Edith Sowerbutts surveyed her reflection critically in the full-length looking glass. She had planned to buy the correct uniform from the Nurses’ Outfitting Shop in Victoria Street, London, but they did not yet stock what she required, as her job had only recently been created. Resourceful Edith had therefore invested in a lady’s greatcoat, standard issue for Canadian-Pacific’s stewardesses, and had found a suitably smart navy blue frock-coat with scarlet piping in an Oxford Street department store. The addition of some brass buttons had given her improvised uniform a more maritime look, an impression augmented by a neat navy blue hat. Her pin-on metal badge read ‘Conductress’ in gold letters, and she was pleased with her new persona.
It was the summer of 1925 and bespectacled, freckled Edith, aged twenty-nine, full of energy and possessed of a hearty appetite, had been recruited by Red Star Line to be a conductress on their ships travelling between Antwerp and Canada. Her role was to look after the welfare of unaccompanied women and children emigrating to Canada, especially those deemed vulnerable to possible exploitation.
While the United States restricted the influx of immigrants in the 1920s, Canada actively recruited Europeans, promising them ample employment opportunities. The country needed domestic servants, cooks, waitresses, teachers and nurses, and financial assistance was available for suitable applicants. To meet the demand, in 1924 Cunard put two of their passenger ships, the Caronia and Carmania, on the run from Liverpool to Canada, via Belfast, while Red Star Line ran regular ships from Antwerp to Halifax and New York, catering primarily for continental émigrés.
Single women contemplating travelling to Canada were reassured that, for the first time, there would be professional female chaperones on board. There had been considerable international concern about the ‘white slave trade’, the trafficking of women and children. On arrival in a vast city where they did not speak the language, solo female passengers could be easy prey for the unscrupulous, and tales abounded of undocumented and unaccompanied victims being lured or coerced into the sex industry. The Canadian government insisted that immigrants heading to their shores should be accompanied by professional, competent welfare officers, called ‘conductresses’. Each passenger’s biographical details and their emigration plans would be recorded while they were on board the ship, and after being handed over safely to the proper authorities on arrival in Nova Scotia their onward journey and eventual settlement would be monitored.
The creation of the new role of conductress provided British seafaring women with their first increase in status, to the rank of officers. Conductresses were competent, authoritative women, who commanded respect within the ship’s company while chaperoning their charges. Unlike stewardesses, who provided practical care for the physical comfort of their allocated passengers while afloat, conductresses were primarily responsible for their passengers’ moral welfare. Conductresses escorted, advised and protected the women and children on board, especially (though not exclusively) those in third class, who were crossing the globe, travelling to an unknown future in a country where they did not yet speak the language.
Edith Sowerbutts was one of a small but influential group of women who travelled the North Atlantic as conductresses. She started working for Red Star Line, which was owned by White Star, in 1925, and continued in that role for six years, when assisted immigration to Canada ceased and she was made redundant, although that was not the end of her maritime career. Edith was well-travelled, experienced and adventurous. In 1919 she and her friend Trix Bickerton, a former suffragette, had worked their three-month passage as stewardesses on the Canberra, a troopship returning exuberant demobbed Australian soldiers to Sydney. The experience was enlightening; on arrival Edith and Trix were described as ‘A couple of bonzer Sheilas, but no bloody good to me as stewardesses’ by the chief steward. Attracted to the vibrant life in Sydney, Edith stayed in Australia for several years. She had trained as a stenographer, and although she always disliked typing, it was a marketable skill that brought her plenty of work. She bought her first typewriter, a second-hand Underwood, for £20, and in her spare time she wrote articles for the Sydney Morning Herald. She recalled:
I have often pondered the question: was the typewriter women’s road to equality? I think maybe it was one of the first steps. Myself, I could see very little attractive in employment where one typed away from morn to eve, but it has been and can still be a means to an end. I escaped from the typing pool soon after war was declared in 1914. I found work with more scope, less typing, even less shorthand.1
Edith returned to Britain by sailing the Pacific and crossing Canada by train. She was employed by the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women (SOSBW) to promote overseas migration, and ran the organisation’s stand at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in Wembley, during one of the chilliest and wettest summers on record, a factor that may have helped recruitment. She had a great deal of practical experience of intercontinental travel, as well as fellow feeling for people who were prepared to travel to better their lives. Edith was also a natural champion of those who were discriminated against on the grounds of race, class or gender. Her innate sense of justice made her a formidable advocate on behalf of the passengers in her care, and she was delighted to be taken on as a conductress by Red Star Line in 1925.
The westbound route of Edith’s first ship, the Zeeland, was from Antwerp, via Southampton to Halifax in Canada, and then to New York. The majority of people carried in third class were would-be emigrants from all over Europe, planning to settle in the New World. Edith received £12 a month; by comparison, an assistant purser on a small liner would get £15 a month, while a ship’s doctor would have a basic salary of £30–£40 a month, and charge additional fees for any services. Male officers had an entertainment allowance on top of their salaries, so that they could ‘treat’ passengers to drinks at the bar, but this was not given to conductresses. Edith was often short of money as she was fond of the high life once ashore.
