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.

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

Dorothy Hare c1955,
by FJH Whicker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrating

Dorothy Hare deserves to be celebrated because:

# She was a pioneering woman doctor

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

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

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

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

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

See also

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

.

 

‘Florence Nightingale’ afloat: Jane Fennell Swinton and the worst ‘coolie’ voyage to ‘El Dorado’, the Salsette 1858

 A full version of this item will appear here shortly. Here is the prelude.

The long-overlooked backstory of Jane Fennell Swinton (1821-72) is an odd and highly original finale to my contributions to Black History Month 2023. 

Cotton merchant's daughter Jane Fennell married Captain Edulph (sometime written Edulfus or Edolphus) Swinton and sailed with him on the most infamous ‘coolie ship’. On the Salsette 120 of the 324 Indian indentured labourers and their children died between Calcutta and Trinidad in 1858. Almost one a day died from starvation, dysentery, typhid, and pining.

Jane wrote up his account, added her comments, and had the story published, as part of what we might now call the black rights movement. Journal of a voyage with coolie emigrants, from Calcutta to Trinidad . By Captain and Mrs. Swinton, late of the ship Salsette (1859) can be read online, free, in an hour. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=mSJcAAAAQAAJ&pg=GBS.PA16.  

There is also a hard-to-get facsimile edition edited by Ron Ramdin (1994).

She critiqued the damage caused by profiteers who sent unfit and distressed people far away on ill-provisioned ships. There were too few interpreters and no medical and nursing staff able to act as helpful intermediaries for people who were alarmed at Western medicine and uneasy about reporting to a western doctor.

Jane was not black. And she used racist language. But this brief book is important. No other captain, or captain’s wife, has written such a useful first-person account of life on what were, in effect, successors to slaveships, 1834-1917.

Who knows how much Jane contributed to the lessening of shipboard abuses? Her personal story  has never been told before, and it is only fragmentary.

Please keep your eyes open for my forthcoming blog item about this member of an Irish Quaker dynasty. Genealogical research reveals bankruptcy. It shows that she herself was of a family of migrants. Feminist abolitionism may have been her London context. And she had informed opinions about human cargo, including Chinese ‘coolies.’

 No other woman was in such a position of expertise about race on ships. Briefly, she was as effective a campaigner as Elizabeth Fry and Caroline Chisholm.  

Maritime union women pulling together: visible

Women in maritime trades unions and guilds. They're not very visible. That's what I keep finding out as I research seafaring women's history. 

What's the reality? What's just inadequate recording?

The lack of available information about gender in maritime history means it's good to be able to pick out a few highlights from Pulling Together, Nautilus International's history, which has just been published this week. See https://www.whittlespublishing.com/Pulling_Together. 

Pulling Together's author Andrew Linington (pictured) mentions the following items about women in this history. Since 1857 predecessor unions have included MNAOA and NUMAST :

HIGHLIGHTS

1933. Supporting the new  Watch Ashore (organising supportive women relatives of members)

1979. NUMAST establishes the Victoria Drummond Award for an outstanding contribution by a woman, boosting women's achivements at sea. (The first recipient is Sheila Edmundson, the first woman captain. Others are Rachel Dunn [2012], Barbara Campbell [2015], Helene Peter-Davies [2019].
2010. The Women's Forum begins, see pic.

2014. Union campaigns about cadet Akhona Geveza, who disappared overboard following her rape allegation

2016.  After working since 2002 at eliminating bullying and harassment at sea (which disproportionately affects women) Nautilus, ITF and the International Chamber of Shipping publish global guidance.

--

Many matters, of course, affect seafarers whatever their gender. The book is replete with evidence about how much the union has done.  

Other maritime unions

My knowledge of other unions, such as the National Union of Seamen (which was for ratings, and is now RMT), suggests that key milestones are when: 

•  the first woman joins a union executive (usually early 1980s. I think Sheila was on NUMAST's council. She was certainly active in union matters.
•  union has its first women's conference  (usually mid to-late 1980s. Women are so few in the maritime industry that a full 3-day conference would hardly have seemed appropriate)
• union campaigns on behalf of a woman member who's experienced major, and symptomatic, difficulty in the industry
• union appoints it first female general secretary (Brenda Dean of SOGAT was the first in UK in 1985).

The Captain's crucial partner

Spouses have played  a crucial part in the maritime unions community. They've been supportive 'members' while husbands were away at sea. Among their campaigns have been safety at sea and longer leaves, as the cartoon shows.

So it's important to mention the 1933 founding of The Watch Ashore by Dorothy Nelson-Ward, who was married to Philip, president of the Officers'  (Merchant Navy) Federation.  (page 59). 

See: 
# my blog about Dorothy: https://genderedseas.blogspot.com/2023/04/how-is-nelsons-daughter-connected-to.html.
# my article on seagoing wives in the union: 'Wives welcome ... with sewing kits,'https://www.academia.edu/10082043/Wives_welcome_with_sewing_kits

Key fragments known about UK women's maritime organised labour history generally are:

1775. In the Liverpool Seamen's Revolt a woman is among those imprisoned for  'aiding and abetting' the protestors. Crowds released her and others from jail. http://www.billhunterweb.org.uk/articles/seamens_revolt1775.htm

1913. A Cunard lady passenger tries to set up a Guild of Stewardesses. (Women are already allowed in the seamen's union NUS so the Guild may have been a ploy to set up a conservative body, pitting ladies against militant men) 

1917. Suffragist Adela Pankhurst Walsh, Emmeline Pankhurt's estranged daughter, is active in the  Seamen's Union of Australia. She was criticised, then embraced, by the British NUS for her activism.

1913. Southampton politician Emily Palmer (pictured) becomes treasurer of the British Seafarers' Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Palmer 

1953. The Queen honours Irene Combs, the Watch Ashore’s vice-president and treasurer,  for services to the Merchant Navy

1980. With the backing of the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), Lucy Wallace, cinema projectionist, wins the very first maritime test case. Tribunal finds P&O had wrongfully discriminated against her.

1980s. Women join NUS executive

1988. UN agency International Maritime Organisation's gender programme begins. It's supported by unions, and continues today.

2013. International Labour Organisation brings out Working  Paper 298 on employing women in transport, which includes maritime

2022. International Day for Women in Maritime is instituted (May 18)

Pulling together matters

Not all human beings recognise how helpful a trades union can be. So there are also negative stories maritime labour I have glimpsed over the years. 

When  Aquitania seafarers struck in 1921 some stenographers were prepared to be strikebreakers. See pic of Cunard ladies standing by in the London EC headquarters. They signed up as 'volunteer helpers.' 

By contrast, the 'perspiring gang' of women supposed to be cleaning the ship emitted  'a running fire of comment' at the gents who'd laid down their pens to  scupper the solidarity. 

Reading more

• A brief history of UK maritime women breaking through into non- traditional jobs, including the first coastguard Sue Nelson, in https://www.nautilusint.org/en/news-insight/telegraph/sailing-past-sex-discrimination/
• UK women at sea. Pioneers are briefly discussed at https://www.maritimefoundation.uk/publications/mma-2016-brochure/women-at-sea/
• See the global and European story of formal challenges, in the ITF's Gender and Transport discussion paper, 2011, at https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/dp201111.pdf
• Canadian waterfront women: Linda Cullum, 'In Whose interest? Women Organizing on the Waterfront - St John's, Newfoundland, 1948' in Journal of Historical Sociology, 22.1, March 2009, pp108-44

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.