Indian women shaping maritime life : early 20C

Indian maritime women are to be one of the three focuses of Rewriting Women into Maritime History later this year. This Lloyd's Register Foundation Heritage Centre initiative will also be focusing on women in Greece and Australia. 

As a historian of gender at sea, who has studied many countries in passing, I’ve been fascinated to work on this topic as part of the team. 

What was my biggest surprise? Sumati Morarjee and Maniben Kara, two women involved in the organisation of the industry. 

They were women without UK counterparts. It’s eye-opening to find the Indian pattern is totally different to the UK's. 

Both women were born of elite families in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Both had made voyages between India and the UK.

 

Sumati Morarjee

Sumati Morarjee (1909-1998) has been called India’s first ‘first lady of commercial shipping’. Born to a Bombay merchant prince, she married into the growing Scindia Steam Navigation Company, which had been founded in 1919. She was in the managing agency at fourteen, at I923. Narottam Morajee, her father-in-law trusted her and renamed her Sumati, ‘she of superior intellect,’ not Jamuna.

Sumati was a lively leader of the SCI throughout the time when Indian shipping was being stifled by the dominance of UK companies such as the British India Steam Navigation Company (whose ships so many women voyagers to India sailed on). Between 1942 and 1946, Sumati was involved in the underground movement for Independence.

In 1946 she took charge of Scindia’s managing agency. When her friend Mahatma Ghandhi jokingly asked if she’d usurped her husband Shanti’s office she replied ‘Have you not always urged upon Indian women to come forward and take interest in life around them?’ She was involved in day-to-day managing of the company, which later extended Scindia’s routes to Europe, the US and Australia. It became India’s largest shipping firm

But Sumati was also active in the wider industry. ‘No shipping occasion in India is without her charming presence’ said the company history.  INSOA, the Indian National Steamship Owners Association, in 1956, 1957, 1958, and 1965 elected her president.  That meant she became the first woman in the world to head an organisation of ship owners.

From 1979 to 1987, she was chairperson of the Scindia Steam Navigation company, with its 43 ships. Then the government took over the debt-ridden firm. She was later appointed as the chairperson emeritus of the company till 1992. Her death at 89 followed a cardiac arrest.

How do we know about her? She left no autobiography but there are the many fragments about her in Sumati Morarjee - Felicitations Volume,  published in 1970. I read extracts of this rare book on an auctioneer’s website, to which the link is now broken.   

 No-one like her

There was never an equivalent figure to Sumati Morarjee in the UK - or initially on the board of any other Indian shipping company. Some were socially active, but not in maritime life. For example,

Elsie Mackay, centre, on Ranchi in 1925

#   # Liverpool philanthropist Emma Holt (1862-44) of the Holt family was active in progressive causes with Eleanor Rathbone

# Emerald (1872-1948) and Nancy (1896-1965) Cunard were not active in the Cunard company, but were socialite and activist respectively

# Janie Allan (1868-1968) was more involved in suffrage politics than in the family’s Allan Line. She used it to help the suffrage cause, with tickets and funds

# Shimla-born Elsie Mackay (1863-1928), daughter of a chairman of P&O (with whom Scindia were in competition), designed interiors of two new classes of steamers, including the Cathay, Ranchi and fabled Viceroy of India). She was mainly focused on being a pioneering aviator.

Maniben Kara

Maniben Kara (1905-1979) helped found the Maritime Union of India in 1939. She was its hands-on president all her life, and very involved in many unions and in social work. 

A member of the ‘Indian Renaissance’ and colleague of MM Roy, she was highly educated and had trained at the University of Birmingham, 1928-30. She sailed back (ship unknown) with a diploma course in that new subject, social work, and was involved in much activism. 

The Maritime Union of India records that, as a founder member of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, she helped forge the MUI’s international affiliations.

As World War II progressed, the MUI ‘was cut off from seafarers trade union/organizations in other parts of the world.’ Nevertheless the Union successfully achieved affiliation to the International Transport Worker's Federation (ITF) which was based in London. Ground work for the affiliation was done by Maniben, who at that time was Vice-President

In 1944, MUI were negotiating with the Scindia Company ‘demanding parity in wages and other conditions for officers on the Indian coast.’

