women seafarers and what was the pattern of their wartime life? 
The British India Steam Navigation Company records permit a good understanding of women in this company, which may be fairly typical of at least a score of other shipping companies. 
BISNC was the main company taking military men, their wives and children to and from India. It was one-class and seen as more friendly than P&O, which became its parent company.
 Mrs Constance Richards, was a widow of 51. She had been working for the BISNC for thirteen years, going mainly to Bombay and Calcutta. 
Like half the company's pre-war stewardesses Constance stayed on - and on - even though war increasingly made the seas dangerous. 

The general public thought the wartime ocean was not at all a suitable place for women.But these seafaring women were often responsible for keeping a whole family fed. 
They needed the wages. The company and seafaring life was their home. And perhaps they didn't want to leave their shipmates to shoulder the burden alone, or leave the company with staffing problems when men went off to war.

BISNC 's Mantola 

On 8 Feb 1917 German submarine U-31 torpedoed Constance's ship, the Mantola, off Fastnet, Ireland. It began sinking in very rough seas. All except seven Lascars managed to get into lifeboats.  
Shelling recommenced until  HMS Laburnum appeared. This naval ship tried to tow the Mantola, and failed; it was left to sink. 
All the survivors were landed at Bantry, about a hundred miles away, a day later.


It must have had a gruelling impact on Constance because the BISNC Court of Directors granted her '£42 being one year’s pay'. 
They agreed that 'owing to ill-health [she] is not likely to be again fit for service, also that she was 12 years in the service with a VG [Very Good] record.' (1) Very few women ever got such compensation. (But all were always 'VG').

SEA WOMEN AT WAR: BISNC                                      

The bigger picture of BISNC stewardesses like Constance Is that when the war started in summer 1914 the number of stewardesses nearly halved,from 48 in 1914 to just 25 in 1915.
Why? Partly because too few female passengers were sailing to justify the company paying out wages for women workers. Male stewards did the work instead, never mind propriety.
In 1916 women worked on 32 of the company's 38 voyages. Their ships were the Manora, Malda, Matiana, Mantola, Morvada, Mongara, Mandala, Merkara, Karagola, Neuralia, and Kyarra. Some did several voyages a year, despite the mines and u-boats.
In 1917 very few women were sailing, just 28. And by 1918, the last year of the war, there was just one BISNC stewardess  afloat.  
You can see from the table below that by 1917 women were sailing on only a third of the companies' voyages.

Date	Voyages by women crew out of total voyage of BISNC ships that year
1914	34/36
1915	26/37
1916	32/38
1917	12/39
1918	2/21
1919	25/32

Most of those sailing in the war were stalwarts from the pre-war years.  But fresh women wanted to do such work, even though it was dangerous and despite munitions work on land paying more. 
Newcomers carried on seeking a job at sea in all the wartime years: 34 women applied in 1917 alone. 
Did they know what they'd be letting themselves in for at sea? No, only in four cases.The other 30 had no sea experience at all. This suggests that the avid potential staff might have been rather naively in search of adventure without understanding the perils.

HOSPITAL SHIP REWA

Liners were often turned into hospital ships to bring wounded troops home. This happened in BISNC too. The story of the Rohilla disaster in 1914 appears at http://www.eskside.co.uk/ss_rohilla/rohilla_tragedy.htm

Mrs Fanny Roberts of Isleworth was a stewardess on the Rewa, which became a hospital ship in late 1916. It sank in February 1918, No women aboard died. 
Age about 37 (she was creative with her birth-dates) Fanny was the only Merchant Service woman aboard her ship. With her were 20 male ward attendants, who may have been the ship's former stewards. 
After the war she stayed on until 1939, making 61 voyages.                                                            

SAILING ON,  ONCE MORE

After the war many former employees came back.  The table shows how great the increase was in 1919. 
Florence Crafter, a stewardess in 1915,  was one of those who went on to  sail for the rest of the peacetime years. Born in 1884, and from Cambridgeshire, Florence made 51 voyages from January 1920 to 1937. 
By contrast Miss Evelyn Moss, Florence's shipmate from the Mandala to Bombay in 1915 , just did two post-war voyages then left BISNC, and apparently left the sea too. 
It was always a sought-after job, with more applicants than vacancies. Usually only around ten per cent got as far the interview stage.

