The piratess wore Marigolds

 

Picture: Debbie England doing her show on pirate Radio Atlantis, c 1974. 

Picture by Steve England.

... Or rather, she would have worn rubber gloves, had been available on board her rusting old ship. 

So I found out when interviewing Debbie England (now Royle), in land-locked Cheshire this week. She was Britain’s first woman DJ on Radio Caroline and Radio Atlantis, in the great days when pirate radio ships rocked the airwaves. 

Debbie was aboard these North Sea music heavens because she was accompanying her husband, DJ Steve England.  They had run a mobile disco service together in Deal, with Steve’s sister Paula and brother Rick. 

But in 1973 when Steve got his Big Chance – to go off and DJ in this exciting new world of pirate radio – he took it. Debbie and Paula continued the disco business in Deal for a while as the Disco Dollies.

ABOARD MI AMIGO

A few months later Debbie was allowed a quick visit to Steve aboard this semi-co-operative on Mi Amigo. So she went the 5 miles out to the old ship anchored off Scheveningen in Holland.

Getting from tender to ship could be alarming. Big Dutch crew members virtually hauled her on board when the waves allowed her near enough. 

The most exciting-sounding pirate radio ship in the world was a dump.  It was scruffy, basic and ad hoc. ’I was shocked when I saw inside. But you got used to it.’ 

And she stayed on even though ‘I’m not that brave and I was usually too scared to even ride a bike. I certainly couldn’t swim.’  Sometimes they were aboard for weeks at a time. She learned ‘The North Sea can get pretty rough.’

Debbie’s main role was in the galley, cooking ‘mainly stew.’  She admits that as a young untrained woman of 23 ‘I wasn’t much good’ with the food. But she coped when fresh supplies from shore didn't arrive in time and even in wild weather when the big pots threatened to slide off the galley stove and scald the poor chef. 

Aside from cooking, Debbie DJ’ed from around 1973. She was on Radio Caroline, and then on Radio Atlantis when Steve moved there in 1974. 

Radio Atlantis was an old trawler stationed off Knokke on the Belgian coast. The trip out from Vlissingen in Holland was about 14 miles.

Picture: Debbie and Steve at the Astor Theatre in the 1970s. Picture by Steve England.

 

A PIRATE WOMAN’S PLACE IS AT THE SOUND DECK

And in the studio she succeeded because, she told me unassumingly, ‘I’ve always been good at chatting.’  The technical skills she’d acquired when running the disco ashore meant she needed no techie to help her broadcast to the millions on land. And her knowledge of pop music must have been huge.

She graduated to doing two-to-three hour-long shows, which she remembers were called something obvious like ‘The Debbie Show’. But ‘I don’t think I thought I must play songs because they’re  by women.’ 

If she’d been too assertively feminist that might have meant she couldn’t carry on. It was very much a situation where it was crucial to muck in with your peers, to be a co-operative shipmate..

Today Debbie doesn’t recall the first number she played. But she can’t forget the last track she placed on the turntable as Radio Atlantis was finally towed into Sheveningen in 1974: the Three Degrees singing When will I see you again?

‘It was fun’, she sums it up. ‘It was just all about having a good time’ in trying circumstances. ‘ A bit like wild camping. ‘Hard and quite tough. But an experience.  You’d never get it again. It makes you a stronger person.’

ANYTHING LIKE A GOLDEN AGE PIRATE?

This modest pioneer’s story sounds almost like the Ann Bonny story of 1719, aboard Captain Calico Jack Rackham’s vessels. You can read about Ann’s situation in Captain Charles Johnson’s 1724 classic, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates.

Because I’ve written a history of women pirates throughout history I can see ways that being a woman ‘camping out’ on a grubby pirate radio ship in the 1970s had similarities with being a woman on a real pirate ship in the early 1700s. 

1. You were part of an off-shore team who were outlawed. The ‘rebels’ felt themselves to be fairly legit – and mis-perceived. That sense of ‘us against them’ sometimes bonded them (and you).

2. You were usually the only woman in a masculine culture, living with men who were essentially techies.  Few of them cared to do domestic roles but they appreciated home comforts e.g. palatable food.  

3. You cooked and cleaned – because that’s what women traditionally were expected to do.

4. Often you were the partner of a senior-ish man on board.  That meant the rest of the  men aboard saw you as out-of-bounds sexually. Men were not rivalling each other for access to you, so the ship was not a powder keg. And no liberties taken, unlike today on ships where sexual harassment is a major problem.