As a radical humanist, she was a leading activist, including publisher. But she is not on record as arguing for women to become maritime officers. That cause began in the 1970s, the decade in which she died. 

She has a continuing impact via the Maniben-Kara Labour Institute. It was founded in 1980, a year after her death, to organise education programmes for union activists, conduct research and make data bank available. Its contributions have included manuals on labour laws for women workers.

In 2017 the Maritime Union of India developed a Women’s Wing, which was founded by Saleha Shaik.

You will be able to read more about women in Indian maritime life when my findings appear on the Rewriting Women into Maritime History website later this year. https://www.lrfoundation.org.uk/news/rewriting-women-into-maritime-history-enters-a-new-international-phase

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.

A daughter's story of women on board in Rear-Admiral Edward Ellicott's life

This is an item from the blog of the National Museum of the Royal Navy: https://www.nmrn.org.uk/news-events/nmrn-blog/curators-choice-rear-admiral-edward-ellicott%E2%80%99s-biography

The curator writes:
"I am a little bit obsessed with gender history, especially men and women in the past who crossed gender expectations and boundaries to do things that would shock their contemporaries. One of my favourite objects is Rear-Admiral Edward Ellicott’s biography.
"Even though it is written as though Ellicott is telling the stories, it was actually penned by his daughter after his death.
"I was reading through his tales of fascinating 43-year long career (1781-1846) as a Captain, and came across several stories of women on board ships: including manning the pump and loading the guns, giving birth on ship and being captured by the enemy.

"Women on Board Ship
Though in the 18th century only men could join the Navy, women were on the ships too!
"There would often be a handful of wives living on board, usually married to warrant officers such as the gunner or carpenter. Wives were never recorded on ships’ lists; we learn of them by chance in other accounts such as Ellicott’s biography.
"Wives spent most of their time washing and sewing, but they also played an active role in battle, tending to injured men, and carrying out the dangerous job of running between the decks and the powder stores, bringing cartridges to the guns.
"It was a hard life and women could be away from home for years. They received no pay, and shared their husband’s hammock and food.
"Their mission was not adventure, but to be dutiful wives. There are accounts of women giving birth on ships between the guns, even during battle.

"Captain Ellicott’s Ladies

Gunner's wife takes over his gun
"In Ellicott’s biography women showed that they could fight just as well as the men. One event described was when his ship HMS Hebe was in an engagement with the enemy:
“one of the men at the guns was struck dead on the spot, his wife took his place and by the side of her dead husband, continued for a length of time, during the rest of the battle to load and fire her husband’s gun, as regularly as the other gunners…
"she refused to give up her post, and pointing to her dead husband with the effect of a tragedy queen, said ‘he would have done his duty well, had he been spared, and tho’ you have lost him, you shall not lose a gunner by his death, till I am destined to follow his fate’, she unflinchingly continued her cannonade, and was unhurt, tho’ many were killed and wounded around her.”
Captain Ellicott was so impressed that he bought her a farm in Orkney and “several cows” and she sent him milk and cheese for the next five years as a thank you.

Peggy shows the way on the pump
"The author also describes when Ellicott’s ship HMS Explosion was caught in a storm, and a “remarkably short, thick set” woman on board named Peggy came to the rescue: “many of the men soon became disheartened, as in spite of their utmost endeavours the water increased in the hold.”
Peggy, perceiving how things were going, turned away a man from his post and “applied herself to the pump and for fourteen hours worked incessantly at it, up to her middle in water, in an intensely cold night in January.
She invited the men to further exertions by showing them what she could and did do, and to her determination and perseverance was to be owed the keeping the Vessel from sinking from an over quantity of water.”
"Captain Ellicott was so impressed that back in Portsmouth he declared “that he believed she was to be ascribed the credit of saving the ship, as none of the men half worked until she set them the example” and set about organising a medal for Peggy, and a pension for life.
Peggy was so overjoyed by this that “she danced about in the most extravagant manner, and to evince her gratitude for his reporting her conduct; for years after supplied him with garters of her own knitting.”"

*******

I posted this response:
I love this. Thanks for sharing it.

