Naval women allowed to raise flag, 1976

A restriction on what women could do on naval ships was lifted in 1976. The Portsmouth News on Friday 6 December 2019 reprised a celebratory article about what may have seemed significant step forward 43 years ago.
https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/retro/wrens-make-history-on-board-hms-victory-in-1976-1-9166859?fbclid=IwAR39PHBhK40GIGCe45MP_Xt-muScUvKGlg9sGr7kx_ev8cFx5iu1jL1vyIg

 'A little piece of naval history was made when two Wrens [members of the Women's Royal Naval Service] raised the White Ensign on board Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, for the first time.
'While Royal Marines’ bugler David Butler sounded "colours", Wren Donne Lawson, 19, centre, from Scotland, and Wren Christine Tetlow, 19, from Eastbourne, raised the ensign.
'The Wrens had just finished a two-month spell of duty in Victory, acting as guides for public tours.
'This was the first time Wrens had been employed as full-time guides and they had proved popular with visitors.'

You may need to know: 

# Wrens were only allowed to serve on seagoing ships in 1990, 14 years after this significant day.
# Under a thousand of the 3,000 RN women are at sea at this moment. There is still no female admiral, although the navy's equal opportunities policies are impressive these days: women certainly CAN raise flags.
# The Victory is a museum ship, and static. These Wrens were not sailing; they went home at night. But women (as seafarers' wives) had sailed in the Victory in its heyday, and in other battleships. Christine and Donne were conducting visitors around what had been women's floating homes. However, the Wrens may not have known women had preceded them. This is because women were not, at that point, much included in maritime histories. Now women's presence in Victory  is commonly known through this painting of the Battle of Trafalgar by Maclise. Mary Sperring and Mary Buick are thought to have been aboard: see https://verecunda.tumblr.com/post/64719131369/the-women-of-trafalgar

# The White Ensign is the navy's flag and has immense significance. These Wrens were handling a revered icon.
# Historically women, not men, constructed such flags in 'colour lofts' in the segregated and hierarchical royal dockyards. Like some aspects of rope making, flag-making tasks were deemed 'women's work'. Christine and Donne could well have been handling another woman's handiwork.

In other words, history is far from being a process in which women were increasingly or quickly allowed rights to participate fully in naval life. Nor have their roles and connected contributions to the Senior Service been recognised in adequately nuanced ways. 

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?

New articles posted

Want to read my latest articles on women at sea?

1. Seagoing wives, 1950s-today. This is the history of what happened when shipping companies sought to retain skilled staff by allowing officers' wives to sail. As the cartoon shows, seafarers' leave periods were so far apart that it caused family problems.


Wives' advent meant a ship's social life changed, especially on previously all-male tankers. And women learned about seafaring.
Wives adjusted and gave each other tips on how to cope with shipboard life:
~ don't interfere in shipboard politics
~ don't try to match his sleep patterns
~ don't behave like a Butlins red coat
~ take your own iron,coat-hangers and Woman's Own (unless you want to read the guys' Playboys)
~ never, never,have an affair.
Class mattered. First only officers' wives were allowed, then petty officers, and finally ratings, after much negotiation by unions.
Today even same-sex partners may accompany seafarers.

2. Profile of a woman captain of a major cruise ship: Inger Klein Thorhauge of the Queen Elizabeth.
This is based on my phone interview with her. I was delighted to speak to her as she just came in from building a shed in the garden; she stressed how much she liked being ordinary.

These articles were published in the Merchant Navy Officers' union journal, Nautilus International Telegraph in Winter 2014.
You can read to current issue on line at https://www.nautilusint.org/en/what-we-say/telegraph. Only members can read back copies on line. But Nautilus International has kindly made available these PDFs of my articles.

To see and download PDFs of them go to https://hull.academia.edu/JoStanley/Articles-and-chapters