Conductresses were expected to ‘head’ a dining table every evening in the first-class dining room, acting as hostesses for any unaccompanied women. On her first voyage out on the Zeeland Edith hosted a table of ten elderly American ladies, who seemed to find her presence reassuring. Edith was told by the purser that she would be expected to change for dinner, ‘as you would at home’, which amused her, as her family was quite ordinary and did not change for their evening meal, a simple supper. She owned a neat little black dress for evening wear, and a couple of white piqué sleeveless tennis dresses for her off-duty hours on the sports deck in the summer months.
While Edith was available to unaccompanied women in all classes, her primary role was looking after the interests of those in third class, and processing their immigration applications. She would introduce herself to each one, explaining that she had a list of official questions, and record the answers by hand, then type up the details later. On each voyage Edith compiled detailed lists of all unaccompanied women immigrants across all three classes for the Canadian authorities. To extract this information from each woman was often a race against time, because third-class passengers were housed in the least stable section of the ship, and therefore prone to seasickness. If possible, she completed her interviews before they passed the west coast of Ireland, after which the open Atlantic was rougher. Edith relied on the services of interpreters, and was particularly fond of a remarkable character called Terps, an Orthodox Jew who spoke fourteen languages. He spent most of his free time in the kosher kitchen with his friend the chef. Edith used to join them there for fish and chips, as she thought it was the best food available on the ship.
Edith had a great deal of sympathy for her passengers, and believed that, whatever their previous experiences, they were heading for a better life in Canada or America. The unaccompanied women in third class were typically Poles, Ukrainians, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Italians, Romanians or Germans. Many of the central Europeans were from poor rural backgrounds, and they had already made a mighty journey, usually by train, across Europe to get to Antwerp to join the ship: ‘They wore long, voluminous skirts or dresses, grubby but oft-times hand-embroidered; short sheepskin jackets, head scarves and high boots. Their hand-worked blouses were made of a coarse fabric resembling calico. They wore their hair in plaits. I had never seen their like before … these people had known nothing but a very hard life – mud floors, no mod cons.’2
The voyages made by individual women to the New World often required great stamina and determination, and those making the journey were not always young and fit. In 1926 White Star Magazine carried a brief article about a nonagenarian who had made an epic journey:
A remarkable old lady is Mrs Rachel Garberowitz, who hails from Lithuania. Until the other day she had never been away from her village home, but, at the age of 94, she has at last seen the sea and crossed the Atlantic. At the request of her three married daughters, in Rochester, NY, she came all the way across Europe to Hamburg for Grimsby and stepped on board the Baltic at Liverpool on September 4th bound for New York. She was intensely interested in the embarkation of the twelve hundred passengers which the Baltic carried and was vastly impressed by the accommodation and fittings of the liner. Mrs Garberowitz is going to live with one of her daughters.3
Being a conductress was not a job for the squeamish. The women often secreted money and valuables on their bodies, between their corsets and their underwear, and they resisted changing their clothes during the journey, in case their precious possessions were stolen from them. Everyone hated bad weather; the passengers were unable to get out on deck, away from the omnipresent smell of soup, raw garlic (thought to combat seasickness), unwashed clothes and assorted bodily fluids. Nevertheless, Edith would doggedly eat at least one meal a day in third class, alongside her charges, to ensure the food was palatable.
Conditions in third-class transatlantic ships had continued to improve markedly during the early 1920s, and now bore little resemblance to the horrors of the notorious steerage class before the Great War. On the Zeeland, hot seawater baths were available, with special soap that would lather in brine. The women could clean themselves, and wash their clothes. On one occasion an impatient chief steward tried to speed up the process by making two girls share the same bath. Edith insisted each woman should bathe alone, in privacy, and her argument prevailed. Her tussles on behalf of her charges, who were looked down on by some of the crew as racially inferior, often made her unpopular. When she insisted that the third-class women and children were moved to better quarters in the Zeeland, to minimise the likelihood of them getting seasick, she encountered hostility from some of the crew, though she won her case: ‘Since my women were seeking a new world of hope and freedom, a door to a better life, my thought was that it might just as well start on board ship. The old hands who had dealt with emigrants before 1914 did not exactly approve of my ways: they thought anything would do for “wops” and “bohunks”. I did not.’4
Edith was sympathetic to the reasons why many of the third-class passengers were making this epic journey to an unknown continent:
We had many Jews – all types – travelling as emigrants from Europe. They looked as if a terror was behind them, running away with a real sense of fear … all the tragedies of the world seemed to be in their melancholy eyes. They also seemed to have an awful fear of the sea on this, the first time they had ever seen the ocean, or experienced what it could do when in the mood … How terrible it was for those poor, ground-down peasant types, and the persecuted Jews, to be storm-buffeted on a rolling ship, knowing little of what they might expect, only that it was a land of opportunity that awaited them – a strange land, a better life. Others had gone before, and written home to say so. Difficult to comprehend by those of us who had known nothing but freedom and a comparatively good standard of living.5
Edith had other female colleagues on the Zeeland, including a Belgian-born matron. She was stout and elderly, with a toothy smile, unshockable and with boundless common sense, Matron had been a licensed prostitute in her youth. She had married well, had grown-up children, and was now a respectable widow who had taken to a working life at sea. Matron and Edith would escort the ship’s doctor when he examined the third-class immigrant women. Dr Bayer from Brussels was an urbane character, and the passengers, many of whom had never encountered a doctor before, were reassured to have two female chaperones for their examinations. Health problems abounded in the cramped conditions of third class. Tiny children had often been sewn into their woollen combinations, with just apertures left so they could be held over a chamber pot without being undressed. Edith and Matron would methodically ‘unpick’ these children in order to bathe them, often discovering skin conditions like impetigo or scabies, which needed medical treatment.
