Selling sex and seafarer wellbeing in ports, Sept 2026

 

Today (Saturday 5 Sept) is seemingly the final day of the USS aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln’s visit to Thailand’s main sex destination Pattaya. Then it's back to San Diego.

This is a ship visit remarkable only for all the media interest in what didn’t happen: a newsworthy explosion of fizzing by disaffected US Navy and Marines when uncorked from a floating ‘prison’ that has infamously been kept at sea for 264 days, largely by the US-Iran war.

There had been rumours about people on board being suicidal, loss of faith in the mission, and supplies running out  A break was indeed needed.

Onlookers’ interest was not in seafaring workers’ mental illhealth caused by unfairly long deployments, (which is a matter of huge concern in the maritime welfare world today, not least because it impacts safety and retention.)

Instead the question was whether this part of the military oversea would mutiny against the Trump regime.

TIGHT CONTROLS - DAMP SQUIB

An Abraham Lincoln rising hasn’t happened in Sin City so far, largely because US Navy restrictions on permissible recreation are so tight. Or so I gather from YouTube and social media, reading as someone who’s previously researched 20^th century usage of ports for seafarer sex.

Everyone on board the Abraham Lincoln was issued with a Liberty Brief, which told them that yes, there could be shopping in the air-conditioned mall; there could be cruising down Walking Street, a key site of salacious hyper-commercial neon display, but not in the dodgy red-light area, especially Soi 6. 

No, there was to be no buying of cannabis (legal in Thailand since 2022, but not in the US Navy). Nor could there even be a bit of jet-skiing (too dangerous). Ladyboy hookers have certainly not been mentioned in all the heteronormative footage. So much ‘liberty’ hasn’t been allowed.

ILLEGAL BUT...

If I was a sailor in Pattaya this week I’d be confused and frustrated. What’s with these puzzling fuzzy reminders that prostitution is illegal in Thailand – when actually it’s ubiquitous and blatant?

The Abraham Lincoln’s personnel seem to have got round this by digitally booking up massages, facials and pedicures, via parlours, clinics and spas.

This distanced approach is a substitute for the traditional, more direct sex-buying practices, such as engaging with the many solo street hookers who wait on Beach Road (essentially the promenade) rather as ‘Maggie May’ did in the song, ‘cruising up and down old Canning Place’ in Liverpool.

It’s not clear how much the buyers drink in bars then utilise hired rooms upstairs, as US sailors did in the classic foreign hooking novel “The World of Suzy Wong.”

Local traders in Pattaya, including the estimated 60,000 resident sex suppliers, must have expected a bonanza. A very large container full of customers from global north had appeared: 5,000 potentially desirous people with nine-months’ worth of wages stashed on their debit cards.

The average tourist spend was expected to be 30-90 dollars a day.  You can see what that means in practice if you understand that a sex session is 1,000 baht, or 30 dollars a time; the Hard Rock Hotel would have charged you 83 dollars for a room last night; if you want to buy a can of Coke at the 7-Eleven it’ll cost you just under a dollar.

OTHER PORTS, OTHER TIMES

One of the fascinating things about this situation, for people interested in maritime culture, is that it’s revealed the current state of a key aspect of ports: sex-related work. The subject is strongly linked to alcohol retailing, but also gender-based violence, sexual health and above all conservative attempts to control and deny what some see as disorderly, marginal and shameful.
Events in Pattaya this week – invisibilized and euphemized though they are – augment earlier information. In researching several countries I’ve found that four historical (and related) situations can be seen:
~ The 19th and 20th century waterfront communities where sex was sold, most famously in Hamburg and Amsterdam. Pattaya’s Soi 6 had its predecessors in the Reeperbahn and de Wallen respectively, but its 25k away from the dock. Suppliers sometimes had sex (as part of a kind of hospitality extended to men in the same occupation as their seafaring brothers and fathers. Participants in the exchange were ‘us’, accustomed to the international seafaring community’s rhythms.

~ Post-1920s very young women travelled in from the suburbs and partied on moored ships with seafarers. Less interested in money-earning than adventure, these ‘delinquents’ were temporarily attracted to ‘exotic’ mariners from afar and to liminal itinerant living. They sometimes made short voyages, especially round the Australia coast 1950s to 1960s, and often later settled into paid sex work.