The story of the daughter being the author of the only published tribute to a naval man's career is typical of women's connections with the Royal Navy. A number of daughters and wives wrote up the exploits of the distinguished naval men to whom they were connected. Often the women made themselves invisible in the process.
But you could say it was one way women quietly shaped naval historical records. They not only gave the admiral his breakfast and so kept him going. These non-seagoing 'associate members' of the Navy also subtly contributed to the historiography of this very masculine institution.
The stories of Peggy at the pump, and the wife of the Hebe gunner carrying on, are so interesting. Again they're typical of what might be called 'corporate wives doing their duty. Is there more on the mother giving birth at sea?
I've tried to look up Edward Ellicott's daughter's name but all I can found out is that she was his only child, born c 1822 probably.So she would have been at least in her late 20s when she wrote the memoir after his death in 1847, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:A_Naval_Biographical_Dictionary.djvu/346.

******
Looking for more illumination
In reflecting about these stories this morning I'm thinking how very interesting it is that Miss Ellicott wrote 'as' the naval officer she would NEVER have been allowed to become. She was not just a female ghost writer for a man. She vicariously 'became' a rear-admiral, and gave herself a patriarchal voice. It was a kind of ventriloquism, crossing the gender divide - and it could be of interest to literary experts.

Checking out the Hebe history you can see this 16-gun ship served at times between Orkney and Sweden, protecting the convoys. This suggests that the gunner might have already been a locally-recruited Orcadian. So the gunner's wife might have been brought up and married in Orkney, before she settled on the farm Ellicott gave her. It might have helped the widow's entire extended family to prosper. It's likely that the action in which the woman took part was in November 1808 when the Hebe helped capture the Danish ships Erndte and Printz Carl.

Peggy's 14-hour contribution on the Explosion would seemingly have taken place some time between 1804-1807 (Ellicott's period of command). This painting by Tuke shows what, 70 years later, 'All hands to the pump' meant: team work, solidarity, and hard manual labour at any time, not just in a freezing January.

Nursing in the Navy: Nora Miller: passenger ship nurse and QARNNS pioneer.

Nora Miller, later Lewis, (born 1940) (pictured above in Malta when she was a QARNNS) is one of the rare women who nursed in both UK navies, Merchant and Royal. She is part of a remarkable cluster of women who did an archetypal feminine job but at officer-level, and in a workforce where men dominated. Such women numbered hundreds not thousands.
Her memoir, Nurse in the Navy, was published in 2016. It is all too brief: just 136 pages. But two of its key elements are her experience on the prestigious liner/cruiseship Queen Elizabeth from 1966-68, and in the Royal Navy from 1970- 1981.

Looking after cruisers and crew: 1966-68
In commercial shipping women had nursed on passenger ships since before 1900. For the first few decades of the twentieth century they were often employed as stewardesses but expected to nurse when needed, on top of their regular work. When Nora Miller, a former head-girl, joined the iconic Queen Elizabeth in 1966 she joined a world where the two or three Sisters were a respected full-time part of the medical team. (See picture of QE team above: Nora is far right)
‘I settled into a pleasant routine of crossing the Atlantic in winter followed by a cruise, either to the Caribbean from New York or to the Mediterranean from Southampton.’ In summer her ships simply crossed between New York and Southampton.
‘After two years this wonderful adventure came to an end for me.’ Cunard replaced the ship with the QEII in 1968. Jobs were lost. ‘It was last in, first out’ and she went ‘drearily back to life ashore. In the long term it was a good thing as for me it was not a life with any real substance.’ She left ‘far more worldly wise then when I joined.’
Many seafarers eventually become tired of living out of a suitcase, but still addicted to travel. For Nora "I loved the idea of a regular change of job and realise that if I joined the Royal Navy they would do it for me with regular postings, some abroad.’ She became a Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service Sister in 1970.

Navy and QARNNS: 1970-81
By contrast to nurses on passenger ships, women had nursed intermittently in Royal Navy hospital ships near combat situations since at least 1660. They became a separate professional force in 1884, which was in 1902 named Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service.
They worked on hospital ships in the First and Second World War and in Korea. However QARNNS’ usual place was in naval hospitals ashore.
Many QARNNS longed to be based with the Navy overseas. Nora too had looked ‘forward to foreign postings and was dismayed to see the Navy withdraw from Hong Kong, Singapore and Mauritius the very year I joined.’
In fact, she was lucky. In 1971 she was posted to Malta, one of the few remaining overseas naval bases in this Cold War. She afterwards went to the US on an exchange scheme. Then in 1979 Nora had ‘another ground-breaking posting abroad’ at RAF hospital Wegberg near Düsseldorf where she taught obstetrics to Royal Navy student nurses. (See picture above, Nora is on right).

