Women At Sea
Simon Wills discovers the hidden history of the first British women to sail the seas – often disguised as men
Simon Wills discovers the hidden history of the first British women to sail the seas – often disguised as men
The lure of the sea has drawn men to work on ships for centuries, but women were denied equal access to seagoing roles until comparatively recently. For example, in the 18th and early 19th centuries women were not allowed on board Royal Navy ships at sea. In practice, some crewmen’s wives accompanied their husbands, but they were rarely acknowledged in official records.
One exception was Jane Townshend. She was the only woman identified by name as having fought at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and her valued role was publicly recognised by the captain of her ship, HMS Defiance. We do not know Jane’s duties but perhaps she tended the wounded, cooked for the crew, or washed and mended clothes. Despite serving the nation to her commander’s satisfaction, her application for a campaign medal was rejected by the Admiralty. This is the main reason that we are aware of her existence, but we know little else about her.
Driven To Crossdress
The frustration experienced by women who wanted to work at sea is borne out by the fact that some took to impersonating men in order to achieve their goal. One of the most famous examples is Hannah Snell (1723–1792), who joined the Royal Marines as a man named ‘James Gray’. Unlike Jane Townshend, we know quite a lot about Hannah because she later developed a stage career and, unusually, was granted a service pension. Hannah served on board Navy ships dressed in a man’s uniform for four-and-a-half years. Remarkably, she didn’t give the game away even after being badly wounded in the groin in 1748, but eventually she chose to leave and then revealed her exploits. Her
autobiography is available online for free: bit.ly/hannahsol.
The press and the public alike were fascinated by these stories of male impersonators, and many similar examples are known. In 1759, Mary Lacy (c1740–1801) joined a warship as ‘William Chandler’, an assistant to the ship’s carpenter. She went on to become a shipwright in the naval dockyard until arthritis stopped her working and then, to everyone’s surprise, was permitted to claim a naval pension and retired.
From ‘Jane’ To ‘John’
However, not all attempts at enlistment were successful. John Meace joined the Royal Marines at Uttoxeter in 1762, but when the new recruits turned out in uniform the next morning “one of the men lay hold of her coat by the breast and her sex was discovered”, according to the London Chronicle. ‘John’ was in fact Jane Meace.
Similar accounts were described in the 19th century, and in the Merchant Navy too, the service that operates commercial vessels such as passenger ships. Charlotte Petrie from Aberdeen became seaman ‘William Bruce’ and sailed to Italy before being unmasked on a hot night when the crew had to strip to their bare essentials. In 1860, the Leeds Mercury reported the case of Tom Stewart, “a stout person about nineteen years of age, dressed like a genuine sailor” who smoked furiously, swore in the nautical fashion, and walked with a rolling gait. A policeman ascertained that ‘Tom’ was in fact female, and arrested her. The woman did not reveal her name, but said she was going to work on board a merchant ship bound for Melbourne, and was released.
Why was it that women were denied a professional role at sea for so long? The answer lies mainly in society’s view of the men who went to sea. Sailors were characterised as immoral. They drank rum every day and often to excess, and they worked in an all-male environment where swearing, lewdness and gambling were common. Although there might be some form of religious service at sea on a Sunday, if the captain was so inclined, many sailors did not regularly worship God and so were divorced from Christian moral instruction. This explained their outrageous behaviour whenever they returned to port: whoring, fighting and getting drunk.
Accordingly, it was assumed that a female member of a ship’s crew would be quickly taken advantage of by the male sailors, and be abused or become pregnant. Furthermore, any woman who chose to enter this world had to be morally suspect.
There was also the concern that women would not be physically strong enough for the work involved, and that their
clothing would be inappropriate for a shipboard role.
Many women had to be content with land-based support roles for the men who went to sea. Despite the heroic exploits of 22-year-old Grace Darling in famously saving lives from a shipwreck off the Farne Islands in 1838, women were not allowed to serve on lifeboats – and were even considered bad luck. Yet since the inception of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in 1824, women have always played a vital role at lifeboat stations by helping to prepare and launch the lifeboat, and recovering it after a call-out. Women were often the business brains in fishing families too, but they weren’t allowed at sea.
Maids In The Merchant Navy
Yet understandably, a support role on the land or pretending to be a man was not enough, and gradually a few pioneering women secured true seagoing jobs in the Merchant Navy. As early as 1815, the coastal steamer SS Thames advertised that “for the express purpose of combining delicacy with comfort a female servant attends upon the ladies”. However, this was not the norm: until mid-Victorian times, female passengers were generally expected to look after each other at sea if they had not brought their own servants with them.
This was a practice that many women did not appreciate.
By the 1850s there was greater recognition that female passengers on oceangoing merchant ships needed women on board to tend to them when they were sick, to help them with other personal issues, and to care for young children. Hence the role of ‘stewardess’ was born, initially as a seagoing version of a lady’s maid for first-class travellers.
The remit for the role began to widen after 1850s legislation mandated that unmarried men and women on emigrant ships be berthed separately. This encouraged some shipping companies to employ a steerage stewardess or matron to supervise female emigrant comfort but also ‘to encourage decency and order’ among the passengers. In the early decades of the role, a stewardess was often the sole female crewmember on board a vessel and this did raise a few Victorian eyebrows. Shipping companies were, however, keen to employ older women of good character to try to allay any fear of impropriety. In 1865, for example, the stewardess on board the luxury liner SS London was Mrs Grace Logan, who sailed all the way to Australia and back among a crew of 90 men. However, she was a middleclass widow in her thirties who had already raised a family, which society viewed as indicative of moral respectability. The expectation was that Grace, and stewardesses like her, would only ever speak to men on board about work-related issues; she would never be ‘familiar’ with men on pain of dismissal, and had to spend her free time and take her meals alone in her cabin.
A Foot In The Door
Official figures show that by 1888 stewardesses were well-established, but still comparatively uncommon. The Merchant Navy employed just 797 of them – about four people in every 1,000 shipboard employees. Nonetheless, the role of stewardess provided a significant foot in the door for other female seagoing roles, and as the 19th century progressed women gradually adopted more functions on passenger ships. Initially they undertook ‘traditional’ female roles for the period: laundress, hairdresser, nurse, cleaner, waitress and so forth. Inevitably, their wages were often less than those of seagoing men who were in similar positions of responsibility.
Even though women were
few in number, and their roles were limited, they began to prove that they were every bit as professional and competent as men, and without the flood of moral corruption at sea that had been anticipated. A particularly notable example of this came when the passenger ship SS Stella struck rocks off the Channel Islands in 1899. The ship sank in less than 10 minutes, but the senior stewardess, Mary Anne Rogers, managed to save all of the passengers under her charge and even gave her own lifebelt to a young girl who had become separated from her mother.
As the Stella began to go down, the sailors urged Mrs Rogers to escape. However, she refused: the lifeboat was already overloaded, and her weight might capsize it. She went down with the ship – the customary role for the captain, a man. By choosing to act as a professional member of the crew, Mrs Rogers earned instant acclaim. Her courageous sacrifice struck a national chord, and there are memorials to her in the UK’s three most important ports: a large monument on the waterfront at Southampton, a stained-glass window in Liverpool Anglican Cathedral and a plaque dedicated to her heroism in the City of London.
Although seafaring remains male-dominated to this day, the range of roles for women began to expand more quickly in the 20th century and beyond. Jane Townshend and Hannah Snell would surely be delighted to know that the Navy now employs women as warship commanders, and Mary Anne Rogers would be fascinated that women can also captain a cruise liner.