~ In the late twentieth century UK there was now-forgotten diplomatic discussion about what happened to locals’ morals and to decent neighbourhoods when the US Navy was stationed there, not just visiting. Dunoon and Glasgow, in Polaris times, 1969-96, was the main example. So was that earlier ‘Sin City’, at Yokosuka, near Tokyo. Moral anxiety led to trying to binarily separate areas of ‘family life’ and military operations.

 ~ The most telling developments are the consciously created sex campuses in the global south, post-WW2. They were erected outside of town, to maintain a geographical as well as social distance from ‘vice’s pollution’. Women were trafficked there or trafficked themselves, sometimes from thousands of miles away. Like a no-frills holiday camp devoted entirely to sex and drinking, such alienated mass facilities were used mainly by seafarers, the military and posses of foreign sub-contractors. Camp Alegre on the Caribbean island of Curaçao and Olongapo,near Subic Bay in the Philippines, are the main ones.

DISCONNECTS.

Today women selling their bodies in places such as Pattaya are not doing so as part of an ‘all the nice girls love a sailor’ culture. 

They work with sex-seeking visitors simply because all service suppliers need customers, whatever the customer’s occupation. 

Not many port cities today are what you might call briny, when it comes to the sale of sexual services; docks are usually physically, as well as metaphorically, far from recreation areas. Healing? Well, this is commerce.

Seafaring women through history: my book just published

 

If you want to know the history of women at sea in both Britain's navies over the last 250 years, then my book, Seafaring Women Through History, may be what you need.

My favourite thing about it? The micro-biographies set as panels, so that you can skip-read easily.

The thing that most surprised me? That although women  pioneers in some other countries are blazing through, UK women aren't making the progress I optimistically expected, ten years ago. 

History Press published the book in February 2026 . It's the much revised edition of From Cabin "Boys" to Captains: 250 years of women at sea (2016).

You can get it from all the usual outlets. If you'd like to help a maritime charity, order it from https://www.marinesocietyshop.org/seafaring-women-through-history_9781837050734.  

Pioneering trans ex-Wren dies: Mark Rees WRNS

Trans rights advocate and author Mark Rees, who died 26 July, was the second former Wren  (member of the Women's Royal Naval Service) to transition.* The funeral was 23 August.

Mark used the pronoun 'he' later. He was first trans person to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights. While not successful in 1987, his campaigning in Press for Change had a major impact for decades.

Christine Burns, trans actvist, was the first to make the announcement on social media. She's interviewed Mark too.

# hear her very moving interview at  https://lgbtplushistorymonth.co.uk/2008/02/interview-with-trans-pioneer-mark-rees/. 

# see chapter 7 of her book Trans Britain. 

--

Mark (1942-23) was known for activism much later, not for being a 'lady Tar'. He was a WRNS driver 1962-64: a 'Motor Transport Wren'. **

I tried to interview him, for my book, Women in the Royal Navy, and then for an article on Trans seafarers. He never replied to my correspondence. I respected his choice - but regretted it. 

His dad Hubert Rees, known as William, was a merchant seaman who became an officer. Mark wanted to go to sea too. But women in the WRNS were not allowed to do so in until 1990. It appears that he didn't consider joining the MN.

Mark's career as a Wren included being interviewed aboard Captain Scott's Discovery at the Embankment; trained at Burghfield, then at RNAS Culdrose, Cornwall; and later drafted to HMS Excellent in Portsmouth. 

Mark was treated as a 'homosexual' when in the WRNS. At the time it was a homophobic organisation. The word 'trans' was barely used.

'I explained that it was my lack of femininity which posed more problems than my supposed sexuality,' Mark said in his autobiography (p56). 'Because of the lack of information, I regarded myself as some kind of "deviant" lesbian. I couldn't find another label.'

The Navy was far from understanding about diversity at that point. And some WRNS friends and officers were troubling too. But he was helped to a degree by:

# Ken, the RNAS Culdrose chaplain, with whom he remained in touch for 40 years

# the Senior Medical Officer at Culdrose, who nevertheleess 'was unable to offer any other hope regarding a "sex change". "No doctor would do that; he would regard it as a mutilation" .  The doctor was obviously unware there had been two female-to-male changes in the 1940s UK.

# a kind psychiatrist at the Portsmouth naval barracks who wanted Mark to do psychoanalysis twice a week for two years. 'I couldn't understand what the point of it all was. They'd not succeed in making me feminine unless they gave me a brain transplant.'

