My Mike Stammers Memorial Lecture 2023: Ayahs as "worker-passengers"

Race, gender and class: ayahs and amahs as “worker-passengers” in British ships 1890-1950

I'm honoured to be giving the Mike Stammers Memorial Lecture  2023.  It explores maritime  equality, diversity and inclusion. Understanding ayahs helps us understand an overlooked intersection of race, gender and class on ships in the past.

WHERE? Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool 

WHEN? Wed 24 May at 5.30pm BST.  

COST? It's free. No need to book.

What am I saying?

New ideas about equality, diversity, and inclusion are enriching maritime historiography. Exploring transnational movement by a significant group of mobile subjects -- Asian nannies -- enables us to gain fresh understandings of how intersectionality worked on early 20C ships.  

Thousands of Indian ayahs and amahs  (Japanese, Chinese and Malaysian nannies) travelled round the British empire creating domestic comfort afloat. They were non-kin members of the Raj families they accompanied. (Pic shows ayah and other Asian members of This Durham Light Infantry household).

Voyages changed ayahs.  In gendered, racialized and very hierarchical colonial times these non-white, poorly-educated, female domestic workers gained unusual mobility and motility. 

Conversely, ayahs changed voyaging. For example, segregationist policies and practises led to ship’s architects creating ayahs’ bathrooms aboard.

This talk looks at ayahs and amahs as part of an under-researched group: worker-passengers. They were neither seafarers nor passengers -- but almost fish and 

Such voyagers included maids, valets, bearers and governesses. Like all passengers these servants had paid-for tickets. But for them the trip was not a leisurely interlude; they laboured throughout the voyage for the family who paid for that ticket.

Ayahs' subjective, segregated and exceptional experiences differed from those of the maritime labourers who were directly employed by shipping companies. 

Unlike Lascars  who routinely serviced the vessel, ayahs were intimately connected to their bosses on relatively one-off voyages. In that way they were unlike the white stewardesses who did care work, processing multiple batches of human cargo on repetitious trips.

Ayahs’ own testimony is barely visible. They are usually nameless. 

The quantitative evidence used in this talk includes the freshly-sorted data I have derived from passenger lists. 

This numerical data is triangulated with: 

• genealogical information about ayahs’ employers
• varied travellers’ voyage descriptions
• newspaper reports of ayah-related crime
• recent interviews with ayahs’ (now elderly) carees. 

The lenses used include those generated by the new international working party on ayahs and amahs. This contextualises ayahs along with today’s airborne chattels, often Filipinas. Such intimate care workers' oppressive conditions are now recognised by activists. (See activist poster).

LIVERPOOL ANGLES

Many ayahs sailed to and from Liverpool, including on Bibby, Clan, and Henderson Line ships. 

Ayah Boutflower was one, on the Anchor Line's Roumania. In October 1892 she headed from Liverpool to Bombay. 

Almost certainly she was going to be dropped off in India while her employer, Edith Boutflower (pictured), sailed on to Australia to join her husband, William, there. He was a Seaforth lad made good, who had become a schools inspector in India.  

On the Roumania the ayah's job was look after Edith
and William's four children, including 8-month-old Margaret. Their paternal grandfather was the famous Seaforth vicar of St Thomas's, William Rawson.

The Roumania  (pictured) ran aground in storms off  Peniche, Lisbon. All the women and all 8 children were lost, including the unnamed Boutflower ayah and the ayah of Mrs Elizabeth Burgess. 

Only nine people were saved from the wreck. (See an artist's idealised impression).

Glaswegian Elizabeth Burgess, with baby Arthur, was going back from Edinburgh to join her husband William (pictured),  and their three children.  She'd taken the baby to show her parents, taking a break from Wesleyan missionary work in Hyderbad. 

It's likely that these ayahs had been making their first trip to England and had stayed for a few months with their employers' families of origin. 

Baby Marjorie/Margaret Boutflower had been born in Jersey that January. Her mother may have travelled to Britain from Allahabad, the capital of North West Provincesith, the ayah, to have her baby 'at home' in the UK. 

Expectant mothers sometimes did this, especially if they were frail, older or mistrusted the Indian health care system. Edith Butflower had already lost two children. Maybe she had been supported through that by this same ayah.