Occasionally women gave birth unexpectedly during the voyage. Heavily pregnant women were not usually allowed to embark, but sometimes their voluminous clothing and deliberate subterfuge would conceal an imminent arrival. Edith relied on the doctor to manage the delivery, but often had to assist. On one trip, Edith encountered a language problem with one very young expectant mother: she was Hungarian, while the doctor only spoke French and Flemish. Edith and the stewardess tried to mime ‘push’, but met blank bewilderment. Fortunately, a young Hungarian female passenger with a smattering of rudimentary English was located, and translated at the appropriate moment. With urgent instructions being given simultaneously in four languages, the passenger produced a little boy. Babies born mid-ocean were registered by the captain, and their names added to the passenger manifest. If born on a ship sailing under a British flag, the new arrival was registered as a native of Stepney, in London. The arrival of a baby mid-voyage tended to cheer the passengers in all classes and provoke an outbreak of sentimental generosity: one unexpected addition to the passenger list was given an impromptu collection of £450 by the passengers, worth approximately £13,000 today, while another was awarded an unspecified lump sum and a Ford car (worth approximately £3,000 now).6
On another transatlantic crossing Edith was summoned to the sick bay where a young woman was evidently on the point of giving birth. No one could locate Dr Bayer – it was cocktail hour and he could have been anywhere – and though the dinner-jacketed purser offered to help, he was rapidly despatched by Edith, who struggled to remove the patient’s knee-high boots, revealing a pair of filthy feet. Moments later the baby arrived, and the breathless doctor appeared just in time to cut the cord. The child, a very handsome little boy promptly named Janus, was bathed by Edith. His arrival had taken his mother completely by surprise, so he was wrapped in towels while numerous passengers and crew contributed spare clothing to be cut up and made into a layette for him.
Many of Edith’s adult female charges had been recruited in their home countries to be domestics, and were known as Gelley Girls, after the Commissioner of the Canadian Immigration Department who had invented the assisted places scheme. However, some would try to escape their escorts before their intended destination, having arranged clandestinely to meet a boyfriend or a family member. They didn’t get far; their clothes made them conspicuously alien, they were unable to speak a word of the host country’s language, and they were wearing a ribbon that marked them out as destined for domestic service. The escort system was intended to be protective, so that these young women did not fall into bad company or become illicit ‘brothel fodder’.
Edith Sowerbutts was astute, worldly and practical, and dedicated to the welfare of her charges. She was certainly no prude and had spent enough time in and around ports to have a fair grasp of the realities of the sex industry; indeed, she was on friendly terms with the madam of a large brothel in Belgium, while one of her many friends in Antwerp was a former prostitute, now the respectable chatelaine of the ladies’ powder room at a smart country club. However, she had an eagle eye for any possibility of sexual exploitation if it threatened her most vulnerable passengers.
On one voyage Edith became suspicious of a man travelling to America with a very young girl who he claimed was his bride. Her documents stated that she was thirteen, but Edith was suspicious as she spent the trip playing with her dolls on the top bunk, and never ventured out of their cabin. On arrival in New York Edith shared her misgivings with the examining nurse from Ellis Island; she too doubted the given age of the ‘bride’. Both women suspected that the little girl, very pretty, with long golden hair, had been destined for the sex industry. The nurse reported it to the port authorities, who took action. The man’s application to become an American citizen was revoked, but to her frustration Edith never found out what happened to the girl.
Edith also safeguarded unaccompanied children from possible sexual predators on board ships. She would sometimes encounter very young girls who were being sent alone to a distant relative in the far country, and who had been placed, with the relevant photograph, on the passport of some unrelated male. The man accompanying them was usually from the same home town or village, and of course this arrangement might be entirely innocent. However, Edith would step in if she discovered that any young girl or boy had been booked into the same cabin as an unrelated adult male. She would move the child to another cabin, to be berthed with a couple of women who spoke their language, and who were willing to take care of them on the voyage.