# warmly supportive WRNS Second Officer Nancy Thomson 'was probably of more help than the psychiatrist . I remain indebted to her.' (Nancy went on to become Deputy Director of the WRNS in 1977, active in WRNS Benevolent Trust, and was always renowned for humanity).

# Netley Military Psychiatric Hospital, who labelled Mark 'homosexual' and recommended a medical discharge as 'I was never going to settle in the service ... [so] it was almost a relief.' 

He transitioned in 1971 and published his memoir, "Dear Sir or Madam" (Cassell) in 1996. https://www.abebooks.co.uk/.../Dear-Sir-Madam.../plp. The WRNS bit is on pp50-67.

Other Wrens and diversity

*The first known Wren to transition was Stephen Davis, in 1961. Born in 1936 in rural County Durham. On marriage to a navy artificer this Wren found they could no longer pretend all was well in terms of identity. They and their husband split up. Stephen re-joined the WRNS, left again, and later transitioned F to M in the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne. Later they worked as a market clerk and planned to marry their cis girlfriend. No more is known.

**  Other path-breaking 'Motor Transport Wrens' were the famous lesbian WW2 Wren Nancy Spain. (top pic). Later a broadcaster, Nancy(1917-64)  was never formally out. 

Her partner was another Wren driver, publisher Joan Werner Laurie 1920-1964.  (Middle pic) For a time Nancy and Joan had a triangular arrangement with racing driver Sheila Van Damm. (Lower pic). 

If only Mark could have met them back them. His 1960s would have been a little easier.

New book on gender and the sea just out!

This year the Women's History Yearbook (# 41) is focusing on Gender at Sea. It's rare that a multi-authored, multinational book focusing on a 'minority' in maritime life hits the bookshelves.

Gender at Sea is so rich  and diverse. In all my years of reading such books it feels like the last one that excited me as much was Iron Men, Wooden Women in 1996.  

Yes, I've got a chapter in Gender at Sea. So I would be delighted, wouldn't I? But even if I wasn't a contributor I'd still be welcoming all these fascinating new angles on the subject. 

Editor Djoeke van Netten and the Editorial Board write in their summary:

"For centuries seafaring people thought that the presence of women on board would mean bad luck: rough weather, shipwreck, and other disasters were sure to follow. Because of these beliefs and prejudices women were supposedly excluded from the maritime domain. 

In the field of maritime history too, the ship and the sea have generally been perceived as a space for men. "This volume of the Yearbook of Women's History challenges these notions. It asks: 

• To what extent were the sea and the ship ever male-dominated and masculine spaces? 
• How have women been part of seafaring communities, maritime undertakings, and maritime culture?
•  How did gender notions impact life on board and vice versa?

 "From a multidisciplinary perspective, this volume moves from Indonesia to the Faroe Islands, from the Mediterranean to Newfoundland; bringing to light the presence of women and the workings of gender on sailing, whaling, steam, cruise, passenger, pirate, and navy ships. 

"As a whole it demonstrates the diversity and the agency of women at sea from ancient times to the present day.

See picture of celebrations on launch day, 27 January, at the Netherlands National Maritime Museum, in Amsterdam.  (Pic courtesy of Bob van de Poll)

Published in Hilversum Netherlands, this book may not be as widely circuated as it deserves elsewhere.

Therefore I'm including the contents list. That way you can see that this is a book that should be on the shelf of everyone in the maritime industries, worldwide. 

CONTENTS

Iris van der Zande on behalf of the Editorial Board. Preface

Djoeke van Netten. Introduction:Taking Women on Board.

PART 1. Women and Children First: Uncovering the Presence of Women and Children on Board

Laurel Seaborn. Searching for Signs of Seafaring Women in the Age of Sail

Sarah Lentz. Overlooked Inhabitants of the ‘Wooden World’. Child Passengers as Part of Shipboard Societies in the Age of Sail

Joan Druett. ‘The Late Fashion;’ Discovering Whaling Wives at Sea

Kristof Loockx. Jackie of All Trades. The Emergence of Stewardesses in the Belgian Fleet, 1870-1914

Iris van der Zande. The Cruise Tourist’s Corset: Gender, Space, and Mobility on Dutch Youth Cruises in the 1930s

PART 2. Experiences at Sea: Women Travelling from Europe to Asia and Australia

Simon Karstens. An Unfaithful Wife and a Cross-Dressing Soldier:Christian Burckhardt’s Report of Two Women Sailing to Batavia in 1675