AWARDS

In other words, seafaring women were sailing the seas on passenger ships - or even just trying to - despite the wartime dangers. 
Those who did so, like Sarah Lillian Ellis (age 58) on the Manora [see below], were  awarded, like male shipmates who'd been sailing long enough, the Mercantile Marine Ribbon and Medal [pictured], plus the British Medal Ribbon and Medal. (2)

---
References

(1) National Maritime Museum archives, Court of Directors' records, 

Vol 1, 24 October 1917, p260, BIS  /1/16.


(2).http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D8008734

Chinese stewardess & young daughter captured in WW1

What a revelation this image is! A Chinese female shipboard worker in wartime. It's evidence of a past that is not at all visible in mainstream historiography. It shows that at least one Chinese women worked at sea despite the war. Not only that, she traveled with her child (meaning working a double shift). Not only that, both were captured by the enemy.

Women in many countries worked at sea as stewardesses throughout WW1. (Far fewer did so in WW2, in Britain at least). They faced risks of capture and shipwreck, as male crew did. They didn't necessarily count themselves as women when the 'abandon ship' order said women and children should leave first.

As the war went on ships' stewardesses dwindled in number. This was partly because of the convention that women should not be in danger zones, which increasingly meant European shipping lines replaced women crew with men. But also, so few women passengers (bouches inutiles) were allowed to take up scarce space on wartime ships, that there were no women for the stewardess to serve.

Many women were prepared to travel, no matter what the risk. They regretted that they were forced to stay home.

I've found evidence of only one British stewardess sailing by 1917. But this Chinese stewardess was sailing as late as 26 September 1917. She was on the Indian Ocean on the Japanese freighter, Hitachi Maru.

Having her her young daughter with her was not exceptional. It was a Chinese custom for seafarers to have families at sea. Many women passengers were on this ship too.

This image from the Australian War Memorial shows the unnamed stewardess and her girl among the Chinese crew. It's taken after they were all captured by the German armed merchant raider, SMS Wolf, south of the Maldive Islands.(Image number P05338.160, Photographer unknown)

After being captured crew and passengers alike had to wait a month at Suvadiva Atoll. The ship was scuttled. And they were, presumably, freed. German crew were often gallant to women and children, even at that fierce stage in the war. In some cases German crew let women go free or gave them priority.

Was this the case here? And what did the women make of an experience that is normally traumatic experience? It looks oddly matey here. Who knows. But how useful it was that a man on the Wolf had his camera with him, used it, and that the picture survives.

WW1 Women seafarers captured by Germans: anniversary

Pic;Brussels stewardess at Holzminden internment camp, summer 1916.

Today, in 1916, five British seawomen were captured by the enemy. Despite wartime dangers women crew were still sailing. These stewardesses were on the Great Eastern Railway ferry Brussels looking after Belgian refugees.

After leaving the Hook of Holland for Britain on a routine trip their ship was captured after Captain Fryatt was accused of sinking a U-boat.It was Friday 23 June 1916.

German crew who boarded the ship wondered at the women’s calmness. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being shot?’ they asked. After all, Edith Cavell had been executed by firing squad just seven months earlier. ‘“We are Englishwomen” was considered sufficient reply,’ claimed the women’s company magazine afterwards.

When the captured ship was taken to Zeebrugge then Bruges the women's blue uniforms with brass buttons caused a confusion about identity. Germans took them for fighting women: England’s last hope.

Their male shipmates were sent to Ruhleben, a civilian detention camp near Berlin, As females, the stewardesses were interned at the Holzminden camp, near Hanover.

Hungry and miserable, they must also have been worried. Internment meant the women lost earnings. Many seawomen were family breadwinners so their dependents were at risk.

No shipping company paid crew who were not working. Wages stopped the day after shipwreck. For the Brussels women this meant six months without an income.

They were only released in October. One of them, Edith Smith, went straight back to marry her fiancée by special licence, just before his unit left for Egypt.[3]

During their incarceration a high-profile publicity campaign was waged. Diplomatic initiatives attempted to free the women. Indeed, they got more publicity than any other seawomen in that entire war. Media headlines spun the story into another shocking tale of Hunnish brutality.

