Violet Jessop’s life was immediately disrupted by the declaration of war on 4 August 1914. She was working as a stewardess aboard the White Star Line’s Olympic, the sister ship of the Titanic, which was sailing to New York. The outbreak of hostilities surprised many merchant vessels already embarked on scheduled voyages, or berthed in what were, suddenly, hostile ports. Ocean liners hurried across open waters, fearful that enemy ships might already be lying in wait for them. On the transatlantic routes there was a great homeward rush of Americans and Europeans travelling in both directions.
Aboard the Olympic, Violet noted that the passengers managed to maintain the civilities but there was considerable tension among the multinational crew. The journey back to Britain in the huge ship, now darkened in case of enemy action, was sinister and menacing. Violet recalled: ‘It seemed uncanny, journeying back to England, to goodness knows what, in a huge darkened Olympic. The first sign of a large ship with the unmistakable signs of a cruiser about her did make our hearts beat swifter. It was the Cunarder Aquitania, already converted to an armed merchant cruiser, looking very much like a woman showing off a beautiful new dress, which we duly admired, gratefully.’1
Passenger numbers were adversely affected by the outbreak of war, and many women seafarers were rapidly made redundant. Cunard’s internal records show that by 1915, owing to the submarine menace, passenger traffic across the Atlantic had to a large extent been diverted to steamers of a neutral flag. However, there were still some Allied passenger ships plying the Atlantic, albeit less frequently, and it was generally believed that the Germans would not dare to target any passenger ship carrying civilians from a neutral country such as America or Canada. But those assumptions were proved catastrophically wrong by the sinking of the Lusitania, a huge Cunard liner, sailing from New York to Liverpool via Queenstown, in May 1915. On board were 1,959 people, including twenty-one stewardesses, a matron and a typist.
On the morning of the Lusitania’s departure from New York, on 1 May 1915, the German Embassy in Washington placed warnings in major American newspapers:
Travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters, and travellers sailing in the war zone … do so at their own risk.
The threat of attack was not taken seriously by those booked to travel on the Lusitania because, unlike other Cunard vessels that had been converted to military and naval use, the Lucy, as she was affectionately known, was still supposedly engaged solely in conveying passengers, and had not been requisitioned by the Admiralty for war service. Nevertheless, Captain W.T. Turner took every precaution, with bulkhead doors and portholes sealed and lookouts posted.
The Lusitania was a modern and well-designed ship, with modifications added since the loss of the Titanic; she carried forty-eight lifeboats, which were capable of accommodating 2,600 people, ample capacity for the full complement of 1,962 passengers and crew on board. However, on this voyage the ship was not travelling at full speed; due to the general decline in the volume of transatlantic travel and the increased price of coal, as well as a shortage of labour, it had been decided to reduce the steam power of the propellers by approximately a quarter, which simplified manning the stokeholds but reduced the speed of the vessel to twenty-one knots. Crucially, the Lusitania was moving slowly enough to provide a tempting target for the German U-20 U-boat, when she was spotted on 7 May 1915, ten miles off the Old Head of Kinsale in Eire.
The lookout reported an oncoming streak of foam and the ship was hit seconds later below the bridge by a torpedo. There was hardly any time to launch the lifeboats and evacuate, as the ship sank a mere eighteen minutes after the attack. Survival was random, a matter of luck. Although the captain insisted ‘women and children first’, as on the Titanic, so quickly did the Lusitania start to sink that panic spread and there was a mad scramble for the lifeboats, with the youngest and fittest inevitably winning the struggle.
Families were separated in the chaos; Lady Allan, wife of a partner in a shipping company, escaped in a lifeboat with both her maids and her Cartier diamond and pearl tiara, but her two teenage daughters, Anna and Gwendolyn, were among those who died because they were in a separate part of the ship when the torpedo hit and could not be located in time.