 Neptune Ceremony, Wasp,1942.
Image with thanks to https://
laststandonzombieisland.com/
2015/11/05/crossing-the-line/ 

Felicity Jensz. Neptune’s Visit Made Palatable. Gender and Journeys over the Line in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

Ron Brand and Kirsten Kamphuis. Zusters op zee: Reiservaringen van missiezusters naar Nederlands-Indië en Indonesië in de negentiende en twintigste eeuw

Emily Hutcheson. Women in Ocean Science: The Two-Part Research Programme of the Siboga Expedition

Vicki S. Hallett.  Salt Fish Maids. Untold Stories of Gender and Sex in the Labrador Floater Fishery

PART 3. Violence and Victims: Gendered Agency on Board

Virginia W. Lunsford. Piracy and the Hidden History of Female Agency. The Case of the Buccaneers

Alicia Schrikker. Januari’s schim

Elisa Camiscioli.  Sexing the Steamship,Prostitution, Trafficking, and Maritime Travel

UK radio officers in training, in the early 1970s when the first women were being admitted - and encountering systemic sexism. The trainer is saying "We shall devote this morning's lesson to mutual induction and double-humped curves."

Jo Stanley. Women/Sea/Misogyny:Ending Silences about Sexual Abuse at Sea

Víctor Ramírez Tur. Problematizing Homoerotic Relationships on the High Seas. The Exhibition ‘Desire Flows Like the Sea’

Image from Barcelona Maritime Museum's "Desire Flows Like the Sea"

PART 4. Stories to be Told. Power and Representations of Women at Sea

Roberta Franchi. Woman and the Sea in Classical and Christian Texts

Muhammad Buana. The Stranger Sea Queens: Gender, Migration, and Power in Sulawesi and Javanese Traditions

Stefan Roel Reyes. ‘Tweete Sielle’: The Affective Presence of Women in the Sailing Letters of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Dutch Seafarers

Valerie Sallis. Spiritual Anchors or Sinful Shoals; Women, Religion, and Spirituality in the Shipboard Writings of American Sailors,1810-1859

Russell Fielding and Ina Seethaler. Women and Whaling in the Faroe Islands

Getting it

Price 32 Euros. Paperback. 308  pages, with illustrations.  ISBN 9789464550399. Obtainable via https://verloren.nl/Webshop/Detail/catid/90/eid/58732/gender-at-sea

Celebrating Pride in Maritime day 2023. Queer seafarers

 

 

Dutch gay seafaring steward from the SS Rotterdam looks at his voyage album, late 20C. He's helping in the Amsterdam Maritime Museum research project, 'Queer Spaces at Sea. Queer culture on merchant ships 1950 - 1980

Celebrating Pride in Maritime Day, Tues Feb 28 2023. This year join in some wonderful opportunities to celebrate queer seafarers and their place in maritime heritage: 

• exhibitions
• talks
• events .

So why not try:

1. Seeing two European exhibitions on now till summer (both with English subtitles)

# Bergen, Norway: ‘Queer Lives at Sea’ https://sjofartsmuseum.museumvest.no/norsk/utstillinger/skeive-sjoefolk/

# Amsterdam Maritime Museum, Netherlands. As yet 'Queer Spaces at Sea. Queer culture on merchant ships 1950 -1980' is in its early stages. 

Bob van de Poll, Curator of 
 Amsterdam's Queer Spaces
at Sea project

Curator Bob van de Poll invites you to:

• Join in if you have memories. 
• Read/hear stories. 
• See the first-ever film of LGBT+ crew reminiscing about the oddly out -and-proud ships' subcultures in those early days.

Queer Spaces at Sea' is part of the wonderful new exhibition, Humans at Sea: https://lnkd.in/eDxTKH55.

2. Helping develop Pride in Maritime Day 

It’s only the second year of its existence. Tuesday 28 Feb 2023. So let’s big it up. And join in the Diversity in Maritime UK discussion at https://bit.ly/PrideEvent28Feb2023.

3. Catching this info, in talks, posts and films throughout LGBT+ history month. I’ll be sharing stories about:

Wendy at his piano in Hull, lifting spirits as he did
at sea.Picture courtesy Harriet Jones. 

