Flying Angel Xmas cheer: trans at Vindi, 1951.

Researching gender and the sea - at the moment through Mission to Seafarers archives - I keep finding the ways that this Protestant charity inadvertently helped people struggling with their gender and sexual idenity.  

So here's s heartwarming story of accidental queer support, one Christmas. It's complete with refreshments and kind ladies in jolly paper hats, but sadly not the usual little gifts that staff presented to residents at some mission centres all over the world. 

It happened at Sharpness, near Bristol, in 1951. April Ashley was the one of beneficiaries. Twenty years later this would-be deck boy became one of the most beautiful British super-models of her time. 

I have a soft spot for April because she was born in the same Scouse hospital as my dad, just yards from my Nana's Smithdown Road terrace. They, too, were poor. My nana, like April's mum, was a Catholic married to a Protestant in that divided city. Those were grim times and you learnt to be tough and to pretend to conform.

HEADING TO MANLINESS AT SEA 

April wrote 'At fifteen I... I was constantly taunted for being like a girl and yes, I wanted to be one .... I would have long conversations with God each night, asking Him to make me wake up .... whatever it was proper for me to be. Instinctively, without knowing why, we all knew me to be a misfit. 

'Therefore I decided to take myself in hand. It was no longer any good wanting to be a girl. I wanted to be a man .... I privately determined to go to sea ... It seemed to be one of the things that made you a man.'

She managed to get a posh introduction to a merchant navy training school near Glucester and 'On a damp November morning I found myself at Lime Street Station with a small brown cardboard suitcase, waiting for the train to Bristol and the cadet ship  S.S. Vindicatrix.'

I myself happen to know from Mission to Seafarers archives that, in the period just before April went there, the old premises on the River Severn were being partly  replaced because merchant navy labour demands were increasing. A permanent structure was being built (see pic above). Meanwhile the boys slept in Nissen huts.

LADY WARDENS' WARMTH

The Mission to Seafarers hut (unil 1952 the low black building near the centre of this picture) offered hospitality to the 'Vindi Boys', after lesssons.  It was a homely place without strict teachers around and was psychologically warm enough to stop boys absconding from the dark marshes and tough discipline. 

Miss Eileen M Kerr had been running it since 1943. The Lady Warden role was relatively new post opened up in the MtoS to about six authoritative ladies because of wartime shortages of men. 

In correspondence Miss Kerr makes clear she had a pastoral, almost almoner-like role, looking up train tables for home-bound boys, dressing light wounds and listening to problems. (Vindicatrix at that point seemed not to have a matron or women teachers.)  

She would have seen April come in hating the ill-fitting uniform  'I looked like a vaudeville act' and unused to social life. 

Each day of the six-week intensive course it was 'Up before dawn, ablutions, tidy the bed and locker, polish buttons and boots, clean the washroom, marching, breakfast, formal classes, lunch, potato-peeling and floor-scrubbing, physical jerks, dinner, lights out at 9 p.m. There was no time for conversation.

'The second three weeks were more romantic. We moved on to the S.S. Vindicatrix herself, a three-masted hulk slurping up and down alongside the River Severn, where one was taught the practical skills of seamanship. I dashed up the rigging, out along the yard, and shouted 'Land ahoy!' with both lungs.

'At night we fell asleep exhausted, soothed by the creaking of the ship and the sound of water. I loved it all, especially this new experience 'companionship', even when the others bragged about girls and I went peculiar inside ...

CHRISTMAS ABOARD

' Shore leave came at Christmas  ... those unable to afford the fare home were allowed to stay on board. It promised to be glum until an extravagant food parcel arrived from John and Edna. Included was a huge fruit cake. I cut myself a slice and passed the rest on. 

'In return, back came a hunk of haggis which I tasted for the first time and found not unpalatable. We shared everything, cracked jokes ...

'In the evening [we] ambled over to the Mission House where the tea ladies in flimsy paper hats made a sense of occasion out of lemonade and buns. 

'On Boxing Day three of us slipped away to the Bristol pubs and got tiddly: strictly against the rules and therefore essential to do. 

'It was the most delightful Christmas I've ever had'.

NEW YEAR 1952

Back in Norris Green, Liverpool, two months later, April got work as a deck boy. So in February 1952 'I picked up my cardboard suitcase ,.. took a deep breath of air, coughed, and set off on the road to Manchester to join the S.S. Pacific Fortune.' (Pictured).

Life on the Furness Withy refrigerated cargo ship to Jamaica wasn't a happy time. April was bullied, tried suicide, and eventually left the MN. The rest is history -  of the high-profile glam trans kind. Google it. 

Meanwhile, life in the Mission House by the Vindi went on. And who knows how many GSRD (Gender and Sexual Relationship Diverse) gained from the warmth of women who knew support mattered but may not have had  a clue about what identity issues? 

A number of Assistant Lady Wardens left after only a few months, so it must have been a challenging job. Or maybe the strict Miss Kerr put assistants off.