5. You could sometimes grab the occasional opportunity to play a more active ‘masculine’ role when it was a case of all hands to the pump. Such openings including DJ-ing in Debbie’s case, and fighting enemy vessels in Ann Bonny’s case.

6. The ship you were on had been ‘acquired’; it was not purpose-built for the task. So the team were always coping ad hoc with an imperfect situation.

7. Rough weather really mattered. So did your ability not to be seasick.  (Some studies think women are more liable to suffer mal de mer). 

8. Sometime you and your team were up against force of law and order, as when law enforcers circled round threateningly, or attacked the ship (took radio masts down) and towed the ships into port. 

DIFFERENCES

Of course there were also difference between the Anne Bonnys of the 1720s world of piracy and Debbie’s offshore radio life in the 1970s. Here are nine key points:

1. Debbie and her shipmates were not roving the seas but anchored in one place. 

2. They weren’t there to attack enemy vessels and plunder doubloons, but to relay music to land – a kind of public service. DJs did not plunder other vessels. However some opponents think pirate radio abused musicians’ rights but not paying for each disc spun.

3. She was in the cold North Sea, not far away in the sunny Caribbean.

4. 250 years on, the women’s liberation movement had started. Women were just starting to glimpse that their talents had been habitually overlooked and their rights restricted.

5. Pirate DJs are never punished by hanging, as pirates were.  So Debbie was not at risk of being widowed because of her husband’s job, although sometimes prison was on the cards.

6. Your pirate radio ship was sometimes one that had no motor. You had to be towed, whereas a pirate ship of the past had sails and could move.  Those pirates had a sense of collective agency. Motility was taken for granted. 

7. Debbie’s ships had chest freezers that trundled up and down the corridors in bad weather.  Tins fell off shelves. But cooks in Anne Bonny’s time contended with brine barrels, kidnapped turtles, and ship’s goats.  Like Anne’s cook (as the captains’ wife, Anne was above such things)  Debbie also had to deal with limited fresh water supplies and lack of green veggies.  

8. A pirate vessel tries not to reveal its presence. A pirate radio does the opposite. Its reason for being is that it is widely audible, and visible to visitors. 

Picture: Debbie (left) and Lynda doing the cleaning on Radio Atlantis, 1974. Image by Steve England, supplied by Pirate Radio Hall of Fame. 

WAS DEBBIE THE EXCEPTION?

Not at all. See my blog of 15 March 2021: http://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2021/03/women-djs-on-pirate-radio-pioneers.html. 

Debbie adds other women were involved in offshore radio too, after the mid-1970s. 

• Dutch women were sometimes on Radio Caroline.

• Kate Cary, who was married to DJ ‘Spangles Muldoon’ (Chris Cary), was working in the land-based side of Radio Caroline’s operations with him in 1972-73.

• Lynda Anderson (c. 1953-2014) was involved in 1974. She was married to Radio Atlantis DJ and sound engineer Andy Anderson. Mainly Lynda did the cooking, sharing it with Debbie. 

Steve England says ‘Lynda did one show on Atlantis but, after we gave her some advice and criticism, refused to ever do another show... [However] she did speak on air from time to time in other people's shows and on the farewell show.’ 

Is it possible that some pirate DJs were not very tactful about the ways they gave advice to newbies? Could there be a possibility of jealousy or sexism when women stepped from galley to technology-filled studio?

Picture: Lynda Anderson, photo by Steve England, loaned by Hans Knot to http://www.offshoreradio.co.uk/djs7a.htm.

SWASHBUCKLING – OR SOUND EXPERTS IN THE MAKING? 

‘Did you think of yourselves as piratical?’ I asked Debbie. She thought that was funny. Being on her pirate radio ships was more like living in a shambolic shack at sea. 

But, she said ‘Yes, Sometimes. We were not trespassing but we were outside the law.’ There could be a feeling of joyous rebellion, like a waterborne version of the new counter-culture.

Women pirates sound so excitingly swashbuckling. But maybe it pays to think more realistically. A woman on ‘pirate’ vessel was a woman in a man’s world of a very specific kind.

Is there a non-glamorous way of seeing women’s role in kinds of piracy, as part of a team of defiant co-creators ?