CONNECTING TO MIKE STAMMERS

The late Mike Stammers, AMA,FSA, a former keeper of the museum, was someoneI knew.  My mum was delighted to give him many of her photos of the dock road gates at sunset. He would have enjoyed this talk.

I myself am a Scouser, of a Liverpool seafaring family. My great-grandad Peter Quinn, a ship's barber, would have sailed with ayahs. Maybe he cut their hair with the scissors now on diplay in the museum that Mike helped create.

EXPLORING MORE

• You can read my work about ayahs and ethnic minority seafarers at http://jostanley.biz/ethnic_minorities.html
• The Roumania history is at  https://www.bhsportugal.org/uploads/fotos_artigos/files/TheSSRoumania.pdf

Elder Dempster - and its seawomen's history

One of the things that Liverpool shipping company Elder Dempster inadvertently did for women in the mid-twentieth century was that it gave them the chance to go to West-Africa and back, for free, as stewardesses.

Now the project Homeward Bound: A Liverpool-West Africa Heritage at Liverpool John Moores University has gathered the stories of 20 Elder Dempster seafarers, including their oral testimony. http://www.ljmu.ac.uk/elderdempster

The launch party on Friday (11 Nov) was a really great opportunity to not only meet the lively, joke-cracking elders of the company nicknamed Elder Shysters. We also enjoyed a West African band + story-telling presentation there, and heard the story of what the research process found.

Heritage Lottery-funded, this project was led by two key people Professor Nick White and Dr Ailbhe McDaid(pictured).

PROUD TO BE PART OF IT
I'm really pleased to have been involved in this project in several ways. I hope other shipping companies will follow suit while its veteran seafarers are still with us.

May Quinn, my great aunt, was one of the stewardesses (see picture of her against some of the scraps of fabric she worked with as a dressmaker after her retirement, in the 1950s). She sailed on the Apapa, which was where she met the steward she would marry, Bill Sullivan.

NOT ALOFT, BUT DUSTING THEIR WAY ROUND THE WORLD
It's because of May, really, that I came to be an historian of women's maritime pasts.

After her death I realised that stewardessing was the way adventurous working-class women managed to see the world for free. They dusted their way round it.

But no-one seemed to have written anything about these dynamic women, then. Someone should, I thought. Then I realised that person would have to be me. And so in the 1980s I started interviewing veteran stewardesses. And I went on, and wider...

You can read the stories of May, and of Julia Andrews (whose descendents I interviewed way back) via the link above.
To read about Liverpool JMU's version of the launch event see:
https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/news/future-proofing-history#Find

But here today are pictures of the women, some of which will be eventually posted on Homeward Bound's website. Julia is pictured here with passengers in the late 1920s.

Her friend, another ED stewardess, name unknown, walks with a West African woven shopping basket.
Objects change countries. Seafarers were important transmitters of culture knowledge - of which souvenir objects are a material symbol.

The basket lid to the side of her photo is from my old and similar sewing basket. It may indicate the colours of her original basket: this material evidence that she had indeed ventured far away to the country that was called the White Man's Grave - and come back.

Elder Dempster - and its seawomen's history

One of the things that Liverpool shipping company Elder Dempster inadvertently did for women in the mid-twentieth century was that it gave them the chance to go to West-Africa and back, for free, as stewardesses.

Now the project Homeward Bound: A Liverpool-West Africa Heritage at Liverpool John Moores University has gathered the stories of 20 Elder Dempster seafarers, including their oral testimony.

The launch party on Friday (11 Nov) was a really great opportunity to not only meet the lively, joke-cracking elders of the company nicknamed Elder Shysters. We also enjoyed a West African band + story-telling presentation there, and heard the story of what the research process found.

Heritage Lottery-funded, this project was led by two key people Professor Nick White and Dr Ailbhe McDaid (pictured). (Sorry, I can't find a picture of Nick)
.

PROUD TO BE PART OF IT
I'm really pleased to have been involved in this project in several ways. I hope other shipping companies will follow suit while its veteran seafarers are still with us.


May Quinn, my great aunt, was one of the stewardesses (see picture of her against some of the scraps of fabric she worked with as a dressmaker after her retirement, in the 1950s). She sailed on the Apapa, which was where she met the steward she would marry, Bill Sullivan.

NOT ALOFT, BUT DUSTING THEIR WAY ROUND THE WORLD
It's because of May, really, that I came to be an historian of women's maritime pasts.