Picture Brides were another intriguing feature of Edith’s shipboard life. These were European-born women who had consented to marry men already living in Canada or the USA, without ever having met them. These women took life-changing decisions after answering a newspaper advert, then exchanging letters and photos, arranging their marriages by post. Edith met one on a voyage to Halifax. Rose was British, pleasant in nature, about thirty-five years old and unmarried; in the euphemistic phrase of the day, she was ‘an unclaimed blessing’. By 1925, Rose saw her chances of matrimony were diminishing, so she replied to a newspaper advertisement placed in a British paper by a widower farmer living in western Canada. She sent her photo in a letter, they corresponded, and agreed to wed. She sailed on the Zeeland with a modest trousseau and high hopes. Edith admired her courage, but didn’t find out if Rose’s future lived up to her dreams.
The Canadian immigration system was well-organised; having interviewed each woman and noted her details, Edith would give her a colour-coded piece of ribbon, which showed her eventual destination: red for Manitoba or Saskatchewan, blue for Ontario, white for the maritime provinces. The women proudly wore these ribbons like badges of honour, or campaign medals, pinned to their clothes. They landed at Pier 21, Halifax, Nova Scotia, to be met by female officers of the immigration department, led by a Mrs Bond, who checked the paperwork provided by Edith and escorted the women and children to trains. They were grouped according to their ribbon colours and then taken to their various destinations all over Canada by so-called ‘train girls’. Edith also handed over any unaccompanied children, who had their tickets and vital documents contained in little calico bags securely pinned to their coats.
After leaving Halifax, the Zeeland sailed on to New York, and Edith often assisted the American immigration officials on arrival at Ellis Island, although technically her role only covered passengers going to Canada. Ellis Island was a liminal place, where every day thousands of people queued to be processed, and were either cleared for entry and released into the city, or held for deportation. Sometimes would-be immigrants were refused entry on medical grounds, if one member of a family had a communicable disease, such as trachoma, an eye complaint. In those cases the whole family might have to return to the country of origin if they would not separate. This was calamitous; they had usually sold what few assets they owned to scrape together the transatlantic fares, only to be sent back to certain poverty and destitution.
The Zeeland expanded its service to take over part of the Irish migrant trade and now the ship ran from Antwerp, calling at Southampton, then Cherbourg, and Queenstown (present-day Cobh) before setting out into the Atlantic. Consequently, Edith had more British and Irish women among her third-class passengers, and she found them more trouble than all the others. Unlike her continental charges, who were examined, bathed, deloused and fumigated before they embarked, the British and Irish women often harboured lice or nits. Edith and Matron would have to treat the lousy promptly, to avoid their ‘stowaways’ infesting the whole ship.
Health risks were part of the conductress’s role, but for most female staff on board, after a cursory medical on joining the line, they could consult the ship’s doctor if they were ill. Edith noticed that on every journey, after a certain number of days at sea, all the male crew were summoned in turn to the doctor’s cabin for a brief but mysterious medical, and would emerge rebuttoning their trousers. It dawned on her that they were undergoing what was euphemistically known as ‘short arms inspection’, making sure that they hadn’t contracted any sexually transmitted diseases during their last shore leave. She noted the favourite toast of the crew was: ‘To our wives and sweethearts … and may they never meet!’
There was a general wariness about the possibility of sex between women seafarers and their male counterparts, and they were physically segregated within the ship as much as possible. Between the wars the large international ocean-going ships increased the roles undertaken by female staff, although they were still greatly outnumbered by male crew and officers. Female seafarers were expected to be beyond reproach, but, like Caesar’s wife, they also had to be seen to be blameless. They were not allowed to wear make-up, they must wear a hat or cap while on duty, and they were not allowed to go out with crew members. The women’s sleeping quarters, a dead-end corridor lined with twin cabins, were strictly off limits to all men.
Stewardesses generally avoided getting entangled with any male colleague, and if they did have romantic ambitions they would prefer a more advantageous marriage to an officer, or even a passenger. Some women seafarers did find partners afloat, but often the relationship foundered because of the time spent apart, and they separated and returned to sea.
No stewardess would normally risk entering a man’s cabin, so male travellers were attended by stewards. Female passengers travelling alone or in pairs were always the primary responsibility of the stewardess; to avoid embarrassment, passengers were advised to ring the bell once if they needed a male steward, and twice for the stewardess. Stewards and stewardesses worked closely together, and often became friends. In married couples’ cabins, they would usually share the responsibilities: she would deal with the wife’s bed, toiletries, clothes and personal effects, while he cleaned the bathroom and dealt with the husband’s belongings. For heterosexual or lesbian stewardesses working on the ships, having a gay male colleague was often an advantage for both parties: they could be friends or allies without any romantic or sexual expectations on either side.
Sexual harassment from men could be a real hazard for some women. There were those within the ship’s company who tried to coerce female staff into having sex, either by offering promotion, or by threatening to sully their all-important reputation if they didn’t comply. A number of stewardesses recalled unwanted encounters with questing men. Violet Jessop had to evade the attentions of both an amorous purser and an embittered captain. Edith Sowerbutts was woken one night by a drunken young man who had managed to get into her cabin; ‘You’re a sailor – I’m a sailor,’ he declaimed, as justification. Fortunately, he ambled off, while Edith threw on a dressing gown and went for help. Her ‘beau’ was promptly detained on deck by two burly crew members, and incarcerated for the night, and Edith moved into a superior cabin, one with a better lock.