INFO

• April wrote three autobiographies; Odyssey, The First Lady and Inside Out. Two were pulped. For detailed comparisons see Aprils biogs. I took the above extracts from April Ashley's Odyssey, by Duncan Fallowell & April Ashley, Jonathan Cape, London, 1982. ISBN 0-224-01849-3. It bears a strong resenblance to James Hanley's novel, Boy.
• The Sharprness Mission info is to be found in archives within Hull History Centre. MtoS archives 
• The Vindi and its accompanying mission went circa 1967 but are remembered on social media. (April is not mentioned there). Over its 28-year existence 70,000 boys had trained there.

D-Day’s first women to sail June 1944: exploring questions

It's the 80th D-Day anniversary on June 6. And it's important to recognise that women were initially and deliberately excluded from this major maritime operation. It involved 156,000 allied troops, an unknown number of merchant seafarers, and less than a handful of women at first.

Timeline of first women to sail to France after D-Day 1944
6/7 June overnight: Journalist Martha Gellhorn (36) (stowaway) and 6 US nurses, un-named. On the hospital ship Prague from a south coast port to Omaha beach.
11 June: Joy Taverner, QA nurse (22). She and her colleagues had to first wait 3 days on an LST  (landing ship tank) in the Solent
11/12 June overnight Princess Mary’s Royal Air Force Nursing Service sisters, part of No. 50 Mobile Field Hospital. Iris ‘Fluff’ Ogilvie (nee Jones, later Bower) (29) (pictured)  and Mollie Giles, sailed on HMS LST 180  from Gosport to Juno beach, to found a  field hospital. 

The captain gave up his cabin (with ensuite lavatory, for them). Men were hostile to women's presence. This was obliquely expressed by one commanding officer who warned ‘We can’t cater for you to have toilet facilities on your own.”
19 June: Matron Sally Wade and group of QAIMNSs arrived on HMS Duke of Lancaster

August: Six Wrens went over. They included WRNS Petty Officer telephonist Ena Howes (25) , who was Admiral Ramsay’s telephonist
September: FANYs, including driver Monica E Littleboy, went with motor ambulances, by landing craft
Date unclear: ATS went across to run mobile canteens

MARTHA'S STORY
War correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s story of her D-Day+1  landing in France, on June 6 1944 reveals five interesting truths as well as raising  at least two fascinating questions about women on wartime ships. Martha (1908-1998) was a leading US  writer and is one of my heroes.

TRUTHS
1.DIVERSITY. Actually D-Day was not a totally male military business. 

On the evening of June 6/7 the woman who was to become one of the most female journalists of WW2 stowed away on the Prague, a Great Eastern Railways Harwich to Hoek Van Holland ferry that been converted into Hospital Carrier number 61. 

Her cover was the six US nurses also on board. Good at sweet-talking her way into situations, Martha pretended she was going to interview the sisters for a magazine. You can read the story of what she said she really did in the 29 choppy hours to Normandy and back at ‘Martha Gellhorn, D-day: 60 years on; Second world war’, Guardian, 28 May 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/28/secondworldwar.features116.
2. WOMEN.  She was one of the first seven women in the D-day invasion. British nurses were only allowed to go several days later.
3. UNCHALLENGED. The presence of this civilian female with no right to be there was oddly unquestioned. Reasons for that include:

• she too was American, so she fitted in 

• she was a pretty, plausible, personable blonde

• as a Bryn Mawr girl and seasoned journalist she had agency and confidence  

• her dad and brother were medics so she knew the hospital staff's cultured

• on the confused ships nobody understood enough to challenge her

• she had already travelled so much that she was a ship-savvy able traveller and could fit in well. (From 13-27 May she’d sailed, precariously, as the only passenger on a convoyed Norwegian cargo ship from the US to Liverpool; it carried dynamite, forbad booze, and had no lifeboats. She read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, enjoyed iceberg sightings, and, sighting the English coast in the 4am dark felt ‘such a feeling of wild happiness.’)

4. HANDY. As someone who could speak French and German she was useful for translating in communications between European casualties and US medics. Also she distributed cigarettes, emptied urinals, and worked with cabin boys creating corned beef sandwiches.
5.  DESPITE SEXISM. She achieved this feat in the teeth of official opposition and ‘curious condescension’ towards women journalists excluding women from this key moment in WW2, and despite the opposition of her own husband, writer Ernest Hemingway.

Her double whammy success was:

• to get there anyway

• to actually land in France, on Omaha beach, trumping her husband who was confined to watching from a landing craft out at sea.

 

QUESTIONS
1.  Lasting impact.  What effect did this 29-hour voyage have on Martha’s feelings about the war, and women’s place in it? She was to go on to do so much more, especially in Italy. She had already done so much
2.  Emotion handling. Martha was dealing with a hostile husband. The day after her arrival at Liverpool docks, ten days before D-Day,  she had just told Hemingway their four-year marriage was over. His cowardice, lies, bragging, selfishness and philandering had finished her. (They were to divorce in 1945.)War meant brought many relationship heartbreaks, some about masculinity and sex. With what other personal preoccupations did other women, like Martha, sail into the post D-Day events? In other words, we don’t participate in war as 100% single-minded warriors. So how do all our emotional preoccupations – especially sexual betrayal and anger about misogyny – effect our efficacy? Martha was private about this.