Changing times: 1970-90
Naval nurses were not allowed to serve at sea in this period (male sick berth assistants did that work). But in 1971 when she was allowed on board HMS Glamorgan for a family day Nora told an officer she met that ‘"It won’t be long before we women are at sea with you"… To my astonishment he replied angrily, "You can stop talking like that! It's very unlucky to have women at sea!"
In fact, it took another two decades before women in naval service were allowed to routinely serve at sea, just like males. Exceptionally, ‘in the 1970s [naval] nurses were quickly put on board ship if it was sailing off to evacuate British families from some danger zone, as happened several times’, she explained.
When she returned to Portsmouth in 1973 ‘Sexist attitudes in hospital were being challenged at last… One of the Ear Nose and Throat doctors… told me to fetch him a cup of coffee. "Get your own coffee," I replied. He looked startled. "But nurses are the handmaids of the doctors!" he said and was only half joking. "Not on my ward, they’re not!" I told him firmly. "And don't you go asking any of my staff to do it either.’

The two key changes that affected naval nursing were:
~ 1977. The decision to include women under the Naval Discipline Act, just as men were. Nora Miller told me ‘It changed everything.’ QARNNS became properly affiliated to the Royal Navy, although remaining a separate service. They wore a more naval uniform with gold braid on their sleeves. Nora found that when the QARNNS came back from their post-NDA course some male medical assistants were quite hostile because the women now had a more naval status. They got used to it.’
~ 1990. NDA was followed by the 1990 decision that women could serve at sea on naval ships. By that time Nora had left the QARNNS to be with her husband.
In both Merchant and Royal Navies, a few women were also serving as doctors from the 1960s.

After 1983 males were allowed to be QARNNS. Today mixed health-care teams serve on all ships. Men still predominate in the higher medical jobs.

~ Nursing in the Navy can be bought via http://www.carolinebrannigan.com/memoirs-by-caroline-brannigan.php.
~ Naval nursing history is outlined in my forthcoming book Women and the Royal Navy (IB Tauris/NMRN).
~ Passenger ship nurses’ history is in my From Cabin “Boys” to Captain: 250 years of Women at Sea (History Press, 2016).

Royal Navy's pioneering women doctors

Move over Dr Stephen Maturin? Make room, Dr Roderick Random?

Britain's Royal Navy was slow to accept women medical offices, certainly at sea. A sawbones and a woman was surely a contradiction in terms, it was thought.

Today I'm just discovering the women pioneers in this field in the 1960s. Colette Green in 1963 was the Navy's first woman doctor to be commissioned for 10 years. This is picture from the Imperial War Museum that I found with great delight and surprise. IWM A 34746. Part of ADMIRALTY OFFICIAL COLLECTION

Finding these naval women is all part of the exploratory process involved in writing my new book: Women and the Royal Navy, to be published later this year by IB Taurus/National Museum of the Royal Navy.

Dr Green had a very few predecessors, seemingly less than 20. See below.

Early pioneers
1. Dr Dorothy Hare (1876-67) Medical Superintendent for the WRNS in WW1 but initially a doctor with the Royal Army medical Corps in 1916. Pictured below, courtesy of IWM.

2. Dr Genevieve Rewcastle (1897-1951) obstetrician and the Medical Superintendent for the WRNS. She had 21-25 other doctors in her team including Ailsa Whitehouse, WW2. They worked mainly with Wrens

3. Toweringly stellar pioneer and First World War veteran Louise McIlroy. In World War I she had been a leading figure the Scottish Women's Ambulance movement, including in Serbia and Salonika. In WW2 she was a consultant gynaecologist to the Second World War WRNS. Miss McIlroy (1874-1968) was the only woman among the twenty-eight civilian medical consultants for the wartime Navy and the only woman consultant to the Navy until that point.