An Irish passenger in third class, Mrs Nettie Mitchell, found herself one of eleven people in Lifeboat 14, which was lowered successfully, but rapidly filled with water as it had no boat plug in place. The lifeboat was swamped, and sank almost immediately; her husband Walter and baby son were quickly drowned. Nettie slipped into unconsciousness, was picked up by a rescue boat and was left on the quayside at Cobh in the open air among a pile of corpses, as her rescuers assumed she was dead. By chance, Nettie’s brother John, who had also survived the sinking, was searching the port looking for his family; he found Walter dead, then spotted Nettie’s apparently lifeless body nearby. He noticed her eyelids were fluttering, and summoned medical help. Nettie was resuscitated, and recovered from her physical ordeal, though her double bereavement – the loss of both her husband and son in such traumatic circumstances – affected her mental health for some time. Eventually, her doctor recommended she take up some absorbing, worthwhile career as therapy; Nettie moved to Dublin and trained as a midwife, a vocation that she found greatly rewarding.
Of the twenty-one stewardesses on board the Lusitania, only eight survived. One of the fortunate few was Fannie Jane Morecroft, who had worked aboard the Lusitania since 1912. An ebullient Londoner who had a lively past and a spirited personality, she had eloped at the age of eighteen with a much older man, whom she married despite her parents’ disapproval. In 1901 he died, leaving her a widow with two young children, and so she was forced to place her children with a foster family in Liverpool and to seek work at sea as a Cunard stewardess to support them. In later years she lied about her age, claiming to be seven years younger than she was in reality. Her great friend, Marian ‘May’ Bird, who was forty, worked alongside her on the ship, and they were both apprehensive of German submarines, which were known to be active around the coast of Ireland.
As soon as the torpedo struck, Fannie Jane Morecroft ran to the cabins in her care and hurriedly helped the women and children passengers into life jackets, then bustled them up on to the starboard deck. She graphically recalled that everyone was running about ‘like a bunch of wild mice’. She assisted passengers into lifeboats, and watched as the boats were launched. Marian emerged from the crowd as the ship listed alarmingly and they began to slide across the tilting deck. The two stewardesses jumped overboard together and were pulled from the water by the occupants of Lifeboat 15, which was floating nearby. However, that boat became entangled in the exposed wires and trailing ropes of the stricken ship, and it was only by luck that at the last moment it was able to float free, rather than be dragged under as the Lucy sank. All those in Lifeboat 15 were picked up by a trawler and taken to Queenstown. So determined was Fannie to return to her family in Liverpool that, three days after the sinking, she arrived at her married daughter’s home, still wearing the bedraggled stewardess’s uniform in which she had been rescued.
Of 1,959 people on board, 1,198 were lost; there were only 761 survivors, and 885 bodies were never recovered. The sinking of the Lusitania caused international condemnation and outrage. British public opinion was incensed:
The simple fact was that the Lusitania, carrying about two thousand passengers, who for purposes of interest or pleasure pass to and fro across the Atlantic, was torpedoed without the usual warning, so that there was no time to rescue any but a comparatively small portion of those on board, and the hostile submarine made off without an attempt at rescue … We can scarcely imagine even the bloodthirsty Hun gloating over the deaths of these.2
The day after the sinking, on 8 May 1915, Cunard’s chairman A.A. Booth wrote a heartfelt letter to the company’s general agent in America, Charles P. Sumner: ‘We are all at one in our feelings with regard to this terrible disaster to the Lusitania, and it is quite hopeless to try to put anything in writing. My own personal loss is very great, as my New York partner, Mr Paul Crompton, with his wife and five children, all appear to have drowned … the loss of life appears to have been appallingly great as the time was so short [between the torpedo’s impact and ship’s sinking just eighteen minutes later].’3 The Board Minutes from Cunard on 20 May 1915 recorded the members’ ‘deep sense of horror at the outrage committed against this ship’.
The German government defended its actions against international denunciation, and, despite the findings of the commission appointed to investigate the matter, that there was no truth to allegations that it was a cruiser carrying troops and munitions, Admiral Tirpitz maintained in his memoirs that the Lusitania ‘figured as an auxiliary cruiser in the British Naval list’, and he described the ship as an ‘armed cruiser, heavily laden with munitions’.4
The sinking of the Lusitania was the inspiration for one of the most compelling propaganda posters of the Great War. In June 1915 artist Fred Spear portrayed a drowned mother, her dead child still clutched in her arms, sinking down through murky waters, with the simple instruction ‘Enlist’. It was an emotive and influential image, designed to inflame a sense of moral outrage at the atrocity perpetrated by the enemy, and contributed to America joining the Allies in 1917.