HOW TO EXPLORE FURTHER

READ. Read her novels, collected letters, and reportage, plus biographies. A good starting point is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Gellhorn

VISIT. You might like to visit the exterior of Martha’s flat at 72 Cadogan Square, London SW1X 0EA. (She didn’t write of her voyage there; she’d only moved there in the 1970s).  It has a blue plaque about her now. She had at least eleven homes in London, mainly Knightsbridge.

PASS BY: You can browse past her Welsh holiday home (1980-1994), Yew Tree Cottage, at Kilgwrrwg, near Chepstow, Monmouthshire, NP16 6DA. See purple plaque at gate. NB it’s a private residence, please respect that. The Purple Plaques campaign marks the achievements of remarkable women in Wales. https://purpleplaques.wales/

WATCH. See Philip Kaufman's  2012 movie, Hemingway & Gellhorn, https://play.google.com/store/movies/details?id=E16qPIuqr2I&pli=1. No, it doesn’t go into her voyages.

Wrens at sea, movie style! Yellow Canary,1943.

On YouTube I’ve just spotted a film about a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) who sailed to Canada. Yellow Canary was directed by Herbert Wilcox in 1943. 

I’m delighted because I hadn’t got this movie on my (yes, very brief) list of WRNS films. See below. And it's the only one where a Wren is lethal toughie.

In WW2 Sally Maitland (played by Anna Neagle) wasn’t working on a warship as an RN person. No woman did.  Nor was she doing signalling and coding, as Wrens did on troop ships. 

Instead Sally was a deep-cover spy for British intelligence on a passenger ship. Her work was to act as a pro-Nazi but charming British civilian, including on the voyage from England to Halifax NS. 

She infiltrates, she plots, she nearly marries the dreadful Nazi. Only at the very end does she tie her deceitfully platinum waves back, tuck her hair under her uniform HMS cap and share family tea at home in an unimpeachable Home Counties sort of way.

Dear reader, yes, she marries the co-spy (Richard Greene). He turns out to have been trying to protect her all along.

Goodness, the blonde dame in the fur suddenly turns out to need a rescuer with a cocked gun. Didn't she have her own? Wasn't she in command of him a minute ago?

(At that point in the war, with all the labour shortages, real Wrens were allowed to carry on Wrenning after marriage. Neagle was actually married to the director, Herbert Wilcox.)

Box office takings revealed that the film didn’t do well because people were confused by the complex plot. Also Neagle, though the main star, never convincingly became a sympathetic character here.

In fact, if you don’t watch carefully you can easily end up not knowing that Sally truly was a nice Wren after all. She was not a double or treble agent just masquerading as a female member of the unimpeachable Senior Service.  

Basis? Mitford nazi and maybe a US cowboy fan. 

This film is based a little on aristocratic British nazi Unity Mitford. (Pictured with Hitler).  But Unity never was a Wren or spy – that we know of. Nor did she repent her fascism.

A story by one of the three screenwriters, PM Bower, is credited as the basis. PM Bower is untraceable. But literary sleuths know that if you scratch a set of initials (say CB: Charlotte Bronte) you may well find a woman underneath. 

There was, actually, a BM Bower (1871-1940).  A woman. Is she the originator? Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, formerly Bower, was a prolific US pulp novelist and scriptwriter, specialising in women in men’s worlds, such as the Wild West. Could an earlier BM Bower story have inspired the chaps’ screenplay?  

“Her work was unusual for its time … featuring female characters that were as developed as their male counterparts” says Britannica. 

The Yellow Canary's female characters are indeed developed. The ruthless leader of the Nova Scotia Nzi spy ring turns out to be the ‘poor old lady in the wheelchair’. The ‘carer’ pushing her invalid carriage is actually her evil henchwoman.

Bower’s The Flying U Strikes, and The Quirt are about spying, but  certainly not in Halifax NS in WW2. Yet the identity fits, just.  What’s your bet?

WRNS feature films 1940-1960. (* = my rating)

1943 Bell-Bottom George. Cheeky chappie waiter rejected by navy befriends Wren Pat (Anne Firth). He foils a spy ring, is allowed into the navy and Pat accepts him. Comedy

1944 Fiddlers Three.  Comedy about two sailors and Nora, a Wren (Elizabeth Welch). They are transported back to ancient Rome and treated as seers

*1945 Perfect Strangers. Poignant drama about married couple who join naval services. Cathy Wilson (Deborah Kerr) becomes a  boats crew Wren despite his objections. Wartime separation and other relationships then broaden their horizons and reignite their marriage

1946 Piccadilly Incident. Weepie about a briefly married Wren (Anna Neagle) who is soon torpedoed off Singapore, and presumed dead. Returns from three years on South Sea island (with sailors) to find husband has new wife and child

*1953 The Cruel Sea.  Classic drama battle of Atlantic action film, especially focusing on Hostilities Only sailors. WRNS Second Officer Julie Hallam (Virginia Mckenna) initially abjured by the Compass Rose’s second hero ,who puts war first 

1958 The Silent Enemy features naval frogmen in 1940s Gibraltar. Third Officer Jill Masters (Dawn Addams) is the minor love interest.

1960 Sink the Bismarck! Naval war film in which WRNS Second Officer Anne Davis (Dana Wynter) is the calm and very competent assistant of the Admiralty’s Chief of Operations. He turns their relationship towards romances the moment Germany’s iconic battleship is sunk. 