After her death I realised that stewardessing was the way adventurous working-class women managed to see the world for free. They dusted their way round it.

But no-one seemed to have written anything about these dynamic women, then. Someone should, I thought. Then I realised that person would have to be me. And so in the 1980s I started interviewing veteran stewardesses. And I went on, and wider...

You can read the stories of May, and of Julia Andrews (whose descendents I interviewed way back) via this link with Liverpool JMU.
https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/news/future-proofing-history#Find

But here today are pictures of the women, some of which will be eventually posted on Homeward Bound's website. Julia is pictured here with passengers in the late 1920s.

Her friend, another ED stewardess, name unknown, walks with a West African woven shopping basket.
Objects change countries. Seafarers were important transmitters of culture knowledge - of which souvenir objects are a material symbol.

The basket lid to the side of her photo is from my old and similar sewing basket. It may indicate the colours of her original basket: this material evidence that she had indeed ventured far away to the country that was called the White Man's Grave - and come back.

Women & Christmas at sea

For the crew and officers on British ships in the 1950s Xmas celebrations were enriched through the actions of the women working on board.
By the 1950s such women included stewardesses (the majority), women assistant pursers (many of whom were ex-Wrens in those days) telephonists, children’s hostess, hairdressers and the nursing sister.

There might be say five stewardesses and one-to-three women in each of the other roles. Women would have amounted to about fifteen in all, depending on the ship.
They were always less than 5 per cent of total complement at that time.
Purser Nelson French wrote about this Christmas at sea on Orient Line ships to Australia via Suez (‘The Purser’s Tale of Christmas at Sea’, Sea Breezes, vol 61, no 504, December 1987, pp 843-848.)
I’ve extracted the sections that suggest what’s going on, gender-wise

HARMONISING VOICES
He wrote that in 1953 on the Orcades women officers persuaded the captain to have a nine-lesson carol service. Apparently it worked so well that ‘This became tradition throughout the Orient Line.’
On the Orion women enriched carol singing both visually and aurally. The ship’ 40-strong choir processed around the ship, led by ‘a nursing sister with her cape reversed to show the red lining on the outside, and carrying a candle.’ When it came to singing, the women led off singing the first verse of Once in Royal David’s City, then the whole choir joined in the next verses and other carols.

SERVING XMAS FARE
Like grand houses and the armed forces, passenger ships had the carnivalesque tradition of the upper order serving food to the lower order on Christmas Day (a bit like Midsummer Eve where everything is topsy-turvy and where revelry can be shockingly frisky, as Bakhtin points out)
Referring to the Orontes, Nelson French pointed out – though not in so many words - what a difference the gender of the server made, especially if she was serving young men who didn’t normally have contact with women on ship (as lower deck and engine room males didn’t):
‘while some ratings may have thought the deputy purser a little patronising serving slices of turkey, when it came to a pretty woman assistant purser offering stuffing it was a different matter.’

SEEING OUT THE OLD YEAR
On New Year’s Eve on the Orion (still in the 1950s, seemingly) ‘a pretty young girl in a bikini burst into the ballroom [as arranged] with a shriek of joy and headed for Old Father Time and chased him' and his scythe and his hour glass, away from festivities.

ALTERNATIVE FESTIVE PLEASURES
So these stories show us that women in these hegemonically Christian situations did at least three things socially, on top of their usual jobs. They:
~ influenced the format of the religious service (a gift given by hospitality staff to guests)
~ they were enjoyed as eye candy in a conventionally-gendered ways in an unconventional exchange where class, not gender, was the main point
~ their voices were an important dimension enriching the collective singing, contrasting to the mass of c30 male voices. They were a welcomed symbol of diversity accepted.

In other words, there was a lot going on that was not to do with the nativity but with cooped-up peoples’ appropriation of a festival that could give a wonderful marginal space for other kinds of pleasure.

The Spy who became a stewardess: Granville

I was delighted to catch a BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour interview with Clare Mulley, who's just written The Spy Who Loved: The secrets and lives of Christine Granville, Britain's first female special agent of WWII (Macmillan).

Granville, also called Krystyna Skarbek, was said to have been Ian Fleming’s inspiration for Bond's wonder woman Vesper Lynd. Christine Granville worked for SOE in WW2. But afterwards - ah afterwards, what does a redundant spy do? In this case, she works at sea, where the footloose people were.