Is there a missing sign somewhere proclaiming ‘A piratess’s place is in the galley – expect exceptionally.’ 

Debbie’s story suggests that when women were allowed to be involved in the ship’s main activity – relaying music in this case – they rose to the task. 

Training, role models and men who were generous  helped. Debbie must have inspired so many girls on land. 

Learning more about pirate radio 

Go to the encyclopaedic and picture-rich The Pirate Radio Hall of Fame at  http://www.offshoreradio.co.uk/

For more reading see my blog about other pirate women DJs at  http://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2021/03/women-djs-on-pirate-radio-pioneers.html. 

With many thanks to Steve England, Jon Myer, Simon Prentice and Debbie Royle.

Girls ranging the seas: Celebrating 100 years

Sea Rangers 

2020 sees the centenary of the founding of the Sea Rangers. Keep an eye on the website for details: https://searangers.org.uk/the-sea-ranger-2020-centenary-celebrations/. So far their plans include a Centenary Parade and Service in Portsmouth on Saturday 25th April 2020.

By chance, I've just recorded the story of Sea Ranger Janet G. I'm interested in the way young women found ways to connect with seafaring.

Born in 1939 Janet became a Girl Guide, a Sea Ranger, a Wren, then a Girl Guide leader. Rangers were part of the Girl Guide movement.

Janet and her Sea Rangers pals (pictured left) especially loved going on summer training trips. For one or two weeks a year a SR unit would have a solid spell on the water, usually on a shared boat. For Janet in the 1950s this included being on the Sea Rangers' own motor torpedo boat at Dartmouth.

Being in a Sea Ranger unit meant any city girl, whatever her poverty, could almost become a Nancy Blackett, the boaty heroine of Arthur Ransome's inter-war children's books like Swallows and Amazons.

You learned so much...

Not only was membership of the SR  a way for young women over 16 to learn small boat skills and gain access to the sea at a time when gendered restrictions on mobility meant women travelled less than men.
(Only one per cent of UK merchant seafarers in the 1920s and 30s were women. Many ships had no woman crew at all until the 1970s and even later.)

But also being with the Sea Rangers also meant former WW1 Wrens could enjoy passing on nautical culture, volunteering as Sea Ranger officers.

And the would-be ‘sailorettes’ these officers trained could then be fast-tracked into the Women’s Royal Naval Service, as Janet G was in the 1950s.

But usually members did not go on to work on merchant ships as stewardesses. The SR didn't funnel women  into a water-based career. Rather it helped develop transferable skills as citizens and responsible human beings.

Other ‘Daughters of the sea’

Being a Sea Ranger, or a member of the other related organisation, the Girls Nautical Training Corps, meant being proudly part of a sea-minded network: rowing and sailing boats, tying knots, communicating by Morse and semaphore, learning maritime lore.

1920: The SR began, growing from the Girl Guides
1942: The more militaristic GNTC started, then really took off until 1946.

Patriotically, some members of these organisations, especially in the mid-20th century, saw themselves as ‘daughters of the sea’.

They had fun, for all that there was naval-style discipline too, as the picture of Janet's SR colleagues shows. (Pictured left, above)

As part of a strong, can-do, adventurous team, girls and young women in the SR and GNTC developed confidence, a sense of agency and also a sense of motility - the idea that one was capable of travel.

Happy Families playing card. Mrs
Jack Tar, the sailor's wife, and Miss Jack Tar
were usually portrayed as being on land.
Master and Mr Jack Tar were seagoing.

Women and girls could live a sea-minded life, generation after generation, in this way. Mothers and aunts and babies were part of this sea-focused community.

Gender did not have to be an obstacle to accessing maritime life directly. Thanks to the SR and GNTC women didn't have to rely on being the daughter or wife of Jack Tar as a way to connect on to maritime life. Any member could connect in her own right.

Sea novels for girls 

From the mid-1930s to the 1950s Sea Ranger novels boomed.  (GNTC novels, by contrast, seemingly did not exist). 
In genre such novels were far closer to the girls adventure juvenilia end of the spectrum, than to cruise ships novels (the other booming genre of sea fiction for women in the 1930s).
Authors of SR books such as Helen  Beatrice Davidson  (fl.1898- 1998) - see below, Lucy of the Rangers - also wrote about Brownies and Girl Guides.