1961 Petticoat Pirates. This is the only film to tackle female-male relationships within naval services, excruciatingly. A comedy vehicle for Charlie Drake, it features many Wrens who, angered at being turned down for sea service, capture frigate HMS Huntress. They take it to sea in a NATO exercise, but then sunbathe and hang undies on the halyard. Finally the happy commander tells Admiralty that Wrens should be seagoing. Starring Anne Heywood as Chief Officer Anne Stevens

WW2: BOAC lady 'seamen' and Poole flying boats

Normally you'd think that chic lady employees of airline operators BOAC in the Second World War would never be blue-sweatered handlers of small boats. Wet ropes, oily hands, Aldis lamps? It sounds more like the work of Boats Crew Wrens servicing warships.

But Dr Nina Baker of the Women's Engineering Society has discovered a crucial image that gives the inklings of another story. In a Glasgow junk shop Nina found this material from The Second War, a popular as-it-happens publication. (The port referred to was surely Poole in Dorset.)

The text reads "Seawomen of B.O.A.C.
British Oversea Airways employed a number of 'women seamen' at the little fishing town which was the Corporation's wartime base. They worked on the launches used to service the four-engined flying-boats coming in from West Africa, Lisbon and America.
"These launches required skillful and delicate handling, especially in bad weather, to get them safely alongside the easily-damaged aircraft. The women, whose ages ranged from twenty-five to thirty-eight were promoted coxswain and placed in charge of launch after they had successfully completed a three-month training in Morse, semaphore and lamp signalling, compass work and general seamanship.
"Duties of women seamen included embarking disembarking passengers, handling the launch while stevedores loaded and unloaded mail and freight, washing down and scrubbing decks, painting and splicing ropes.
"Pictures: Above: a BOAC coxswain signalling to the shore from the flying boat 'Berwick'. Left: Coxswain leaving the 'Berwick' after mooring her."

In over twelve years of writing about women and the sea in wartime I had never come across any such role.

POOLE'S STORY OF 18 PIONEERS

But lo, when I googled I found there was more information about these women, even their names and their usual jobs. It's to be found at the website of the local charity Poole Flying Boats Celebration (Part 19.‘BOAC Staff at Poole: Towards 650+', http://www.pooleflyingboats.com/19_BOAC%20Staff%20Towards%20650+%20v3%20for%20website.pdf

It says that
"During WW2 with many of the MCU (Marine Craft Unit] men [who provided the links between moorings and quays] enlisted in the Royal Navy or to serve elsewhere, a significant shortage arose, whereon 18 women were recruited to train as Seamen, at a School set up by BOAC at Poole expressly as replacements!"

The seawomen in training in 1943 included:
1.Mrs Betty Archer (ex-secretary)
2. Eileen Armstrong (nee Wigg) (Rigger)
3. Mrs Elizabeth Bainbridge (widow of an RAF Officer)
4. Miss Pamela Bate (ex-secretary)
5. Miss V Bates
6. Miss Nora V Bevis (pre-war she raced yachts and by 1947 was last woman coxswain 1st at Poole)
7. Mrs Minna Ann Hansford (lived on a house boat with her husband pre-war)
8. Mary Hill
9. Mrs Pamela Nisbet (former model, also studying for her Yacht Masters Coastal Cert.)
10. Bunny Reece
11. Isobel Rickard
12. Miss Lynette Rowland (ex-commercial artist)

The women's tasks are outlined, and some of the women above are photographed in Fabulous Flying Boats: A History of the World's Passenger Flying Boats, by Leslie Dawson, p100, https://tinyurl.com/fabulousFlyingBoats

WOMEN CAN DO IT
Coastal women everywhere in the UK were no strangers to handling small boats. Poole's Royal Motor Yacht Club's online history shows pioneer racing driver Dorothy Levitt (1882-1922) on her launch in 1903: https://www.rmyc.club/rmyc/history/


WAS VERA LYNN THEIR PASSENGER?

Serendipity today played another part in life. As I was reading Forces Sweetheart Vera Lynn's autobiography Some Sunny Day I found that she had sailed by Sunderland flying boat from 'somewhere on the coast' when she went off to sing in Burma on 23 March 1944. Soon after midnight she and her accompanist took off.
"It was my first ever fight and I didn't enjoy it. I was airsick the whole time ...seven long hours" to Gibraltar. Very nervous (she'd only left Britain once before) it seems she failed to notice that the crew on the little boat taking her to her flying boat were women.

A picture on the Poole Flying Boats website (page 9) shows BOAC seawoman Mollie Skinner (later Mollie Harman) escorting singer George Formby and Beryl, his wife, to their flying boat. In their ENSA khaki greatcoats they they too were going out to entertain the troops.

Rozelle Raynes: she was there, and she wrote about it

Rozelle Raynes, a former Wren Stoker in WW2, and later a Merchant Navy assistant purser, died on June 22, age 89. Her most famous book was Maid Matelot: Adventures of a Wren Stoker in World War II (1971).
Obituaries appeared in the Times http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article4482431.ece and Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11701557/Lady-Rozelle-Raynes-Wren-stoker-obituary.html
So I won't repeat details here. I will simply comment that from my perspective, as someone who knows womens' Merchant Navy and Royal Navy history), Rozelle exemplified three key trends in women's maritime history.