There was a general sense of camaraderie among sea-going women in all roles on the passenger ships on the North Atlantic, because they were few in number, and shared common living quarters. Edith had friends of different nationalities throughout her ocean-going career. There was Mrs Nielsen, a tiny, wizened stewardess with flaxen hair, of advanced years, who spoke a variety of Scandinavian languages as well as German. Mrs Nielsen was often to be found at the end of a busy day in her cabin, soaking her aching feet in a bucket of hot water. Another friend was an Irish conductress on White Star Lines, Miss O’Kane, known inevitably as Miss O.’K. One snowy Sunday morning her ship was due to depart from Saint John, New Brunswick. A devout churchgoer, Miss O’K calculated she could attend a service on land before the ship sailed, so she hurriedly threw on some clothes over her pyjamas and set off ashore with just ten Canadian cents for the collection in her purse. Timing was never her strong point; she returned to the dockside to see her ship steaming away, taking all her belongings and documents with it. Forced to borrow money and clothes from the company’s agent and his wife, she waited two long weeks until another White Star Line ship put in and she was able to return to Europe.
Edith also had a British-born friend, Emma May Mathieu, a highly competent nurse. She had married a Belgian army officer, but he died in 1925 and she struggled to provide for their two small boys. The children went to boarding school in Brussels while Emma May worked on the ships as a stewardess, though she was impressively over-qualified. She had passed her midwifery final exams, in French, the day after her husband’s funeral. Shipping lines often signed up qualified nurses as stewardesses, but denied them ‘nursing rank’ to save money. Emma May was highly regarded by ships’ doctors, so often helped with medical emergencies at sea. It was Edith who persuaded Red Star Line to employ Emma May as a stewardess, a role that brought her ample tips from wealthy passengers, which enabled her to buy an apartment in Antwerp, near the docks.
Emma May had a lively sense of humour; she dealt with one pushy Lothario by coyly inviting him to the wrong cabin, where he burst in on a formidably indignant male passenger, who berated him loudly. On another occasion Emma May and her Liverpool-born sidekick Vera were sitting in a bar in Lisbon, next to a bullring. They were chatted up by a handsome young Portuguese matador in full rig, who was smitten by blonde-haired, blue-eyed Vera. He spoke no English, and Vera’s only language was fluent Scouse, but Emma May acted as their interpreter by speaking French. At Vera’s prompting, she taught their new friend a couple of English phrases. After a few drinks, Vera and Emma May realised that their ship was about to leave port. Accompanied by their flamboyantly dressed young admirer, they sprinted to the docks, and the two women ran up the gangway with seconds to spare, to the amusement of passengers, crew and onlookers. As the ropes were cast off and the great ship inched away from its mooring, the matador struck a dramatic pose on the sunlit quayside, with his arms outspread, his cape aflutter, and took a deep breath. ‘I STICK THE BULL RIGHT UP THE ARSE!’ he proclaimed, with a magnificent flourish. This was greeted with a roar of approval and applause from the assembled throng, which the bullfighter acknowledged with an elegant bow, and a proud smile. The chief steward, however, took a dim view, and Vera and Emma May were separated because they were too mischievous to be employed together on the same ship.
Emma May was ‘let go’ from another ship because she became too friendly with the chief officer. ‘It was all that gold braid,’ she explained in mitigation. On arrival in Antwerp, as the chief officer’s outraged wife stormed up the main gangway to settle the matter, woman to woman, Emma May nipped down the aft gangway with her suitcase, straight into a waiting taxi and headed for Brussels to see her sons. Although usually adept at avoiding trouble, Emma May would occasionally fall victim to sob stories and loan some handsome scoundrel her hard-earned money, never to see him again. As Edith recalled:
She would be the confidante of a duchess, or a friend to a steward or stoker … she had the common touch … she was one of the ship’s most valued and respected senior stewardesses. I have rarely met a woman with more ‘guts’ than she had, and you do meet women of great courage when you go to sea. We started a spontaneous friendship on that voyage of the old Zeeland in 1926 – it lasted till 1973, when she died, aged 81.7
Friendships made with other seafarers were intense, based on mutual trust and common experiences, but Edith was aware that it was difficult to sustain any relationship with land-based friends and family when constantly travelling. Some of her regular passengers she might see again on other voyages, but she was frustrated that she never knew what happened to her thousands of migrant charges, and what lives they made for themselves in the New World after she had waved them off.
As for romance, shore-based boyfriends would soon tire of only seeing her once every thirty days, and female crew were barred from fraternising with the officers on board. Edith had a land-based admirer, a Polish Jew who worked in the company’s Antwerp office. He was offered a round trip to New York, and he accepted because he was planning to see Edith on board the Zeeland on the outward journey. Unfortunately, he was confined to his cabin with rampant seasickness, which lasted from the west coast of Ireland till they reached Nantucket. It was evident that their lives were not compatible, though, as Edith fondly recalled he had a gentle old-world courtesy, and was the only man who ever called her ‘a peach’.