Frances Olivia Hartopp Nash  (1887-1953) shows her sea-minded heroine transitioning from the Girl Guides, as in: 

• (1922) How Audrey Became  a Guide 
• (1923) Audrey in Camp 
• (1925) Audrey at School
• (1933) Audrey, The Sea Ranger. 

In other words, becoming a motile young woman - who got away from home - was represented as natural progress. The novels encouraged readers to see that they could move on from earlier girlhood in wholesome organisations within the scouting and guiding community, become women who travelled, and even be heroic. Frances also wrote about girls' adventures on land, including at boarding school.

Some Sea Rangers include:

1929 (and 1938): Ethel Talbot,  Skipper and Co, A story of Sea Rangers
1933: Frances Olivia Hartopp Nash, Audrey, the Sea Ranger 
1934 : Helen  Beatrice Davidson, Sea Rangers of the 'Rodney'
1934; Mary Shrewsbury, All Aboard the “Bundy”: A sea-ranger story
1935: Helen Beatrice Davidson,  Adventurers in Camp: A Sea Ranger Story
1935: Ethel Talbot, Sea Rangers All
1937: Ethel Talbot, Sea Rangers’ Holiday
1938 (and 1955) Ethel Talbot: Rangers and Strangers
1943:  Frances Olivia Hartopp  Nash, Lucy of the Sea Rangers
1948: Geoffrey Prout, Sea Rangers at Sloo 

And in the air too...

Sea Rangers stories have a counterpart in flying novels for girls by Dorothy Carter (1901-1948). That thrilling new field, civilian air transport, was a profitable topic for the Josephine March-type writers of the day.

Had Louisa May Alcott  still been around and in the UK she'd surely have written another quartet for girls: Little Brownies, Good Guides, Great Air Rangers, and Brilliant Girl Pilots.  Actually it appears  that there were no novels about Air Rangers, Sea Rangers’ counterparts.


Celebrating mobility,  and making clear that long-distance travel was not just confined to boys, these inspirational Sea Ranger novels were the ‘daughters’ of earlier girls’ boarding school novels such as those by Elinor Brent-Dyer and Angela Brazil.

Pioneering waitresses afloat: new insights

Women afloat: serving at tables in the dining room of Matson's Mariposa II. Picture from Wellington Evening Post, Alexander Turnbull Libray EP/1956/2697-F.

Women, rather than men, traditionally cooked and served food in homes on land. So it’s easy to make the assumption that they would do the same for people in transit.

But public food service is about status and perks. On ships it was, and still is, a gendered matter. And for over a century women were only allowed on ships as stewardesses (room maids).

Frances Steel (pictured), who teaches Pacific History at the University of Wollongong, has just written an interesting brief history of waitresses on US ships, especially Matsons' vessels (pictured above, note women’s maid-like caps). 

Her article appears on the Australian Women’s History Network Blog, Vida: 'Waiting women: female employment on Pacific passenger liners' (4 November 4 1918): http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/waiting-women/ 

Reasons for women's exclusion

In the early twentieth century women were excluded from working in ship's dining rooms. My general knowledge of gendered employment practices on ships leads me to surmise that there were two explanations:

1.Shipping companies’ managers wanted to replicate the kind of fancy service delivered by hotels on land. To make voyages seem like desirable, even swanky, experiences - rather than miserable endurance feats - they employed men to serve in ship’s dining rooms.

Elite-seeming maitre d's, wine waiters, and fleets of men in immaculate black who could explain French items on the menu, conferred more distinction on the dining experience than 'girls' in frilly pinnies. Think Maxims, Paris, not Ye Olde Cottage Tearooms.

https://www.cruiseshipjob.com/junior-
waiter-waitress-jobs.html

2. Men typically jockeyed with women for access to roles that brought the possible of lavish tips. Waiting at tables was the very best of these opportunities, especially when passengers were so tipsy that they didn't notice the size of the gratuity they were bestowing.

Waiters developed skilled 'performances' that enabled them to get the edge over passengers, as their historians Philip Crang, Gerald Mars and Michael Nicod show. Camp gay men on ships became especially good at being amusing as they served meals.

Patterns of pioneering

I had long known, in passing, that the US was the first English-speaking country to break through the gendered divide and allow women to become shipboard waitresses in the 1930s.

 But now Frances Steel gives the definitive US story, briefly.