1.Posh gels in mucky jobs
Born in 1925 she enjoyed the war in one of the most highly-desired WW2 Women's Royal Naval Service jobs - working on small boats where about 300 women showed great mechanical prowess and even maritime passion. And she was one of the many aristocratic Boats Crew Wrens who did not, in any way, act grand; Lady Frederica Rozelle Ridgway Pierrepont's fingers were as begrimed as anyone else's and she was always democratic in her friendships.

2. A prize for commercial shipping - and a pioneer
She was one of the many Wrens whose WW2 experience of life in naval service enhanced their taste for the sealife to such an extent that they tried to join the Merchant Navy afterwards (You could work at sea in the MN, but not in the RN) at that time.
Like Elizabeth Sayer, the most famous pioneering ex-Wren who became a purser in 1947, Rozelle was snapped up by a company keen to employ staff who'd had all that excellent WRNS training, including informal training in socialising well, surviving happily far from home, and coping with being in situations where men outnumbered women by as much as a hundred to one. In the 1960s she was one of the early women assistant pursers on Townsend ferries , crossing between Dover and Calais.

3. Hooked! A boatie forever
Wartime WRNS service seemed to turn many women towards enjoying recreation on small boats, including long and risk-taking voyages after the war. In From Rudders to Udders Jane Taylor, Rozelle's contemporary, describes lived on a floating shop-gas station on the Hamble. She later went on become master of a ferry. Rozelle did a single-handed yachtswoman who did epic voyages and wrote about them.

Painting of Rozelle as a girl, by her mother. © The Stonebridge Trust, The Pierrepont Collection. It can be seen at what was once her ancestral home, Thoresby, Notts.
A beacon and the best of avatars</
A few score more of her remarkable sort may still be alive (and slowly, sadly giving up their boating). But no-one celebrated that life in print as Rozelle did. Her articles then books kept alive that culture of women's avid post-1940s seafaring. She inspired sea-mindedness in countless others who didn't have that WRNS experience (but would like to have had it),decades before yachtswomen Clare Frances and Ellen MacArthur.
For me Rozelle Raynes is the best woman writer about seafaring of her period. No-one matches her. If the small and disparate world of women seafarers gave out medals she would certainly have been awarded the highest and shiniest one For Enabling Women to Access Seafaring. She showed girls and women the sea was a place open to women, which they could approach with agency and enjoy with verve.

Soviet women commanding ships

Pic: Valentina Orlikova and colleagues on the bridge of WW2 merchant ship

In surfing yet again for women seafarers’ history in different countries I realised that a new researcher doing the same thing,looking for Soviet women at sea, could easily be under a big misapprehension.
The prominence on the internet of Soviet pioneers Anna Shchetinina and Valentina Orlikova might lead people to think they were exceptions, like Victoria Drummond.(This British marine engineer pictured below was, like them, breaking through in the 1930s.)

In fact, Captains Valentina and Anna were two of many thousands of Soviet women in the merchant navy from the 1930s who did ‘men's' jobs: deck, engineering and radio work, rather than hotel-side work.
~ Anna Shchetinina (1908-1999) certainly was the first Soviet woman in the world to serve as a certificated captain of an ocean-going vessel. (see pics below, and many other images on the excellent Russian-language website about Anna: http://ljwanderer.livejournal.com/150094.html)

~ And Valentina Orlikova(1915-1991), with her movie-star looks, certainly was the most internationally-fancied woman deck officer in the world. Her high profile was created after she was featured in a USSR/ New York publicity drive in 1943.
But evidence of the mass of women is hard to find, even for Russian speakers. Use the search term 'women sailors' on the RIA Novosti press agency site and there’s just an implausibly smiling woman cleaning up a nuclear ship in 1964, and a young woman on Far East service, who looks rather planted.

A much-admired media icon
By contrast to the now-invisibility of the mass of Soviet women merchant seafarers, the Milwaukee Journal of February 28 1943 headlined an article ‘Pretty little Soviet girl is officer on cargo ship.’

And the Illinois Alton Evening Telegraph celebrated Valentina:
‘Any preconceived pictures you have of Soviet women as tall husky Amazons will have to be revised for Orlikova. She is four feet ten. Gray eyes. Brown hair. Slender little figure in a dark blue suit. She is the wife of a Soviet seaman and the mother of a two year-old boy.
‘In stormy weather or calm seas she stands her watch on the bridge, helping direct navigation through mine-sown and submarine-infested waters. She has directed the evacuation of a ship truck by a mine and has leapt from a flaming vessel into the sea, o be rescued by a submarine. And she talks about it more calmly than most people discuss rationed hoes.’
US writer Anais Nin wrote:
<'A photo of her had appeared, which all of us fell in love with... She conveyed firmness and capability, without hardness or coldness. She became a symbol of woman’s most secret wishes: to be free and in command of her own destiny, responsible without loss of her womanliness.