Clare Mulley found that life on the New Zealand Shipping Company's brand new Antipodes-bound liner, Ruahine didn't suit this 43-year-old aristocrat. The crew were hostile and thought this female and foreigner was lying about her war experience.

Worst of all, a fellow steward who fell for her and supported her against the attacks ended up as her stalker and killer. She tried to give him the slip and worked on other ships such as the New Australia.

But Dennis Muldowney fatally stabbed her in the lobby of a down-market Kensington hotel in 1952. After he was sentenced to death, at the Old Bailey, he declared‘To kill is the final possession.’

I've given some thought to Clare's biography, in the light of all the interviews I've done with stewardesses of that period. Christine's story fits.

The hostility is plausible because ships then could be dog-eat-dog situations where seawomen (usually 1-3% of the entire crew) had to fight not to be put upon or sexually mis-used, in the very over-sexualised situation that a ship is. And female colleagues could be very rivalrous. Some seafarers were proof that travel does NOT broaden the mind.

Many of Christine's shipmates would have been through hard wars just six years earlier, torpedoed and lost everything they possessed. So they might have thought her story implausibly glamorous and therefore implicitly insulting - they knew they'd been though hell.

And an obsessive, co-dependent character like Muldowney might well have been at sea because it was a place that attracted people who felt themselves to be misfits. Ships' companies were very acceptant of square pegs, because people absolutely have to find a way to get on with everyone else in such a tight space.

So here's a new take on women's merchant seafaring in the post-war years. Christine Granville has got to be the most famous stewardess on any ship. And she's a tragic victim of possibly the only merchant seaman to be executed for killing a seawoman.

See Clare interviewed in the very London cafe that Christine and Polish forces used,
at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNr9KR-PNs.

WW1 Women seafarers captured by Germans: anniversary

Pic;Brussels stewardess at Holzminden internment camp, summer 1916.

Today, in 1916, five British seawomen were captured by the enemy. Despite wartime dangers women crew were still sailing. These stewardesses were on the Great Eastern Railway ferry Brussels looking after Belgian refugees.

After leaving the Hook of Holland for Britain on a routine trip their ship was captured after Captain Fryatt was accused of sinking a U-boat.It was Friday 23 June 1916.

German crew who boarded the ship wondered at the women’s calmness. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being shot?’ they asked. After all, Edith Cavell had been executed by firing squad just seven months earlier. ‘“We are Englishwomen” was considered sufficient reply,’ claimed the women’s company magazine afterwards.

When the captured ship was taken to Zeebrugge then Bruges the women's blue uniforms with brass buttons caused a confusion about identity. Germans took them for fighting women: England’s last hope.

Their male shipmates were sent to Ruhleben, a civilian detention camp near Berlin, As females, the stewardesses were interned at the Holzminden camp, near Hanover.

Hungry and miserable, they must also have been worried. Internment meant the women lost earnings. Many seawomen were family breadwinners so their dependents were at risk.

No shipping company paid crew who were not working. Wages stopped the day after shipwreck. For the Brussels women this meant six months without an income.

They were only released in October. One of them, Edith Smith, went straight back to marry her fiancée by special licence, just before his unit left for Egypt.[3]

During their incarceration a high-profile publicity campaign was waged. Diplomatic initiatives attempted to free the women. Indeed, they got more publicity than any other seawomen in that entire war. Media headlines spun the story into another shocking tale of Hunnish brutality.

Surprisingly no newspaper ever suggested the women should not have been working at sea.

This is just one of the surprising stories of courageous women at sea to be found in my new book, Risk! Women on the Wartime Seas, which will be published next year by Yale University Press

Falklands Conflict seafarers: women & queers

I’ve been tracking down stories about GBT seafarers and women seafarers who were in the Falklands War. It’s for two articles, as well as a conference paper at the Falklands War 30 Years On conference at the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth on May 19-20 2012. http://www.royalnavalmuseum.org/documents/Falklands2012conferenceprogrammeMar12.pdf

Finding them is a needle in a haystack job, not least because so many survivors don’t want to talk about that traumatic time. Also many traditional historians prefer the story that only tough hetero boys were there, so it’s hard for people with hidden histories to speak out with confidence.