For women seafarers, as the Great War progressed there were diminishing opportunities to pursue their former careers afloat. So great was the public revulsion at the fate of the women and children killed by the sinking of the Lusitania that Cunard was reluctant to employ any female staff on ships until the end of the hostilities. Fannie Morecroft was laid off, to her great indignation, and she spent the rest of the war working in a variety of jobs, including that of tram conductor, though she was able to return to her maritime career when peace was restored. And she was not alone; as transatlantic passenger traffic shrank, many stewardesses of all lines were forced to seek employment in other fields. Some retrained as nurses, and found themselves working on one of the seventy-seven converted liners that were now hospital ships, where their sea knowledge was highly regarded. During the Great War, Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service alone had eighty-five sisters on thirteen hospital ships, and Dr Jo Stanley estimates that there were some 2,000 nurses employed on British hospital ships, coping with the wounded of all nationalities.
Nursing was to offer a worthwhile career to many a British woman who was previously denied a role outside the home. Sheila Macbeth Mitchell was born in Bolton to middle-class Scottish parents, and had hopes of becoming a teacher of physical education, but was dissuaded by her parents, who did not want her to work. The outbreak of the Great War swept aside such misgivings, and Sheila trained to become an auxiliary nurse in Queen Alexandra’s Nursing Service. In 1916 she found herself on the hospital ship Britannic, working alongside veteran former stewardess Violet Jessop, and the two women left gripping eyewitness accounts of the disaster that befell the vessel. Violet’s wartime transatlantic voyages had left her in no doubt of the value of nursing as a career. In the first months of the war, while she was working as a stewardes on the Olympic, commanded by the redoubtable Captain Haddock, their vessel was involved in the rescue of the crew of the Royal Navy battleship HMS Audacious, which had struck a German mine on 27 October 1914, between Northern Ireland and Scotland. Despite the appalling weather and mountainous seas, all the crew were saved, though the ship was lost. It was this experience that made Violet decide to train as a nurse, like many other young women. She joined the VAD, the Voluntary Aid Detachment. This was a nursing organisation that had been set up by the British Red Cross Society, with great success; by the end of the war there were more than 126,000 VADs working in support of the war effort, and they were greatly needed. Violet’s four brothers were now serving in the trenches, and she lived in fear that one of her injured patients might turn out to be her sibling.
By 1916 Violet was a qualified nurse, but her considerable pre-war maritime experience as a stewardess made her doubly valuable on the HMHS Britannic, which had been despatched to the Mediterranean, to the Aegean Sea. There were 673 crew on board and 392 hospital nurses. The ship was enormous, a former White Star ocean liner designed for the transatlantic route, and it was the sister ship to the Olympic and the ill-fated Titanic, on both of which Violet had previously worked. The Britannic was charged with caring for wounded Allied servicemen, and was equipped with 3,000 hospital beds. Fortunately, it had not taken on any patients by the morning of 21 November 1916, when there was suddenly an explosion, caused by either an underwater mine or a U-boat torpedo, and the ship began to list.
Sheila related how those on board remained calm, picking up their life jackets and queuing quietly to enter their designated lifeboats. The order was given by the captain to evacuate, and the sixty-year-old chief matron, Mrs E.A. Dowse, stood calmly on the ship’s deck, counting off each of the nurses as they filed into lifeboats with crew members. Mrs Dowse had been one of four nurses who had been in the 1885 Egyptian Campaign, serving in the Relief of Khartoum. During the Siege of Ladysmith in the Boer War, she was in charge of the hospital, apparently impervious to the constant danger from stray bullets.