Surprisingly no newspaper ever suggested the women should not have been working at sea.

This is just one of the surprising stories of courageous women at sea to be found in my new book, Risk! Women on the Wartime Seas, which will be published next year by Yale University Press

Remembering

Pic: Outcry about nurses lost on the Anglia.

Today on Remembrance Day I'd like to remember particularly the women who died at sea in WW1 and WW2. Most people don't know that there were such women, but I've found there were a number.

Of course they deserve to be commemorated. To put a face to a phenomenon let us remember Violet Long, drowned at sea on Saturday 3 August 1918. A Chief Controller of Queen Mary’s Army Ambulance Corps, she was 32 and had two young daughters.Her long bright brown hair was later described by her vicar as ‘magnificent’.

On her way back from Le Havre to Southampton to give a progress report, her ship, the HMAT (His Majesty’s Australian Transport) Warilda was hit by a torpedo. They were 37 miles south east of Selsey Bill, nearly home.

Charlotte Trowell, her orderly, was coming home on special leave to marry a man who had just returned from Mesopotamia. She told journalists:

‘There was no warning of impending disaster when I retired to my bunk at a quarter to twelve. Mrs Long came to my bunk just before retiring herself and inquired, “Are you comfy?” and gave me some chocolates.

'When the torpedo struck the vessel I was thrown out of my bunk. I hurried on deck, and just as I got up there the stairway was blown up… I was put into a boat filled with wounded, but as the vessel sank our boat was not level. A davit rope was cut, but the boat capsized and we were thrown into the water.

'I clung to a rope and a wounded American Officer and an Australian pulled me into another boat. The wounded soldiers who were in that boat insisted on wrapping their saturated blankets around me.'

While Miss Trowell was sitting in lifeboat number four with her feet in the water ‘someone said “that is a woman” and I saw Mrs Long clinging to our boat and heard her murmur “Oh save me. My feet are fastened. I have lost a foot."’

Violet Long had become entangled in some rope. ‘I caught hold of her hair to hold her up and she said “You are hurting me.”’ Despite all efforts to free Mrs Long’s limbs and get her into the lifeboat, Miss Trowel says, Mrs Long's

'grip suddenly loosened and she collapsed and fell back into the sea. I felt like collapsing also at the sight, for she had been very kind to me, but I took courage from the fortitude of the suffering and dying men around me. Strange though it may seem, the thought that was uppermost in my mind was that I should have liked those who strike in wartime to be there to witness the scene.’

They were about two hours in the boat before a patrol boat picked them up. ‘An officer called out “The badly wounded cases first,” but the wounded replied “there is a girl in the boat. Go on, Miss” and that despite the sufferings they had endured,’ Charlotte Trowell marvelled

With hindsight the attack is understandable. The ship was a legitimate target. It was armed and it was what the Admiralty termed as ship an ‘ambulance transport’, rather than a ‘hospital ship’. This meant it was permitted to carry ‘Government stores’ which of course could include war materials. But as this ship was homeward-bound, rather than outward bound, it would have unlikely to carry armaments.

It took two hours to sink, which meant many could be helped into lifeboats. 123 people out of the 801 on board died.

There’s confusion about who was aboard and what happened. The hurry to be gallant did not necessarily help the women, who tried to keep calm and do their job but found it hard to withstand men’s pressure to evacuate sooner than they wanted to.

Interestingly, British newspapers did not use the Associated Press report carried by the New York Times that said ‘Women were placed in the first boats lowered, notwithstanding their protest that they should not precede the patients.

The London Times headlined celebrated Mrs Long as ‘Last woman to leave the Warilda.’ However, as there were only seven women, and they were all herded into same boat, this matter of minutes seems hardly to be significant timing. Steward TE Redman said she was on the first boat with him.

In the media Mrs Long’s loss was treated as a key part of the tragedy of a precious hospital ship being unfairly sunk, in ‘one more [of] the most dastardly crimes committed by a dishonoured enemy.’The image above indicates the tenor of the media outcry.

But it did not bring calls to stop women sailing. They had become too crucial to the war effort for such exceptionalising to be possible