4. Dr Patricia MacDonald, later Morley (1929-2003), c.1954. She became an ultrasound pioneer after she left the Navy

5. Dr Colette Green in 1963 (born 1934).She was especially interested in orthopaedics

And later pioneers

6. Dr Victoria McMaster (born 1961), the first woman doctor in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (the Merchant Service organisation that provides support ships to the Royal Navy).

7. Surgeon Captain Fleur Marshall, the Medical Officer in Charge of the Institute of Naval Medicine (pictured below, right). http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/-/media/royal-navy-responsive/documents/profiles/marshall-fleur.pdf

What sort of situations did RN women medics face in their early history?
~ exclusion from seagoing, which meant they could never acquire the seniority to gain a high-level career
~ Jack Tars who were embarrassed at baring their bits to ladies - or rather titillated by the idea
~ a Treasury who thought the MOs should be waged as women, not as doctors i.e. low paid (1949)
~ exclusion from the naval medical team in the Falklands Conflict (1982)


What changed?
~ From the early 1960s the acute shortage of medical and nursing personnel meant women had to be accepted or the Navy simply wouldn't have had the healthcare needed to make it operational. Women doctors were able to work on short-term contracts.
~ From 1993, naval women of all sorts were allowed to go to sea, and so their career became similar in structure to men

Today all the Navy's women doctors are seagoing. For the story of one, Surgeon Lieutenant Dr Jo Laird on HMS Somerset in 2014, go to http://www.theadventuremedic.com/features/life-royal-navy-doctor/

Celebrating pioneering women at sea

Never have so many pioneering women seafarers come together in two places - and on historic ships too.

Launch parties for my book, From Cabin "boys" to Captains: 250 years of women at sea brought so many together:
# in Southampton on June 4 on the SS Shieldhall on the Solent (www.ss-shieldhall.co.uk/)
# on June 13 on the Glenlee on the Clyde.(http://thetallship.com)

You can get more information can be seen on the book's own facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/From-Cabin-Boys-to-Captains-250-years-of-women-at-sea-1674785129441025/
But here are some of the photos. And more pictures are to follow.

Southampton

Captain Clare Holmes takes the SS Shieldhall down the Solent for a cruise after our launch party.



Glasgow


Left to right: Anne Madsen James, one of the earliest women chief engineers; Nina Baker, BP's first woman deck cadet; Alistair, Nina's partner; Liz Allen, volunteer rigging expert on the Tall Ship; Linda Forbes, Scotland's first ever woman deck cadet; Captain Barbara Campbell, master of the 'Lord Nelson'; Chris, Barbara's partner; Fiona Rush, deck officer who made the transition from hotel-side work.
Anne and Liz have sailed with Captain Barbara.
Anne, Nina, Linda, Barbara and Fiona feature in the book.
Me, Fiona Rush and Captain Barbara Campbell, photo courtesy of Fiona Rush.

US's first cruise ship captain, Kate McCue

One of the best things about exploring mountains of information about the way women have progressed in maritime history is that I know when feats are mega-feats, par-for-the-course, or odd. Comparisons can be illuminating.

So when today Celebrity Cruises announced their first woman captain, Kate McCue, it's very interesting to see where she fits in two contexts: women cruise ship captains all over the world, and US women captains.

(This information is extracted from my forthcoming history of women at sea:
From Cabin 'Boys' to Captains. It's being published by the History Press, April 2016. There's a whole chapter on women breaking through into deck work, including the first women captains.)



Kate McCue is one of several illustrious women who have finally been allowed to captain huge cruise ships, since 2003. Some cruise ships captained by women are twice the size of hers; many go worldwide, not only the US's east coast, as she will be doing.
She is the successor of women masters who began sailing in the 1830s. Women really broke through in the 1930s in a small way, and then more routinely from the 1970s following anti-discrimination legislation.
The US Navy has been allowing women in command (of small warships) for a decade, so Captain McCue's feat is surprisingly late in US history. However, she has risen to this height relatively quickly, after only fifteen years.

The breakthroughs on cruise ships
2003: Inger Klein Olsen became staff captain on the Seabourn Pride, then took command of the Queen Victoria in 2010, Cunard’s first woman captain.
2007: Karin Stahre Janson (pictured) became Royal Caribbean International’s first woman captain on the Monarch of the Seas and the first woman to command a major cruise ship.