# Entertaining 4 sanity@sea:  Roy ‘Wendy’ Gibson: steward, Falklands Conflict hero, and Hull’s answer to pianist Liberace 

You can hear about people - especially queer seafarers - who raised shipboard morale by making music and theatre. 
Discover how the exceptional gay-affirmative sub-culture on late 20C ships enabled some LGBT+ people to boost their mental health despite gruelling homophobia ashore. 

Show-biz style fun kept you sane at sea! Watch this space and social media for updates.

#  Comparing Europe’s queer maritime past 
New stories are emerging of Norwegian, Scandinavian and Dutch LGBT+ seafarers’ lives at sea. 
Compare revelations of below-decks fun and work, love and tourism, on late 20C ships of different countries. Watch this space and social media for updates on venues and dates.

1968: Yes, gay seafarers were aboard seemingly the queerest Dutch ship, Rotterdam, with two other ships of the Holland-America Line (Maasdam and Ryndam) at the Wilhelminakade in Rotterdam

For a roundup including Canada's exhibition on gay seafarers see also https://hec.lrfoundation.org.uk/whats-on/stories/rainbow-sea-swelling

Jamaican ship's cook: her poison mystery 1764

 Maybe the mysterious cook previously worked in the Jamaican
canefields, like these women?

It's Black History Month. And here's a newly-found story about a rare BAME woman seafarer. 

So this is about race, gender, ships. It's part of the history of maritime diversity, labour and seafarers' forgotten lives. A fluke and your occupation could affect whether you ever arrived home from the sea. 

Only a fragment about this mysterious West Indian woman can be found. And the same words about her are repeated word for word in seven British newspapers. No more information than that is available. 

The story's a gift for a dramatist with a Sherlock Holmes touch. So I hope someone creative will make fiction from this small seed in the Derby Mercury, 10 Feb 1764. 

'We hear that a whole Ship's Crew, lately arrived from Jamaica, have been poisoned by a Black Woman-Cook they had on board, who after she had committed it, threw herself into the Sea and was drown'd. They are all dead except the Captain and two Men, who are very bad.'

Seven good questions to ask

Q. 1. Why does her story matter?

 A. Because women crew were very unusual.Black women  crew were even more unusual. This is the frst black woman ship's cook I've heard about in 40 years of researching maritime women.

Picture from 'Seamen “Love Their Bellies”: How Blacks Became Ship Cooks'  

Q. 2. How did the ship come to have a woman cook, unusually? 

A. Because a cook was needed. This person was available and affordable. It was was common for cooks to be black or disabled.

(See Guadeloupean William Buckland's story Buckland seacook BAME Maybe another black cook recommended  her. Indeed she may have been the widow of a black cook on board who'd died.  

Want to know more about the brief and late history of women cooks (usually white)? See my book From Cabin 'Boys' to Captains: 250 Years of Women at Sea,pp 214-219. 

This picture from it shows (left) Chief Cook Betty Fitch and Freda Price (right) Second Cook, in the tinned food storeroom on the Langleeclyde c1950. (Courtesy Maud McKibbin). Freda and Betty were highly appreciated for their good cooking.

Q. 3. Why did she poison these men? 

A. If it was deliberate, because she was angry and wanted redress. Revenge? Perhaps the ship was a slaver and she was one of the enslaved people who'd endured a bad voyage and seen her shipmates die. Perhaps someone on board had offended her. by assuming she was sexually available,  or had expressed dislike of food she had cooked?

A. If it was accidental, she might have had been supplied with bad ingredients.

Q.4. Why did she throw herself overboard? 

A. Surely because she knew she would be punished on landing. It was better to end the misery now, and by her own hand.

A. If it was accidental, she might have felt ashamed, and/or feared summary justice. Seafarers could hate bad cooks, because seafaring was hard enough without dismal food.

Q.5. What poison would she have used, if it was deliberate?

A. Women such as her were sometimes doctresses with a knowledge of herbs. Possibly she had a selection of herbs with her. 

A. If the poisoning was accidental, it could have been because the food she was expected to cook had gone off, There were plenty of opportunities were victuals to deteriorate as the 4,000-miles,oyage from Jamaica took between between three  weeks and four months depending on winds etc. 

Q.6. Why didn't everyone die?

A.  Possibly because the cook was given two lots of ingredients to cook, and those for the crew were inferior to the officers' rations. This status difference would not be unusual.