 The US timeline is:

•  Grace Line (in 1930s) on its Santa ships

•  Nippon Yusen Kaisha (1931) on US routes, as a trial

•  Matson Line (early 1950s).

 The UK timeline is:

•  Buries Marks and Medomsley tramp ship companies, as a gimmick (early 1950s)

•  Union Castle 'stewardettes' (1960s)

•  Many companies (early 1970s), when the advent of buffet dining in shipboard cafeterias lowered the prestige attached to dining. Therefore women could be allowed into this shipboard role.

In the UK women had been allowed to be cashiers in shipboard restaurants on White Star vessels, at least to the US, from the 1920s. This history is inadvertently revealed because Blanche Tucker was feted as one of the first women to be trained to take charge of a lifeboat, in 1929. Mrs Tucker was chief restaurant cashier on the Majestic (pictured).

Blanche Tucker (far right). Picture: University of Liverpool D42 PR6.10

However, still today almost all restaurant managers on cruiseships are male. Waiting in ship's bars remained a gender-segregated job out of bounds for longer. Cunard's first female bar tender (as opposed to person circulating the room to solicit drink orders) was in 1987: Sabine Machado-Rettau. (Pictured)

Matsons in the 1950s

Frances Steel links the San Francisco company's use of 30 women on its two new transpacific liners – Mariposa II (pictured) and Monterey –  to post-war commercial strategy and alleged labour shortages.

 ‘The waitresses, appointed through the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union and formally rated as merchant mariners, replaced male dining room stewards.

‘The company looked to women ostensibly in response to the shortage of first-class stewards on the U.S. west coast. Even so, men continued to be hired for service in the stateroom and public room, and held all the senior positions, including head waiter.’

Commercial flying’s advent, from the 1930s, led to companies employing female flight attendants to reassure edgy first-time flyers.  The 1970s label 'trolley dollies’ minimised the extent of women's skilled emotion labour and abilities as safety professionals; it also maximised a reductive images of them as simply delivering food (graciously).  

What is this figure, a seagoing waitress?

Frances thinks that in the 1950s 'comfort – if not safety – may have played a part in Matson’s strategy. On these new transpacific ocean liners, the figure of the waitress contributed to the restored appeal of sea travel, shorn now of its wartime privations and dangers.'

She sees women on Matson's new luxury transpacific  liners as part of the company's narrative about America’s post-war ‘rediscovery’ of the Pacific, representing it as a space inviting white bourgeois relaxation, and consumer comfort and freedom.'

Frances argues that the figure of a woman waiting at tables is complex: 'in contrast to the air, where hostesses were ostensibly trained homemakers in waiting, this aspect of gendered domesticity of female employment on ships appears to have been more ambiguous.'

Also, such gendered public servers of food have to be seen in context: 'The figure of the ocean-going waitress embodied interlaced themes of post-war modernity and mobility, labour and consumption.

'This change in the working world at sea also gendered the U.S. presence in the Pacific in more layered ways, serving as a counterpoint both to the masculine deployments of the Pacific War and the sexualised fictions of Hollywood’s South Seas.'

--

I can’t help thinking that if Elvis Presley's Don Juan character had travelled by a Matson vessel in Blue Hawaii (1961) his ship-board steak would surely have been served up by a woman. But she’d be represented as not sexualised or glamorous enough to be girlfriend material.

Going further

 Frances Steel's blog article on shipboard waitresses goes on to detail:

• the kind of women whom Matsons employed (not Pacific Islanders, and sometimes dental assistants and teachers)
• passengers' responses
• trade union opposition
• pay
• women's motivations and satisfactions

I do urge you to read the article in full, at http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/waiting-women/. 

The author can also be followed on Twitter @FrancesMSteel. 

Frances Steel's published works include:

Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (co-authored). https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/colonialism-and-male-domestic-service-across-the-asia-pacific-9781350056732/.

Oceania under steam: Sea transport and the cultures of colonialism, c. 1870–1914. http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719082900/

You can read more about women in shipboard catering in my book From Cabin "Boys" to Captains: 250 years of women at sea, pp.214-218. Greta Foff Paules has written interestingly about waitresses on land in Dishing it Out: Power and Resistance Among Waitresses in a New Jersey Restaurant. 

Lesley Poling-Kempes studied US track-side women in The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West. There's also been a movie about them, starring Judy Garland. Seagoing waitresses have yet to become stars of the screen. The nearest thing in the UK is the waitress at 'Milford Junction' in Brief Encounter.