2008: Lis Lauritzen became relief captain on RCI’s Jewel of the Seas followed by command of the Vision of the Seas in 2011.
2010: Sarah Breton became captain on P&O Cruises’ Artemis, followed by command of P&O Cruises Australia’s Pacific Pearl in 2011.
2015: Kate McCue becomes Celebrity Cruises' first woman cruise ship captain, on the Celebrity Summit.






Earlier US women captains
US women were captains from 1887. They included Philomène Daniels, ’the first female steamship captain’ (pictured below) Mary M Miller, and Mary W Coons.

Lots of 'firsts' were claimed, in women's maritime history, I've found. Maybe communications weren't good enough to allow for checking and corroboration.
Possibly the first certificated US captain was was Ivy Wambolt (1910-1976)
Captain Ivy commented to a newspaper that ‘It was natural for me to go to sea … my father and my brothers all went … Following the sea is much more exciting than sitting at a pokey old desk. I get to go places, see things, and know that my ship is my own … I don’t see how it is unusual for a girl to be a captain. It happens to be my job.’
Ivy was followed by Molly Kool in 1939.

Worldwide pioneering woman captains
Worldwide, women have been captains since at least the 1830s. Some weren't certified, because formal qualifications, rather than experience, weren't initially required. The first woman captain on record in Western history is Betsy Miller,(1792-1864). Master of the Cloetus or Cletis, a 197-ton brig taking timber from Ardossan to Belfast, Dublin and Cork, she was from Saltcoats, Ayrshire, in Scotland.
Women in the early days, and they were rare, almost always rose to these heights because their family owned ships and had trained the woman to handle them. The women were known and trusted, and didn't initially do very long voyages.
They often got their opportunity because there was no-one else to help out in a crisis that would otherwise have ruined the family business.

Best person for the job
So Captain McCue is part of a new pattern: women who get their job on merit alone, because they are the best person for the job.
Her story, as it appears in US newspapers this morning, is below:

"MIAMI, July 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- For the first time in the cruise industry – and in Celebrity Cruises' history – an American female will take the helm of a mega-ton cruise ship. At 37 years of age, San Francisco native Kate McCue will command Celebrity Summit– a 91,000-ton, 965-foot ship in the Celebrity Cruises fleet, sailing between the eastern United States and Bermuda. As Captain, she will be responsible for the safe navigation of the ship and the onboard experience of its 2,158 guests and 952 crew members.

Career path
"The modern luxury cruise brand, which operates a fleet of 10 ships, has elevated McCue to the position of Captain based on her 15 years of successful experience and leadership in the maritime industry.
"During her tenure, McCue has managed ship logistics while sailing worldwide itineraries, including Europe, Asia, Australia, the Caribbean, the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and along the Panama Canal.
"Captain McCue has also served as a maritime leader while sailing several transatlantic and repositioning cruises, and played a notable role in the revitalization of ships in Singapore.
"A graduate of California State University's California Maritime Academy, Captain McCue has held a variety of roles in the maritime industry, beginning as a cadet and deck officer, then working through a series of successively more responsible positions to her most recent role as Master Mariner with Royal Caribbean International.
"McCue has earned numerous certifications in a variety of areas pertaining to leadership navigation, ship management and security.

Leading women in Celebrity Cruises
"Continuing Celebrity Cruises' dedication to advancing the role of women in leadership, Kate McCue's appointment follows that of Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, who was named President and CEO of Celebrity Cruises in December 2014.
"From the first time I met Kate, I looked forward to this moment, when I could extend my congratulations to her for being such a dynamic and highly respected leader who will continue to pave the way for women in the maritime industry," said Lutoff-Perlo.
"Of all the great moments throughout my career, this is at the top of my list. I am both honored that Kate accepted this position, and proud of the way our team continues to transform the way people think about Celebrity, and about cruising in general."

How Kate McCue sees it:
"Becoming the first female American captain of a cruise ship has been a goal of mine for as long as I can remember," says McCue. "The honor is amplified by being the first at a company like Celebrity Cruises.
"The cruise industry is ever-evolving, from the ships and the itineraries, to our guests' expectations for vacation experiences. Celebrity has a history of delivering on each of these and I am thrilled to be a part of it.
"I look forward to working with an amazing team and the exceptional leadership who bring the Celebrity Cruises vision to life every day."