'We wanted to imitate Valentina Orlikova. We saw ourselves trim, efficient, capable captains of our ship and our own lives. It was not a desire to be a man, but be free and capable of self-direction and professional growth.’ And Nin cross-dressed in her husband’s tuxedo and cut her hair short, in emulation.
So wartime needs for women’s labour, and new temporary alliances of Allied powers, were helped by her not being fitting the burly Russian Bear stereotype. The message was that you could be cute AND a tough worker and a married Mom - and someone from the land of Communism.

(Pic: Anais Nin cross-dressed,from http://pensaleas.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/anac3afs-nin.jpg)

Realities
The reality was that Valentina Orlikova was a dual-ticketed engineer and deck officer, aged 28. And one of thousands of women who were in the USSR merchant fleet long before the war started.
The socialist revolution gave many rights to women, including doctors and scientists, which were astonishing in other countries. By 1933 British economist Sidney Webb had recorded that there was ‘a steadily increasing number’ of women sailors, engineers and wireless operators, usually dressed in trousers. They went to marine training schools along with men.
When they docked in foreign ports the women were seen as novelties and featured in the press.
For example when the Chelyuskinet arrived in New York with exhibits from the Soviet Pavilion at the Worlds Fair in February 1939, the women officers along with what we could call ‘stewardesses’ were pictured by a news agency(see picture below.)

Caption: Left to right Uliana Lebedeva, Mess Girl; Elizabeth Gierorga-Pulo, Radio Operator; Galina Gradsaya, Second Mate; and Nina Todory, Mess Girl.


Wartime
The Soviet defensive navy had the same trouble as most defensive navies in letting women sail in this all-male organisation in WW2. (Finally the USSR did. Britain didn’t, except very exceptionally. And the Canadian navy rejected women radio officers, who instead joined the Scandinavian merchant vessels)
According to historians Markwick and Cardona, 21,000 women worked in the USSR's defensive navy. Some rose as high as captains in the Amur River Fleet, sailing on the relatively safe Amur and Sungari rivers. Those on the Astrakhan, carrying and ammunition, troops, wounded people, and supplies, were much decorated. In the Black Sea Fleet were 2,854 women.
Not all were seagoing and they faced misogyny. Captain Taisa Rudenko-Sheveleva, the first woman naval officer, who had got in by pretending to be a man, said cats and women were traditionally seen as unlucky.
By comparison, the intensively-trained professional seafarers Anna and Valentina were some of the long-accepted technical officers on merchant vessels routinely going deep-sea in dangerous waters, including the horrific Murmansk route.

~ Captain Anna was transporting cargo in the Baltic. She took part in the ‘Russian Dunkirk’, on one of the 190 ships of the Baltic Fleet evacuating people from Tallinn in August 1941. She was also sailing as master of a Liberty ship, transporting Lend-lease supplies from the US, and therefore at great risk of Axis attack.
~ Valentina was working as a mate on cargo ships, including as fourth mate on the armed Dvina, sailing from Archangel to New York in 1942 and 1943 delivering US arms to the USSR.
She’d been ‘serving as mate on hospital ship in the Baltic Sea … the Nazis sowed mines directly in our path. Our ship hit one of them. I shall never forget the terrible moments that followed – the explosions, the flames, the wounded all around needing help – and through it all the faces of my women comrades, strong and heroic…[the water rose, the ship listed]
‘I was on the upper deck, in charge of lowering lifeboats … Despite the frightful danger facing everyone on ship, my heart was calm. I saw there was no room here for weakness. All the women around me, young and old, nurses and crew members, were working quickly, efficiently, confidently….I did not see any of the women make even a gesture towards saving their own lives.’
The ship managed to get to a small island where the wounded were unloaded. The ship temporarily repaired so that it could limp to the home port and be properly repaired.
When ‘the wounded were re-embarked and the ship ready to sail again, I ordered the women to take some rest. With tired, but happy, smiles, they refused …noiselessly they glided through the cabin helping to bring back to health those who had been wounded,’ she told the US media.

In typical ‘women can do it’ and Rosie the Riveter style, the Alton Evening Telegraph reported ‘Orlikova is the only woman mate on her ship. But she does not intend to stop there. Her ambition is to be a ship's captain. She thinks in three more years she should make it.
‘"It's good to have women on ships," she says. "They keep everything clean and in good condition. They are exact as doctors and radio operators, too. And they are not afraid of anything." Have any of Orlikova's order ever been questioned because she was a woman. "Never," she says with a grin.’


COURAGEOUS SOVIET WOMEN SEAFARERS
• Anna Shchetinina (Captain on numerous vessels)
• Valentina Orlikova (Captain of Storm, etc)
• Vera Mitsai (First Mate of whaler Typhoon)
• Alla Rezner (First Mate)
• Lydia Kochetkova (Second Mate)
• Nadejda Zabardayeva (Radio Telegraphist)
• Vera Gorlova (Radio Telegraphist)
• Nadejda Neoslenaya (Surgeon's Assistant)


Pic: Unnamed WW2 woman in Pacific Fleet landing party on their way to Port-Arthur,Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, 1945.Photographed by Yevgeny Khaldei. Courtesy of RIA Novosti.

After the war
Both Anna and Valentina women survived the war, and were much decorated.