The Britannic’s engines were still running and the ship was moving, as the captain was hoping to beach the vessel in the shallows. But the prow of the ship gradually filled with water and tilted downwards, while the giant propellers continued to turn, rising from below the sea to scythe through the air. As the first lifeboats full of evacuees struck out from the ship, relief at their escape turned to horror as boat after boat floated within reach of the vast, churning steel blades above them. Some seamen wrestled with the oars, desperately trying to steer their boats out of danger, while others leaped into the water, capsizing their boats, and were drawn inexorably into the bloody carnage left in the Britannic’s wake. Fractured wooden spars, life jackets, horribly injured men and women were all churned up in a bloody froth. Two lifeboats were cut in half, their occupants slashed to pieces in seconds. ‘Unsinkable’ Violet Jessop was the only survivor from her boat. Despite being unable to swim, she was wearing a cork life jacket, so she dived into the water as the boat overturned, and came up under it, sustaining a bad blow to the head. In the darkness her hand grabbed another’s, and she was dragged to the surface by a surgeon from the Royal Army Medical Corps. There they floated among a sea of bloodied, injured and dead men. Violet had received a deep gash to one leg, a head injury and a fractured skull, but she was lucky to be alive. ‘All the casualties were caused directly or indirectly by the propeller, and the wounds and fractures were terrible,’5 recalled Sheila Macbeth Mitchell.
The survivors were picked up from the water, and the nurses in other boats tended to them by ripping up their aprons for bandages. The Britannic sank exactly fifty minutes after it was hit, and 1,035 survivors were eventually rescued by three British ships who, alerted by radio, had raced to the scene. The casualties would undoubtedly have been far higher had the ship been carrying sick and wounded soldiers when the incident occurred, as it would have been almost impossible to evacuate any bed-bound patients successfully. Thirty people died at the scene, but many more suffered life-changing wounds from the propellers.
While Britannic’s rescued male crew and officers were returned promptly to England, arriving in Southampton on 4 December, the nursing staff, including Sheila, were stranded for weeks on the island of Malta, unable to return to Britain. They were finally sent back on a former French cargo ship, an uncomfortable and seemingly interminable journey. They arrived at Southampton at last on Boxing Day and took the train to Waterloo Station, where their matron-in-chief ordered them to go home, rest and await further orders. Sheila was eventually posted to work in an army hospital in France, to her relief, as she was glad to be back on dry land. After a lengthy period of recovery in Malta, Violet was sent back to Britain via Sicily and through Italy by train. On her return she accepted that there were now almost no posts for women afloat while hostilities continued, so she put her linguistic knowledge to good use and took a job at the London branch of the Banco Español del Río de la Plata of Buenos Aires. It was as a result of this traumatic episode aboard the Britannic, her third maritime catastrophe, that Violet gained the soubriquet of The Unsinkable Stewardess. She wore a wig for the rest of her life to conceal the injuries sustained to her scalp.
The Britannic was the largest vessel to be sunk during the First World War, and remains the largest passenger liner ever sunk. In a curious footnote, in 1976, when she was eighty-six, Sheila Macbeth Mitchell responded to a worldwide appeal for witnesses to the sinking of the Britannic from French naval officer Jacques Cousteau, who wanted to explore the recently discovered wreck on the seabed. Sheila not only supplied him with uniquely detailed information about how the vessel came to grief, but she also flew to the Aegean and descended to the seabed in a miniature submarine with the divers, though she feigned disappointment that they were unable to retrieve the alarm clock she had left on the bedside cabinet of her cabin sixty years before.