A.  Perhaps, if the poisoning was deliberate, she was targetting lower-decks crew, not officers.

Q. 7. So what else should we be asking about her?

A. All we can!

Pic shows sentimentalised version of a black male cook, with ayah and white girl on Victorian ship.

This story was drawn to my attention to John D Ellis. I thank him very much for his generosity in sharing it, and many other stories too. John is working on the history of black people in the armed services. Some of his work can be seen at https://www.historycalroots.com

New play: Sexual harasssment at sea

Corrina Corrina, Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, UK (17 May – 4 June 2020 https://www.everymanplayhouse.com/

Corrina faces a metaphorical storm. All pictures by Helen Murray

Workplace sexual harassment today is a big mental health issue, especially for seafarers. Victim’s lives are wrecked. Promising careers are wasted in an industry facing severe shortages.

The death of Cadet Akhona Geveza in 2010 and the at-sea rape of Midshipman X in 2021 mean most people now know that being on a ship where someone senior is pursuing and disrespecting you is a 24:7 hell that needs to be stopped forever. Pronto.

For the first time, a play – not a trade union survey or policy document – is making that story of sexual harassment at sea come alive. Corrina Corrina also shows the structural injustice and the gas lighting in a context of the racial injustice against the Filipino crew.

THE STORY

Third Mate Corrina Wilkinson (Laura Elsworthy) is 28, smart, fair-minded and set on becoming a captain. She joins container ship MSC Keto in Felixstowe, headed for Singapore. The good news is that her captain (smug David Crellin) prides himself on being progressively pro-women. That’s one battle less for her, she thinks.

Then Corrina  finds that she knows the First Officer, Will Lewis  (creepy Mike Noble) from Warsash training college. He’s a guy who once before didn’t believe her ‘No’ meant no, although conveniently he now mis-remembers her as complicit.

Being a prat and egotist, he thinks he’s in with a chance this trip. But she’s makes it clear she just wants to get on with her job.

The Filipino crew have mixed feelings about a woman onboard. Corrina doesn’t endear herself by telling bitter gendered jokes, swearing, eating in the crew space and not being up for karaoke. She’s not being an acceptable sort of lady, and that’s as upsetting as Mr Bligh’s bad language was on the Bounty.

Luckily, in this tenderness-free zone, deck worker Angelo (loveable James Bradwell) and Corrina become pals. They enjoy the kind of extraordinary camaraderie that can be possible between even the most mismatched of shipmates; they  trust, despite the class divide.

Not so luckily, Will takes against this (non-sexual) affinity. In a racist way he warns her that as an officer and woman she should keep her distance. They aren’t used to a woman being  ... open with them.’ 

Confrontation on the Keto: Rafael, Coriina, Rizal and Angelo.

Angelo’s fellow crew members are uneasy about this friendship too.  Lonely Rafael (a convincingly wary Martin Sarreal) resents people crossing boundaries. And the older Rizal (Angelo Paragoso) stays circumspectly out of the way.

Trouble mounts as Will ‘chivalrously’ bullies Rafael, which undermines Corrina. Will clearly becomes a liability when he plays a traumatising trick on Corrina. (This is a thriller, so I’m holding back. On what happens, but it’s so bad that she complains to Captain.

Will not only denies what he did, he wrecks her status – which may ruin her future career.  Similarly, his impact on Angelo causes an irredeemable tragedy and worsens class/race relations on board.

Stressed out of her wits, Corrina takes revenge. See it to find out how she does so.

WHY IT WORKS

This is a moving and wise play, about the importance about integrity and respect, and the proximity of suicide. It’s a world where a Dolly Parton song can save your life, where loan shark attacks are inescapable, and where pix of your kids are a constant reminder that your shipmates can never be your real family.

The two-tier set makes the class conflict clear: white officers can move between the high-tech site of control aloft and the scruffy crew mess room below with its pitiful microwave and sauce bottles below. But the crew are sentenced to the netherworld dump where the karaoke machine is the company -supplied sweetener that doesn’t ever make up for the structural injustice.

The production by Headlong and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse, with a script by Chloe Moss. The director is Holly Race Roughan. If you can't wait until a tour gets sorted then pre-order the book at https://www.nickhernbooks.co.uk/corrina-corrina

Traumatised Corrina faces Will in the ship's citadel

IT'S SPECIAL

I’ve watched and read a lot of ship-based dramas. This stage play ranks with the two best modern merchant shipping movies: Stowaways (1997)  by Denis Chou nard and Nicolas Wadimoff, and Fidelio: Alice's Odyssey (2016) by Lucie Borleteau. 