~ Captain Shchetinina went on to captain six ships of the Soviet Baltic Shipping Company, MV Askold, Baskunchak, Beloostrov, Dniester, Pskov, and Mendeleev. Then, aged 41 in 1949 she came ashore and taught in the Leningrad Marine Engineering College College where Valentina had studied two decades earlier. Anna later became Dean and wrote a very entertaining lifestory, not yet translated.

(Pictures from http://ljwanderer.livejournal.com/150094.html, with thanks)

~ Captain Orlikova worked on whalers sailing to the Far East from 1947-53. Under international law Russian-style factory whaling was illegal and controversial. She attained her dream to be captain, working on Storm.
Many women were on whalers in both 'male' roles such as scientists and radio officers, and in domestic roles such as cooks, and laundry. Valentina never got the same publicity again.

Pic: Soviet whaler Aleut, 1958. Photo by Yulia Ivashchenko

It’s rather peculiar that the progressive trend of women doing ‘men’s work’ at sea didn’t continue in the USSR. However though this 1960s photo of some Soviet women seafarers visiting Warsash Maritime Centre (now Academy) in Hampshire, indicates they not only existed but traveled. In the 1980s there was at least one woman, Valentina Plutova, a First Officer.


Yet when Nina Baker, Britain’s second women deck officer, sailed to the USSR in the 1970s Soviet officers (male) deliberately visited her ship to see this phenomenon: a woman on the bridge.
(This blog entry is part of a longer article to be published elsewhere, later. Suggestions for additions are welcome.)

Drawing WW2 Wrens at work: Gladys E Reed

Gladys E Reed has given the world some of the best images ever of life in the WRNS life. Her newly-acquired sketches, maianly of women personnel) are on display at the National Maritime Museum till 15 July.


The Museum says:
'She joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) in 1943. From February to July 1943 she was in the Woolwich class and trained at the coding school HMS Cabbala, a shore base near Warrington for wireless telegraph operators.

Between 1943 and 1944, Reed worked as a Wireless Telegraph Operator in the Liverpool and Birkenhead area, and was stationed at the shore base HMS Eaglet, Liverpool, the flagship of the Commander-in-Chief of the Western Approaches.

In her off-watch time, Reed kept a sketch record of the work being done by the WRNS, mostly drawn in 5B pencil on cheap paper.

She apologetically wrote to the National Maritime Museum Director, Frank Carr:
‘I am afraid you will be more than a little shocked at the untidy state they are in.
'They were sketched under all sorts of conditions, have been carried wherever I have been stationed, and passed through many people's hands, so that since 1944 have become very grubby.
'I console myself with the thought that they may still reflect a little of that busy, happy atmosphere that did exist in the WRNS – especially in the “open air” categories'.

And the museum would love to to know something more about her. Can anyone help? Contact curator Melanie Vandenbrouck.

WW2 un/welcomes to servicewomen on warships

(Wrens were seen as suitable for serving grog ashore, not for drinking it at sea along with shipmates.)

Most people think women were never, ever, on warships in WW2. But I’ve just been to Portsmouth’s National Museum of the Royal Navy to give a very illustrated talk: ‘Grog, darning and gendered un/welcomes; Wrens and QARNNS nurses on WW2 warships.’ (Jan 8)
The point was to discuss the women who were exceptionally given passage on Royal Navy vessels in WW2, as semi-members of the crew. They were either Wrens being evacuated when overseas, or naval nurses (QARNNS) assisting homeward-bound British POWs as the war ended. Their warship was the first available ship that could take them.
For example, Jane Eldridge (below)was on HMS Renown because she was cyphering for Churchill, going to and from the crucial Tehran conference on this fast ship. He needed cypherers and coders with him.
(with thanks to the Association of Wrens: http://www.wrens.org.uk/gallery/?start=54)

WELCOMES VARIED
Welcomes for these ‘lady intruders’ varied, depending on the time in the war, the seas, and the women’s roles and attitudes. They got in trouble if they asked for grog or got in the way of battle. But they were welcomed if they darned and kept to women’s traditional place.
A large portion of my talk was built around a fascinating 2004 mini-memoir by Mary Sturt (later Pratt) (Recollections of a War-time Wren, part 2,http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/67/a3436067.shtml)


TALKS' BENEFITS
Giving talks is a wonderful activity because of all the expertise you are offered by an audience afterwards. This evening was particularly useful because so many men there had been or were in the Royal Navy. They were able to say how the situation looked from their perspective.
Several sent me follow-up multi-page emails full of background information and advice about where to look for more evidence. The topic could well make an article.
Certainly the new knowledge I’ve gained will feed into the book I’ll be writing for 2017, on the history of women in the Royal Naval service (IB Tauris).
Thank you, everyone, including Radio Solent (Jan 8, the Julian Clegg show) and the Portsmouth News (Jan 13), who interviewed me and gave it publicity.

The lost history of Wrens and QARNNS on battleships in WW2: news of event in Jan 2014

A uniformed service woman on a wartime battleship? Surely it's a seeming contradiction that can't be countenanced, like, for example, Prince William marrying a North Korean barber.

But ... it happened. Royal Navy vessels in WW2 exceptionally carried women as semi-members of the crew. They were either Wrens being evacuated or going out to overseas postings, or naval nurses(QARNNS assisting homeward-bound British Prisoners of Wars as the conflict ended.