Given that many of the ocean-going ships were deemed male-only environments while hostilities lasted, in November 1917 the Royal Navy created the Women’s Royal Navy Service (WRNS) – a body later known as the Wrens – to provide land-based support for the men fighting at sea. The female workforce ashore was also galvanised to support the war effort, particularly in support of the beleaguered merchant navy
By the end of August 1914, 30,000 men were volunteering to join the armed forces every day, and there was a desperate shortage of skilled labour as they left their previous occupations for military training. In keeping with the national drive to free up the male workforce for the armed services, women were recruited for manual jobs, including working in the shipyards, which was a radical departure from the pre-war expectations of genteel paid employment deemed suitable for the fairer sex. A newspaper article on women shipbuilders grittily reported:
They are working in blacksmiths’ forges; they red-lead iron work, and do certain portions of the paint work. All over a shipyard they may be seen tidying up, shifting scrap iron, carrying baulks of timber, pieces of angle iron, and iron bars … A more valuable part of their work perhaps is done with machinery, especially in the joiners’ shops … In the engineers’ section of the shipyard, also, they work screwing and boring machines, sharpen tools, and in many other ways help in this department. Experienced girls are very skilful in manipulating such powerful machines as those used for cutting angle-iron and for keel-bending. They drive electric cranes and winches, work which demands the greatest steadiness and care. The proportion of women employed in engineering works is greater than that in the shipyards, on account of the larger number of machines available. As time goes on, and the value of women to the shipbuilder grows, the percentage of women workers engaged in the construction of merchant steamers will doubtless increase.6
Following the outbreak of war, Cunard continued to service and repair its own ships, but also supported the war effort by servicing and maintaining naval craft in its dockside facilities. Cunard already ran a complex, multi-faceted shore-based operation; it owned extensive premises on land, warehouses, repair shops and engine works, and employed hundreds of highly efficient managers, clerks and administrators, all based ashore but working in support of its ocean-going fleet. In October 1915 the company converted its Branch Engine Shop in Bootle into the Cunard National Shell Factory. Managed by Alexander Galbraith, who had the pioneering idea of recruiting some 900 local women, as well as 100 men to work there, the factory produced the first 6- and 8-inch shells made in Britain using female labour, along with a variety of other weaponry. As a bold experiment in bringing women into munitions manufacture, the Cunard Shell Factory was a triumph, and it was much imitated; by 1918 there were nearly 1 million women employed in British munitions and engineering works. The Lady Shell Workers, as they were known, were committed to supporting the war effort in their limited free time, putting on concert parties for wounded soldiers and performing at fundraising events, at which a spirited rendition of ‘God Save the King’ always closed the concerts.
Meanwhile Cunard was given the task of establishing and running the National Aircraft Factory Number 3, to build planes for the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, which amalgamated in 1918 to become the Royal Air Force. Forty-one per cent of the 2,600-strong workforce were female; photographs of the ‘covering room’ show scores of women dressed in pinafores and caps, busy attaching canvas to the wooden frames that formed the wings of planes. The factory constructed 126 fighter planes by 1919, a large contribution to the fleet of the new RAF.
On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, at 11 a.m., the guns finally fell silent, marking the end of fifty-two months of carnage and slaughter. The Shell Factory closed days after, having manufactured 410,302 missiles. Three weeks later, on the evening of 7 December, a grand farewell party was held for the women employees. There were speeches of thanks and celebrations, the guests danced to the Cunard Orchestra, and it was announced that King George V was to be presented with a book of documentary photographs taken at the Shell Factory, at his request. The Lady Shell Workers received letters of heartfelt thanks for all their war work from Sir Alfred Booth, the Cunard chairman, and ‘a memento of your share in the great victory … a souvenir in the form of a 4.5˝ H.E. shell, with the compliments of the Cunard Steam Ship Company’.
For Violet Jessop, now working for a bank in the City of London, the formal end of the hostilities was a hollow triumph. One of her beloved brothers had been killed in the closing days of the war, and she did not have the heart to join the seething and excited crowds out in the street. She recalled:
I went into the manager’s office with a letter I had been translating for him. We were the only two left in the building. There were tears in his eyes. We wept openly as we discussed the contents of the letter. His old heart was torn by the news that his youngest son had just been killed in action during the same engagement as my poor Philip. We had our grief in common, and to neither of us did that Armistice Day bring a message of joy.7
More than 9 million men had been killed in the Great War, 942,135 of them from the British Empire. During the four years of conflict, Cunard had lost twenty ships through enemy action, including the Lusitania, the most high-profile passenger ship to be sunk during the First World War. The final tally represented 56 per cent of the company’s pre-war tonnage. Even the Carpathia, which had steamed to the rescue of so many Titanic survivors in 1912, was sunk. Cargo vessels bringing vital supplies to Fortress Britain were also decimated by the German U-boat fleet. Among Cunard’s many losses was the Vinovia, sailing from New York laden with brass and munitions, which was torpedoed and sunk in the English Channel on 19 December 1917, with nine crew members killed. That vessel was commanded by Captain Stephen Gronow, the author’s great-great-uncle; he survived a night in the open sea, and was rescued the following morning, unconscious and suffering from hypothermia, but he recovered and returned to service on the Aquitania when peace returned.