Corrina, Corinna is about a totally different world from Anything Goes, Carry on Cruising and the Love Boat TV series. The production gives us a  profound understanding of human relationships and the intensity that can make a voyage life-changing, even fatal.

Women working at Lloyd's Register in history

The justifications for women being excluded from seafaring in the past are understandable, though not solutions-oriented.

 But why exclude women from the safe premises of shipping businesses on land, for example Lloyd's Register (pictured), which began as a maritime classification society in 1760?

Anyway, a Lloyd's Register blog now reveals that women were indeed in this centre of maritime life and at its outposts. 

See Mina Ghosh's Women at Lloyd's Register, September 12, 2019. Yes, it was was written a while back but it's  interesting, and it may not have reached many readers.

It reveals some elements that are are akin to the history of women at sea: like "she shouldn't have been there, but ... she was, and she did well."

For example Ann Johns was the first unofficial female surveyor, in October 1860. She took over when her husband was poorly - and did  a good job at Bangor. The first female surveyor to be properly employed was Sonia Stavroula Anastassaki in 1979. Li-Rong Zhou (pictured) qualified as a surveyor in 2001.

"The first women employed at the Society were the housekeeper’s daughters, the Misses Ginn, who worked as cleaners. It would be another three quarters of a century before another woman was employed at the Society’s head office. Clara Kitchen joined in 1912 as a cleaner. She retired after 49 years of service.

"Though there was a reluctance to employ women at the head office in a role other than as a cleaner, the Society’s out ports were more forward thinking and began employing women in clerical roles from 1907."

In 1947 the first lady mathematicians came along. And Elspeth Parkes became the first public relations officer, after 1956. (Pictured.)

Do read on, and check out the telling pictures at Women at Lloyd's Register

Conference: Feb 9 to11, 2022. MERMAIDS. (En)Gendering Maritime Labour and Business Histories

 

Image by Alison Headley – Tempest, 2017

This is a free online international conference being run by University of Ljubljana 9-11 February 2022.

It's not about mermaids but real women in maritime  business and labour in the last 200 years. They include ship owners, dockworkers, wives, fish-canners in Yugoslavia and Spain, and waterfront sex industry workers.

For details see https://www.wecanit.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/MERMAID_Programme.pdf. 

No need to register. The zoom link is already there.

Catch a programme that includes includes:

KEYNOTE LECTURE by Valerie Burton: 'Re-Presenting Women’s Maritime Past: an Historian’s Keynote for the Mermaids Conference'

Sessions on:

• Women into the Deep. Labour on Board and Surrounding 
• Undines. Women, Fisheries and Maritime Communities
• Gendering the Waterfront. Women, Ports, and Gender Roles in Maritime Labour
• An Officer and a Gentle[wo]man. Gender, Navies, and Hierarchies
• “Call me Ishmael[a]”. When Class, Gender, and Ethnicity Matter

The conference is organized in the framework of the MSCA-IF Project 2019 “We Can Do It! Women’s labour market participation in the maritime sector in the Upper Adriatic after the World Wars in an intersectional perspective”.   

Race and the Sea conference, Liverpool Sept 2017

(Black seafarers were part of the crew. Racial mixing and integration was normal, as this image by Maclise, The Death of Nelson, indicates.)

Race and the Sea is something maritime historians in the UK are giving attention to.

Liverpool's Centre for Port and Maritime History is making an important step towards making research visible by organising a conference on this theme on September 15, 2017 at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.

"Since ancient times peoples of different races have enjoyed a relationship with the sea. This has included trade, exploration and the pursuit of empire. We seek to better understand the relationship between race and the ocean." say the organisers.

Conference themes include Maritime History, Transport, Port-towns,Activities on-board ship, Conflict & reconciliation at sea, Maritime warfare, Maritime exploration & science, Maritime economies, Maritime law, Maritime art, Tourism & leisure at sea.

For more information go to: http://events.history.ac.uk/event/show/15776

Women in relation to race at sea can be found on this blog using the search terms 'race' and 'black.' For example, the UK's first black woman cruise ship captain was Belinda Bennett in 2016.

And the tragic loss at sea of Akhona Geveza (was she murdered to shut her up or was it suicide?) after her sexual harassment allegation can never be highlighted enough. (pictured below left)
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