WELCOME TO A TALK
On Wednesday January 8 I'm giving a highly illustrated talk on the subject at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. "Grog, darning and gendered un/welcomes; Wrens and QARNNS nurses on WW2 warships" takes place at 5o'clock and is free. (http://www.nmrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/Research%20Programme%20leaflet%202013-2014.pdf)

In it I'll be looking at the way these women were seen as intruders and anomalies that had to be accommodated into closed and traditional masculine institutions. They were "matter out of place", to use an anthropological concept.

WRENS
Great tension caused by some Wrens who were seen as transgressing gendered boundaries by expecting that if they worked as men did they should also get men’s rewards, including grog. Wrens on warships were positioned as boys (at best) or troublemakers and spoilers to be got rid of (at worst.
But on some more progressive ships officers were proud to flaunt Wrens on deck as they sailed in a celebratory way into the world’s harbours.

QUARNNS
The only accounts of QARNNS on ships show that they were welcomed, and even made honorary members of ship’s companies, because they were not challenging. They sewed for the men and did not expect to be treated as full participants.
In other words, they behaved as lady visitors traditionally did: appreciatively and supportively. The outcome was sometimes marriage.

SO WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT GENDERED ATTITUDES?
With what degrees of welcome and dismay were women, as matter out of place and feminised representatives of civilian and domestic life, handled by their hosts?
What place could women negotiate in total institutions geared to war, the support of the status quo, and the avoidance of ‘weak’ emotions?
And what do these cases reveal about women’s and men’s attitudes towards something approximating gender equality?
--
Using concepts such as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas) and ‘hosts and guests’ in ‘total institutions’ (Goffman) this accessible but scholarly talk explores three recorded cases as examples of possible underlying trends in attitudes towards gender on British warships in WW2.
Why do it? Because during my research into women at sea in both world wars, for a book to be published by Yale University Press next year, I stumbled over these women and found their experience fascinating and telling.
I want to share it with you and anyone who's interested.
Hopefully it will be helpful in understanding naval men's attitudes towards women fifty years later when females were allowed to serve on some warships, as Smiles' cartoon shows (May 2000, Navy News).
The caption reads "The last [HMS] Dauntless had an all-female crew - why not the next?" So far, of course, there has been no all-female warship, although there were many all-male ones.

The British women ‘who never cry’ are released by Germany

Over 70 years ago on this day, Thursday 12 December 1940, British women prisoners of the Germans were finally released from the ship on which they’d been detained for a fortnight. German sailors landed them on Emirau Island in what is now Papua New Guinea.
It was the beginning of the end of being in enemy hands. At last they would no longer be at sea in wartime dangerous waters.
Among the women were Betsy Sandbach and Geraldine Edge, escort nurses who had been captured while returning home from Australia after delivering child evacuees for the Children's Overseas Resettlement Board.
Picture: Several weeks earlier. The children and the escorts had arrived safely in Sydney.

The women who'd thought they were returning home, child-free, to Britain were instead captured by German Kriegsmarine vessels and transferred to a kind of floating detention centre, Kulmerland.

On this pre-war Hamburg-New York passenger liner renamed as the Tokyo Maru, the original amiable staff were still on board.
Genial cigar-smoking Captain Bshunder, who had charmed so many peace-time Kulmerland passengers said ‘“Why should I not be kind to you. War is senseless” … then added the stock phrase we heard so often, “We do not make war on women.” “Sez you,” we softly murmured,’ reported Geraldine and Betsy.

THE ENEMY REGARDED
Clearly women were angrily seeing their German ‘guards’ as an enemy group who were puzzlingly unlike the barbarian stereotype but had to be opposed at all times.
On the other hand the Germans were proceeding in a gallant manner. They wondered rather anthropologically at the pluck and tenacity of their female unexpected ‘guests’.
The two escorts write a triumphal version of one much-repeated story about gendered and nationalistic relations aboard. There was a day when the doctor asked one of his very poorly CORB patients:
‘”Do you English women never cry?” “What would be the good? We have no handkerchiefs,” was the laughing retort. Two were immediately produced, but the tears, needless to say, never came.’
By contrast another escort, Florence Cebild, recalled a more complex, and less-quoted version where the patient bravely replied ‘“Oh yes, when we have something to cry about” ... [but later in the darkness was] sobbing quietly.’

RELEASE TO "CRUSOE ADVENTURE"

Two weeks later, in the early afternoon of that final Thursday ‘came the longed-for and joyful command, “Will the ladies and children go off the ships first, please?” We needed no second bidding. Down the gangway into a waiting lifeboat we hurried,’ said Geraldine and Betsy.
The women were more fortunate than the 150 white men, who were taken back to Prisoner-of-War camps in Germany.
After that Betsy and Geraldine’s group endured two weeks of what one newspaper described as ‘a rollicking Robinson Crusoe adventure’ on Emirau (‘Squally’) Island. It was not.
Then on Christmas Day an Australian Naval initiative rescued them and took them safely to the Antipodes.
Very quickly, Betsy and Geraldine wrote their vivid book, which was published in September 1941.Now forgotten, it is one of the only books about women on the wartime seas. It must also have been important early propaganda, by women, with which women readers could identify.