One aspect of the seafaring life that especially appealed to the more adventurous women was the opportunity to explore foreign cities. After recovering from the voyage and putting up their tired and aching ‘Cunard feet’, they would venture down the gangway to see a show, or go on a shopping spree. Seafaring women who ate in passenger dining rooms, such as Edith and Hilda James, had to buy their own evening dresses, shoes and accessories, as well as uniforms. Edith loved exploring the many cities where they berthed, and was as fascinated by the low life as the high life to be found on shore. In Liverpool she noted the younger male crew members often headed for the city’s pubs and dance halls, hell-bent on fun. Senior officers gravely warned the younger crewmen ‘to do no more than wave at the “good time” girls on Lime Street’, advice that was often ignored.
In Antwerp Edith frequented the opera, but she also liked to visit seamen’s bars, always accompanied by some of her shipmates. Most of her time ashore was spent away from the beer and brothel brigade, as she was more friendly with passengers than the roistering crew. However, she was familiar with the red-light district of Antwerp, near the station, which sailors called Ruination Street in a variety of languages. Seated outside the doors, elderly women plied their knitting needles – each one was a madam, touting for business. Edith would pass the time of day with them and they were cordial, knowing she was the conductress, the madamica, from one of the big ships.
New York seemed remarkable to Edith, as it did to many foreign seafarers. It was so different from the dingy hinterland of most British ports in the late 1920s. The streets were brilliantly lit, and lined with giant, colourful advertising hoardings; cinemas and dance halls were emblazoned with lights; art deco skyscrapers loomed over canyons of bustling cabs and automobiles. There was the lure of Hollywood movies, the theatres and music halls of Broadway, the glossiness of the magazines, the hum of commerce, the fashions to be seen on the crowded sidewalks. It was all humming with a sense of industry and optimism, jazz and vibrancy.
Edith frequented speakeasies, informal and unlicensed drinking clubs, and she would occasionally go dancing at Roseland with her fellow shipmate George. On one occasion Edith was late meeting him, and he guessed correctly that she had joined the throngs of women queuing to see the mortal remains of film star Rudolph Valentino. Her motive was curiosity; Valentino was possibly the most famous film star in the world and he had died suddenly in the Polyclinic Hospital in New York on 23 August 1926. She recalled: ‘The movie idol looked shrunken, yellow, wizened … Valentino was 31 when he died, and he looked like any Italian waiter.’8 She found the lavish grief surrounding his death incomprehensible, but then she maintained no illusions about the man, rather than the matinée idol. Valentino had been a passenger on one of Edith’s ships, the Lapland, and when they docked at Halifax, he refused to get out of bed to have his papers checked by Canadian immigration authorities as he was an American citizen. Her succinct epitaph was: ‘Valentino thought he was immune. He was not.’
Edith often looked after unaccompanied young travellers, and teenagers could be a particular trial. One thirteen-year-old, who was returning to her boarding school in Britain, was entrusted to her care. She was pretty and a good dancer, and Edith as her chaperone had to deter a couple of prowling male passengers. Nevertheless, Edith became suspicious late one evening – she went to the girl’s cabin after midnight and found it empty. Two hours later the teenager returned to find Edith waiting for her. She had attended a bachelor’s drinks party in his cabin. The man had told the girl to pretend to retire for the night, then to creep along to his cabin when the coast was clear. Fortunately, she hadn’t come to any harm, but Edith tackled the ‘boyfriend’, threatening to tell the captain. The Lothario apologised profusely, muttered something about having young sisters of his own, and kept his distance thereafter.
Edith was occasionally surprised at the behaviour of female passengers when at sea and off the leash, especially when drink was involved. Alcohol inevitably loosened the inhibitions afloat, and during the era of Prohibition in the USA one of the main attractions of travelling on foreign ships was the alcohol freely available once out at sea. One particularly wild sixteen-year-old girl who was travelling alone on the French Line experimented unwisely with the many cocktails available in the bar, and found herself the next day with a cracking hangover and engaged to be married to a Gallic barman whose divorce was pending. Her parents were outraged, and summoned her back to the States in disgrace on Red Star Line, so she was entrusted to Edith’s care. She apparently required constant monitoring, and it was a long and acrimonious voyage for the girl, the stewardess and Edith.
By the late 1920s, ‘conductress’ was not the only role for women seeking sea-going careers beyond the nurturing, caring roles traditionally deemed appropriate for the fairer sex. The boom in transatlantic travel enabled women to take on new roles afloat. An ability to type, coupled with an outgoing personality and organisational abilities, suited women to be stenographers on ocean liners, based in the chief purser’s office, where administrative competence was vital.