McCue will begin her new role on Celebrity Summit in August 2015.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kate-mccue-advances-womens-leadership-in-cruising-as-celebrity-cruises-names-her-the-industrys-first-ever-american-female-captain-300111992.html

HER foreign forays in HIS ship: Eleanor Reid’s 1799 voyage reviewed

Few women sailed the late eighteenth-century seas. Fewer still wrote about it.
And female seafarers were rare. But it could be argued that wives of the captains of merchant vessels worked, unwaged,as diplomats, go-betweens, unofficial human resources experts, ad hoc Chief Mates,and providers of emotional labour.
Eleanor Reid is one, sailing to Australia in 1799 on a ship of the East India company, when she was only 21.
The usual problem with the very rare autobiographical accounts by such travelers is that they lack a cultural interpreter, ideally one who is gender-aware.
So Joan Druett’s interpellations are welcome in this, her edited version of Eleanor's Odyssey. A maritime historian of women, Druett is particularly acclaimed for her books on whaling wives.

WHAT IT'S ABOUT
‘Odyssey’ is the right word. This is an account of seafaring from the proprietor’s wife’s benign perspective.
It’s also a story in six episodes of what Eleanor saw of many countries, including India and Southern Africa, and what she made of the people she met with such humanity.

A DIFFERENT SORT OF GRAND TOUR NARRATIVE
Eleanor’s is not quite a counter-version of Grand Tour narratives. She, like privileged tourists, met local elites, was borne on palanquins and viewed ‘the poor natives’.
The difference is that she does so within a party of global citizens, seafarers of many backgrounds, who offer her cultural interpretations, for example about cannibals. She travels not with chaperone and maid, but with many Lascars, three score sheep, and a human cargo of 176 Gaelic-speaking Irish convicts to whom Eleanor’s kindly husband, Hugh, allows much sage leeway.
In terms of class and gender I was fascinated that when Eleanor met ex-pat bigwigs she was not disdained on class grounds, as ‘only a captain’s wife’. And indeed a wife’s presence helped him be accepted in places where a ‘commercial trader’ would have been inadmissible.
Her account gives evidence of intermittent avid homosociality mixed with wider hospitality. She’s heartily welcomed by lonely European women in outposts who relish a lady visitor dropping anchor.
Such settlers give her hospitality for many weeks in some cases, imagining she’d rather be ashore. In fact she likes the ship. So this is partly a story of the Friendship, as her cozy ship-home, progressing oddly unproblematically across the oceans, interrupted by ports and strangers.

ABSENCES AND DIPLOMACY
If only Mrs Reid had told us about what the different stopping points meant to her. How useful it would have been to hear her comparisons of the many places where she does a civilized version of exploring of the natural history and social anthropology.
Druett refers to Reid and her husband having to quickly ‘decipher’ existing social situations as they land at new ports.
Reid’s final account is as tactful as this unofficial diplomat herself must have been in these encounters with ‘savages’ and early colonials. It’s carefully under-controversial, so we too have a lot to decipher.
Emotions and subjectivity are often missing from men's ‘we did this, we found that’-style memoirs. And feelings are little present in this careful account too.
Many scholars are working on how women's voices have been silenced or distorted by hegemonic patriarchy. So an introduction explaining the narrative’s early nineteenth century production would have helped.
For example, can we ever know how much Captain Reid or an unknown editor (it was serialized in the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China and Australia, 1819-1820) shaped Eleanor’s initial account? What subtle social insights got lost on the cutting room floor as her story was organized into a marketable public account twenty years on?
This is a rich addition to women’s maritime historiography, enhanced very much by images on almost every other page.
The book is also, quietly, a useful side-angle on Irish rebel history and that of the European women unusually living overseas, in the days of imperial domination.

Eleanor's Odyssey: Journal of the Captain's Wife on the East Indiaman Friendship, 1799-1801 (Old Salt Press, New Jersey , 2014, ISBN: 9780994115218).
Joan Druett’s’s blog about it can be read at http://joan-druett.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/eleanors-odyssey.html.