World's first all-women tugboat crew - one week old

Marine engineer Kelsie MacLean (left) and deckhand Jocelyn Smith pull down the gangway as they work aboard the Atlantic Willow on Wednesday afternoon. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)


This is the straight lift of a story that broke yesterday, about the three women who work and live aboard the Atlantic Willow tug in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Tugboat women are still rare in every country. An all-woman tugboat crew is even more rare. It's still likely that some traditionalists elsewhere may not want their vessels tugged by such a team, or only want them for the novelty.

Francis Campbell wrote this story, which appears in The Chronicle Herald, the biggest independently-owned newspaper in Canada. The accompanying video of them can be seen, too, at http://thechronicleherald.ca/business/1567431-video-halifax-tugboat-with-all-female-crew-like-a-family.
(I've inserted some side-headings and extra pictures for easy reading, and an addendum.)


THIS MAKESHIFT FAMILY REALLY PULLS TOGETHER


THE TUGMASTER'S VIEW
“We’re a team but it’s also like a family here,” tug master Andrea MacDonald said of the non-traditional, all-woman crew who work the bridge, engine room and deck of the Atlantic Willow as it chugs and tugs around Halifax Harbour and beyond.
“It’s going well,” MacDonald, 50, said of her newly assembled tugboat crew of engineer Kelsie MacLean, 23, and deckhand Jocelyn Smith, 29.“We live together. This is home. It’s more comfortable, if you need to get up in the middle of the night, to have all women on board. We were really excited to have the three of us on board. We were all a little curious, even I was thinking, 'Wow, this is going to be different.’ Three women, OK, this has never been done before.
“We are getting along very well, the jobs are all getting done, everything is working fine.” Even a makeshift family that works one of the four harbour tugs operated by Atlantic Towing requires a modicum of structure.
“I’m like the boat mom,” said MacDonald.Like any mom, she shares tidbits of little-known information about her crew.“On Saturday morning, we brought in a tanker in the middle of a thunder and lightning storm. Jocelyn doesn’t like lightning. She was not happy.”

Tugmaster Andrea MacDonald poses for a photo aboard the Atlantic Willow on Wednesday afternoon. The Willow features an all-female crew of MacDonald, engineer Kelsie MacLean and deckhand Jocelyn Smith. (RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)








THE TEAM'S ENGINEER
And what about Kelsie [Maclean], the newest family member brought into the fold just last week? “Even though Kelsie’s only been here a week, I can already tell you some of her idiosyncrasies. I’m starting to learn what she’s like first thing in the morning, in the middle of the night. She’s not a morning person. If you were here at six this morning to see her rolling out, I said ‘good morning’ because I am a morning person. She knows that. She just went ‘mmmm.’” Mornings might not be her thing but MacLean said she has sea salt in her blood.
“I could not imagine living anywhere that is not near water,” said MacLean, who grew up in Marion Bridge on the Mira River in Cape Breton. “My grandfather is a fisherman out of Gabarus. My great-grandfather, I can remember his whole dining room was filled with model ships. That was my favourite place to go, in that little room, but I was little and my mother always scooted me out because she didn’t want me to break them.”
Having studied at the Nautical Institute in Port Hawkesbury, MacLean is now more into fixing things, including the two 16-cylinder marine diesel engines that she monitors in the engine room of the 95-foot Willow.

The Nautical Institute in Port Hawkesbury where MacLean trained

“Fixing everything that breaks, running the engines, doing the maintenance on all the engines and every system we have on the boat, including our domestic systems, like our sewage and our pot water,” MacLean said of her duties. “Literally everything.”
The tug has an unmanned engine room and alarm panels warn MacLean to immediately go below if anything demands her attention. In the interim, she helps Smith on deck.“When we come back in, most of the time we go up with Andrea and have a chat, see the nice views if it is not too foggy,” MacLean said. “There's lots of coffee on board.”