Stenographers were increasingly employed as a matter of course on many ocean liners, so that passengers could avail themselves of secretarial and administrative assistance while travelling. Edith Sowerbutts credited Canadian Pacific Lines’ lady supervisor, Mrs Andrews, with the active recruitment of women stenographers for that company’s pursers’ offices in 1925. In fact Cunard had been an early pioneer in this field, rather daringly employing a woman stenographer on the Mauretania before the Great War, a Miss M. Casey, whose experience subsequently secured her a responsible position working for the Canadian government in Saskatchewan. Similarly, a photograph from 1920 of Chief Purser Spedding on the Aquitania shows him seated on deck with his eight male staff. Sitting alongside him is Miss G. Matthews, a young stenographer, wearing a white uniform and stockings, and a cheery smile.9 For a woman with a portable typewriter and an outgoing personality, working on one of the Atlantic Ferryboats could be a decent way of making a living. By the early 1930s, Cunard actively marketed the on-board skills of its lady stenographers to business travellers, so that they could arrange ad hoc administrative and secretarial support throughout the voyage.
Ships certainly provided floating workplaces for women whose skills were transferable from land. But by the late 1920s there were also some women seeking to take on seafaring roles previously exclusive to men. Although such women were rare – and it is significant that they usually succeeded because they came from privileged and influential backgrounds – they captured the public’s imagination and were a frequent source of interest to the press and media.
Victoria Drummond was Britain’s first female seagoing marine engineer. She was well-connected, and had her family’s backing to pursue her ambitions. The daughter of Captain and the Hon. Mrs Drummond of Angus in Scotland, she was the granddaughter of the First Lord Amherst of Hackney, and a goddaughter of Queen Victoria. Victoria was the first woman in Britain to serve a full apprenticeship, undergoing five years’ training at the Caledonian Shipbuilding and Engineering Company in Dundee, under the same conditions as those for boy apprentices, before passing her works test as a journeyman engineer. In 1922 she became the first woman to be admitted to the Institute of Marine Engineers. Despite her commitment, she was failed thirty-one times by the British Board of Trade when sitting her chief engineer exams. Undaunted, she entered the exams run by the Panamanian authorities, as their examiners marked the papers without knowing the candidates’ gender and status. This time Victoria passed straight away; she served her apprenticeship and qualified as a ship’s engineer in 1924.
Victoria made many long-distance return voyages travelling to South America, Australia and the Far East and, in 1926, she obtained her second engineer’s certificate. She was awarded the Lloyd’s Bravery Medal and an MBE for heroic actions during the Second World War when her ship the Bonita was bombed. Her successful career at sea lasted into the 1950s, despite encountering prejudice and sex discrimination.
Another well-connected young woman sought to take on a maritime career previously exclusive to men. The Hon. Elsie MacKay was a thoroughly modern figure, a marine engineer and a qualified pilot. She was the third daughter of Lord Inchcape, the chairman of the steamship line P&O. ‘She is very good-looking and considered one of the best-dressed women and dancers in London society … one of the most remarkable women of the younger generation, although her modesty has prevented the public from hearing much of her exploits,’ enthused the Manchester Guardian.10
After an early career as a film actress, under the name of Poppy Wyndham, Elsie was appointed to oversee the interior design of twelve of P&O’s liners. The vessels were equipped with modern conveniences, such as passenger lifts, electric radiators and air ventilation, but Elsie emphasised the traditional in her interpretation of historic interiors. The Viceroy of India was launched in 1929 and in its first-class smoking room Elsie installed oak panelling and a vast fireplace topped with a royal coat of arms, flanked by stained-glass escutcheons in leaded windows, and wrought-iron gates. Apparently, she had drawn on accounts of James I’s palace at Bromley-by-Bow, borrowing perhaps from an ironic reference to that monarch’s interest in transatlantic travel, coupled with his famous hatred of tobacco. Elsie favoured a variety of historical styles: the music room and the dining room evoked the eighteenth century, while the swimming pool with its classical columns and reliefs recalled the public baths in the recently excavated Italian city of Pompeii.
There was renewed press interest in the possibility of women seafarers taking on the roles of male crew, a consistently newsworthy theme. ‘Woman at the Helm’ in the Westminster Gazette11 conveyed the revolutionary news that when the Soviet ship Tovarisch left Port Talbot docks the previous day, the female third mate, Comrade Diatchenki, was at the helm. Communist Russia was certainly pioneering in this respect: within eighteen months an official communication from Moscow announced that women were to be appointed officers on ships of their mercantile marine. One woman was named as a naval architect in state shipbuilding yards; another was appointed to be captain of a steamer, and was the first woman to command a ship of the Black Sea fleet.12
In Britain, as early as 1925, in an article entitled ‘Women Sailors’, the Daily Chronicle reported that a ‘woman skipper’ had taken her own motor cargo boat down the Thames to the Isle of Wight, and that several foreign ocean-going freighters were known to be commanded by women. In addition, Norway’s merchant navy was known to employ women as on-board wireless operators. It was acknowledged that ‘Little ships seem to have provided most jobs for women up till now. Scores of Thames barges carry the skipper’s wife, a person who is up to any emergency, and as good as most men in the matter of steering, cooking and washing.’ The feature condemned the superstition, still retained by some seamen, that women on board brought bad luck to a ship. It also made the salient point that: ‘There are plenty of women air pilots, and if the female brain is quick enough to carry out that task successfully, it can navigate a ship with ease, even in time of danger.’13
There was much public debate in the 1920s and 1930s about women training to be pilots. Flying as a means of travel was seen as progressive and daring, and women pilots as modern and chic. As early as July 1919, Cunard Line reported approvingly on Mrs Leon Errol, wife of the well-known actor, who had created a new record by flying in an Avro aircraft from Hounslow Aerodrome to Southampton in order to embark on the Aquitania, as she had missed the boat train. Apparently the ship’s passengers gave her an enthusiastic reception when she joined them on board.
