Islander was first female ship’s master, but coast guard disagrees
Well, this is awkward. In December, the Canadian Coast Guard named its newest icebreaker after the New Brunswick woman it said was Canada’s first female ship’s master.
Only one problem: It was actually a Vancouver Island woman who earned that title.
Port Alberni’s Capt. Dorothy Blackmore got her master mariner’s papers in 1937, two years before the woman for whom the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Captain Molly Kool was christened.
For Blackmore’s daughter, Patricia Currie of Sidney, the lack of recognition rankles: “She should be part of our history, and she isn’t.”
And no, she’s not happy about the response from the coast guard, which argues that while Blackmore got her papers as a tugboat captain in minor waters, Kool’s certification was aboard big, seagoing vessels.
To Currie, that just sounds like revisionist hairsplitting. There was no such distinction made when the icebreaking tug Vidar Viking was retrofitted and relaunched as the icebreaker CCGS Captain Molly Kool in December.
“The first woman in North America to become a licensed ship captain, Kool helped pave the way for future generations of women in her field,” declared a government backgrounder at the time. The coast guard posted a YouTube video in which the woman who commands the icebreaker says: “I’m captain of the ship that bears the name of the first female that ever received a master mariner in Canada, so it’s quite special.”
Well, not to take anything away from Myrtle (Molly) Kool, who earned a reputation for courage while hauling cargo on the Bay of Fundy after her certification in 1939, but it had already been deemed pretty special, a victory for women across Canada, when Blackmore got her master’s papers in December 1937.
That came after Blackmore’s father, upon whose tugs and water taxis she had already worked for six years, got a letter from ComoxAlberni MP A.W. Neill: “I am advised that the department has decided that a woman is eligible to receive a certificate as master, mate or engineer, if she fulfils all the requirements of the Canada Shipping Act, so that I trust that this will lead to your daughter getting the certificate she desires.”
The 23-year-old’s milestone was big news at the time. “Meet Capt. Dorothy Clarice Blackmore of Port Alberni, first lady in Canada to be granted a master mariner’s certificate,” trumpeted the Vancouver Province, going on to observe that 10 years previously, another woman, Mrs. J. Hay, had been denied her papers because the Justice Department had ruled that a woman couldn’t be so certified. (Note that the Persons Case, which established that Canadian women had equal rights under the law, wasn’t resolved until 1929.)
“Madame captain,” read the headline in the Montreal Herald, while the Times of Mobile, Alabama, settled for the more prosaic “Woman skipper.” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s story began: “Pretty 23-year-old Dorothy Clarice Blackmore, whose soft and friendly cheeks have oft been kissed by the breath of Neptune. …” Yeesh.
Blackmore was even celebrated as “the first woman in Canada to be granted a master mariner’s papers” in a Sweet Marie chocolate bar ad in Liberty magazine in 1938.
In 1941, Chatelaine magazine ran a correction: “We said that Capt. Molly Kool of New Brunswick was the only woman in Canada to hold a master’s certificate; but since 1937 Capt. Dorothy has had one at the opposite coastline of the Dominion.”
Here, by contrast, is what the coast guard said this week: Although Blackmore’s achievement was great, she was limited to tugs in minor waters, while Kool gained one of the highest levels of qualification that could be reached at the time, with no limits on tonnage, power or location where the vessel could operate.
“Ms. Kool was the first woman in North America to attain this certification, and the naming of the CCGS Captain Molly Kool provided an opportunity for the government of Canada to commemorate the achievements of all women, including those in seafaring careers, by recognizing this accomplishment.”
Currie thinks her mother’s low profile flowed in part from her personality. “She was a really modest woman. She didn’t think it was all that big a deal. … She said: ‘We’re all just down on the waterfront doing our jobs.’ ”
That job carried risk. She was deemed a member of Canada’s Merchant Navy because she worked in exposed Pacific waters where Japanese submarines prowled.
“Miss D. Blackmore credited with courage in daring rescue of two men stranded on Useless Inlet,” read a 1946 headline after she assisted a police boat in plucking a couple of stranded loggers off a stormswept beach.
Blackmore eventually moved to Nanoose, where she and her war hero husband — Squadron Leader Pitt Clayton OBE, DFC and bar — built a marina, and where she also towed log booms for Island Tug and Barge. Later, they took off for England where, with no sailing experience at all, they bought a boat and set sail through the Mediterranean. She died in Grand Forks in 1996.