While the material losses were considerable, it was the human losses that were the hardest to bear. Some 650 of Cunard’s crew members and officers were lost at sea in the hostilities. A source of pride, however, was the way in which the company had coped. The ships had covered more than 3.5 million miles as part of the war effort, carrying 9 million tons of food, munitions and raw materials. Their main area of operation was the North Atlantic, but they also travelled to the Mediterranean and the far north of Russia. Cunard alone transported 900,000 troops, half a million of them American soldiers joining the war in Europe.
But the victorious nations felt little in the way of triumph, just exhausted relief, as they attempted to make some sense of the peace. In Britain there was hardly a household that hadn’t suffered a bereavement or serious injury. There was a palpable absence of old pals and contemporaries, ‘missing in action’ or ‘lost in France’. The survivors of the four years of war were now returning, some of them maimed, gassed, blinded or disfigured, or mentally affected by their experiences.
With hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors needing repatriation, the ocean liners that had served as troopships during the war were once again pressed into service. Surviving ships were refitted and once again put on to passenger routes, as shipping companies commissioned new vessels to replace their lost fleets. With so many people on the move between continents, it was inevitable that they would be taking with them more than memories and souvenirs; the Spanish flu pandemic, which swept the world in 1918–19, killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, approximately 250,000 of them in Britain.
For women the first year of peace was a period of transition. Injured or traumatised ex-servicemen returned to Britain after the war expecting to take up their old jobs; indeed, many of them had been promised by their employers that they could return to their previous posts after the victory. While the men had been fighting in the trenches, many Civvy Street roles had been largely occupied by women. It was a thorny problem: the women who had been recruited and welcomed into office jobs in order to ‘free up a man for the front’ were now surplus to requirements. Cunard’s staff magazine, Cunard Line, lost no time in dropping unsubtle hints to its female workforce: ‘The day is coming soon when the rightful inhabitants will be welcomed back to the office and many of the ladies must lay down their pens sadly – yet gladly – and retire into private life. May it truthfully be said on that day that they have carried on.’8
While individual women might be prepared to relinquish a specific ‘man’s job’ to a former soldier returning from the front, in general they had no inclination to return compliantly to the domestic hearth after the Great War. A month after the Armistice, in December 1918, British women were granted the vote for the first time (though not all women: for the next decade, enfranchised females were only those who were householders and aged thirty or over). This was both a concession to the pre-war impetus to introduce women’s suffrage, and an acknowledgement of the vital role women had played in support of the war effort. The fundamental changes to women’s lives were more profound than gaining the vote. Four years and three months of hostilities had transformed the nature of British civilian society. For the first time, large numbers of women of all classes and backgrounds had found useful, interesting and remunerative employment outside the home. For younger women, the Great War had overturned all their previous assumptions, and revolutionised every notion of how their future lives might be lived. Galvanised by the war effort and encouraged to demonstrate their patriotism, they had learned to drive motor vehicles, helped to construct munitions and aeroplanes, and trained as nurses or stenographers. For the first time women had been actively recruited and welcomed into offices and banks, factories and canteens. They had been employed alongside men, in clerking and administrative positions. Their abilities and skills had been required and valued, because they were filling vacancies left by men called up for the forces. As a result, many young women had developed a new sense of independence and self-confidence. They had a sense of their own agency, and had proved to themselves that they could earn an independent living. The most outgoing and enterprising were realising that they could be citizens of the world, especially if they were prepared to travel. And in order to do that, they had to go to sea.