THE DECKHAND'S PERSPECTIVE
[Jocelyn] Smith, who lives in Dartmouth, started working in construction but was looking for lighter work.“I like manual labour so this is good for me,” said Smith. “My father is an engineer on one of the other tugs. He got me involved in this.”
The Willow works the harbour primarily but it also makes some long trips to Sheet Harbour.“Six hours there, six hours back and the time to do the job,” said Smith.
The crew works a 14-day rotation, living on the boat and ready 24-7 to chug into action in rain, snow, sleet or freezing weather. “We were looking like a Popsicle after one of those (winter) Sheet Harbour trips,” Smith said.
Smith said her duties include maintaining the tug, putting the line out for ship assist, releasing all the mooring lines, and doing the bulk of the cooking, cleaning and painting.

Atlantic Towing company in action:http://atlantictowing.com/atlantic-towing-marine-services.aspx

FIRST OF ITS KIND?
The all-female tugboat no doubt looks cleaner and smells fresher than her sister tugs manned by males. Sitting in the Willow’s control room at the Woodside dock in Dartmouth, MacDonald repeats a company suggestion that the all-female tugboat crew might be the first of its kind anywhere.
“This is very much a male-dominated industry,” she said. “This type of work is not for the faint of heart. It’s rough. It’s very technical. There is a lot of strain on these lines. We’re just a small boat going alongside these huge moving ships, sometimes at a considerable speed. We’ve got to get in there and get lines on them. It’s quite a job and it’s not something a lot of women think of doing for a career, but it’s certainly very doable.”
MacDonald grew up in Purcells Cove, attained two degrees from Dalhousie and worked for many years in the insurance business before putting her mind to what she loves — the water and working on boats. She’s heard men dismiss her as inferior because of her gender.
“I just smile and say, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’ As time goes on and there are more of us coming into the industry and as we stay in the industry, I’m finding that the men are starting to change their minds and they are being much more accepting of women on these boats. And even encouraging.”


STAYING TOGETHER
She likens her control centre to a video game, with three screens — a chart plotter, radar and engine information — and two joysticks that control the Z-drives, or azimuth thrusters, propeller pods that can rotate 360 degrees, allowing for rapid changes in speed and direction.
Pushing and pulling gigantic ships into port and through narrow channels, the female crew pulls closer together as a family each day. MacDonald said it’s the Irving-owned towing company’s decision as to whether the crew stays together.
“We certainly hope that we will stay together because it’s a good thing and it’s really cool. Fingers are crossed that we all stay together.”

----------

ADDENDDUM: WOMEN & TUGS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Captain Annie Brennan (Madge Dressler) handles her family aboard her tug Narcissus. Pic courtesy of Doctor Macro's High Resolution Movie Scans: http://www.doctormacro.com/Images/Posters/T/Poster%20-%20Tugboat%20Annie_04.jpg

The most famous woman working a tug is, of course, a fictional one: 'Tugboat Annie' from the 1920s stories of Norman Reilly Raine and the subsequent movies and TV series.
Annie, played by Marie Dressler became a byword for a quarrelsome mouthy older woman operating in man's world and not being properly 'feminine'. Luckily that was so long ago that none of the Willow's team will have face this stereotype.
The main thing that the Atlantic Willow and Annie's celluloid family team have in common is that they are operating in a tough world.
Thea Foss of Tacoma, Washington and Kate A. Sutton of the Providence Steamboat Company are said to be Raine's real models. In fact neither was seagoing. Foss was an owner. Sutton was a secretary and dispatcher.

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.

All hands manfully to the ship's gushing pumps: Henry Tuke and Mrs Peggy

I've just found out that artist Henry S Tuke's (self-portrait, left) image of men manfully manning the ships' pump has been discussed as a maritime narrative that can be read homo-erotically. See yesterday's blog here about a woman, Peggy X doing it so staunchly.

Jongwoo Jeremy Kim devotes several pages to Tuke's 'All hands to the pumps!' in Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities, Ashgate Publishing, 2012.

'The sensuality in this brotherhood of seamen 'is suggested in the action of pumping as well as the water gushing out from the pipes' Kim writes on p103

Kim also discusses The run home (1902) from a homo-erotic point of view:'the Cornish fisher-lads are celebrated as heroes who restore the beauty of the male sex, and a homo-erotic gaze is encouraged as a an aesthetic virtue. Tuke's naturalism capturing "views of labour" must be understood in this context of love between men.' p107.

So what does it mean, symbolically, for Peggy (this short, non-beauteous female outsider) and for the limp-spirited sailors who she allegedly showed up by pumping so much better than them? Can she be read as inadvertently causing a crisis of masculinity and queering a proud, formerly all-male team's collective gendered identity?