Researching has been fascinating. The best part of the process was this week:
• by a miraculous accident bumping into 'Wendy' the most famous gay seafaring man of that war, a steward on the Norland, and finding he’d let me interview him.
• discovering that a pioneer woman was there doing ‘men’s work’. She was a Second Mate on the BP tanker British Tamar. Next step is to find her. I’d thought only women doing ‘female work’ – such as nursing - were in that war.
• interviewing a stewardess on one of the non-posh ships in that war, Jean Woodcock on the Hull ferry Norland

My work is going to be published gradually. But you can already read two key things that other authors have made available:
• Sally Children, the Assistant Purser on the Canberra, tells her story at http://www.jamescusick.co.uk/2011/02/sallys-story.html
• Canberra’s acting deputy purser Lauraine Mulberry’s diary extracts, in John Johnson-Allen, They Couldn't Have Done it without Us: The Merchant Navy in the Falklands War, Seafarer Books, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2011.

And there are two autobiographical books by women, which don’t focus on gender:
• War artist Linda Kitson’s The Falklands War: A Visual Diary, Mitchell Beazley, London, 1982.
• Nursing Sister Nicci Pugh’s recent book, White Ship, Red Crosses, Melrose Books, Ely, 2010.

And a book that doesn't deal with women at sea but the wives of the combatants who sailed: Jean Carr's Another Story: Women and the Falklands War, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1984.

Nurses at sea in Falklands War

White Ship Red Crosses, by QARNNS nurse Nicci Pugh, has just been published. The memoir summarises the experiences of Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service personnel on the hospital ship Uganda during the 1982 Falklands conflict. It is published by Melrose Books, ISBN: 978-1907040498

Anna McNamee, for Women's Hour, recorded the book's launch party this week (20.4.2010). The lively programme included interviews with the some of the 'Fearless Forty' nurses. Hear it on BBC Radio Four's Listen Again facility: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rzt98#p007g4yz.

It's great that the book is out and that this story is at last told. I am happy I was one of the people who encouraged Nicci to do it.

And it's important to acknowledge that nurses were not the only women in that war. So too were pursers, stewardesses, laundresses and cleaners. These unsung heroines, some of whom I have interviewed, also deserve recognition.

Who's the privileged one? Working seawomen's pity for their passengers

You'd think that under-privileged women working on ships might envy the paying passengers their freedom to travel. When I started unearthing stewardesses in the 1980s this is what I expected. After all, these women had sailed 1919-1939, a time when women's mobility was extremely restricted.

But see my counter-intuitive findings in a book that's just out: Gendered Journeys, Mobile Emotions, eds Gayle Letherby & Gillian Reynolds, Ashgate, March 2009.

My chapter, 'Caring for the Poor Souls: interwar seafaring women and their pity for passengers', begins 'Women voyaging across the world's oceans in a floating palace heading towards new lives in the New World during the Roaring Twenties sound rather admirable.... [but seawomen's accounts] show, surprisingly, that pity was one of the central emotions [they] felt ....I discuss the main reasons for the pity and how the pity was expressed, particularly through the word 'poor' (as in 'poor things', 'poor souls', and 'my poor passengers'.) I also look at how pity was acted upon.'

A story from Edith Sowerbutts (see pic) illustrates how pity could bring benefits, and lead a woman to act with agency. Edith was sailing as a conductress (a sort of travelling almoner for women without men) in the 1920s on Red Star's Zeeland, from Belgium to North America. 'I always made a point of being present of bath nights and at general delousing sessions. There was a tendency to hustle women along and Matron… was not one to stand up to any bullying.

'I was horrified once when I found the Third Class Steward, a Belgian who had been in the emigrant ships prior to 1914, propelling two girls a time into the bathroom. "Two to a bath" he shouted to Matron. "No," said I, "One at a time."

'That man was livid – never before or since have I seen a man go pea-green with anger. But my women had their individual privacy in the bathroom. The thought of two to a bath, one lot of salt seawater, was just too much for me, especially as seawater was in plentiful supply! '

I like the chapter being in this book about the emotional relationships peopel have with travel, along with chapters on airline crew, truckers, tarmac cowboys, cycling, Victorian women's fears on trains and mapping. Such a context demonstrates that seafarers should be seen as travellers - somethimg that often gets missed out.

You can get the book discounted if you buy via the website: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754670346