The proven ability of women to qualify as private pilots inevitably informed the more trenchant views about whether women could cope with technical jobs at sea. The Evening Standard advocated that women should learn to fly, claiming that they were ‘better pupils than men … the cost is only about £20 all told to become a qualified pilot, and that in comparison with other professional trainings is extremely moderate and short, besides being one of the most enjoyable and health-giving careers which any man or woman can take up.’14 Women who were qualified pilots were also fêted by the press: Miss Lilian Dawson, a fourteen-year-old American girl who sailed to Liverpool on the White Star liner Megantic, claimed to be the youngest qualified air pilot in the world. She was a member of the prestigious Pittsburgh Aero Club, alongside the international aviator Charles Lindbergh, and Lilian had obtained her pilot’s certificate the previous year. However, by law she was not yet allowed to carry passengers in her plane; as the teenage prodigy remarked, in America a girl was not even allowed a driving licence until she was eighteen.15
Flight as a means of passenger transport was already starting to supplant combined train and sea travel across the landmasses of Europe, where ‘short hops’ between cities were now possible. In 1927 White Star Magazine reported on a journey by air from Croydon to Basle and Zurich in one of the big aeroplanes, a twin-engined Handley Page, belonging to Imperial Airways. The writer was impressed by the convenience of being able to get from London to Switzerland within a single day. However, while aeroplanes were gradually becoming a viable means of conveying passengers and their luggage short distances across continental Europe, they could not yet cover the huge expanses of the Atlantic, as it was not possible for them to carry enough fuel for the distance. And while enterprising women might be able to qualify as private pilots, and fly solo across deserts and oceans in small planes, there were still issues about employing women on ships for roles traditionally occupied by men. Various excuses were used; some shipping companies claimed it was not possible to add ‘extra facilities’ (meaning separate bathrooms) for female technicians, even though they were already provided for those women employed in traditional ‘caring’ roles such as stewardesses and nurses.
There were other roles afloat that women coveted, but which were denied them. Semaphore and Morse code were taught in the British Girl Guides from 1910, and there was considerable public interest in the relatively new science of telegraphy and wireless operations. Some women sought training as radio officers and were occasionally employed at coastal stations. However, they were not allowed on board British merchant ships, even during the Great War. Although thirty-eight women had passed their radio examinations by October 1917, it was felt they might ‘go to pieces’ in a crisis.
In 1923 Jessie Kenney, an associate of Emmeline Pankhurst, qualified as a radio officer, having trained at the Rhyl Wireless College. She could not overcome opposition from the Marconi Company, the Board of Trade, or the shipowners to gain work as a radio officer afloat, so she signed on with a shipping company to work as a stewardess, in the hope that she might have the opportunity somehow to prove her skills as a wireless operator once at sea. She found there was no possibility of changing roles, and later recalled that she would often glance wistfully up at the wireless cabin where, in peace and quiet, she could have used the skills she had gained and, in her spare time, continued to study her science in relative peace.
Ironically, competency and increased responsibility were considered in some quarters to be desirable attributes in women afloat in this era. While one transatlantic yachtsman, the maverick Captain Thomas Drake, predicted that ‘The day will come when women will command vessels manned by women,’16 his view remained unorthodox. But some women already working at sea were expanding their knowledge and their skills, in order to become more active crew members. The Board of Trade required every lifeboat or life raft on a liner accommodating forty-one or fewer passengers to have at least two crew members aboard who were qualified to launch it successfully. The awful fate of those aboard the Titanic, many of whom perished because of the failure to fill and successfully launch so many of its lifeboats, was still fresh in many people’s minds, particularly professional seafarers. In 1929 the training necessary to take charge of a lifeboat was opened to women for the first time. Blanche Tucker was employed as the chief cashier in the French restaurant on board the Majestic. She became the first woman to obtain the Board of Trade Lifeboat Certificate. To qualify, as well as proving her theoretical knowledge she undertook a demanding practical examination. Blanche had to prove she could supervise the ‘turning out’, lowering, handling, sailing and pulling away of a ship’s lifeboat containing ten crew members under her command, a considerable display of skill and strength. She recalled:
I was first asked to describe the contents of a lifeboat, and then to box the compass. The next questions were in relation to sailing a boat, and then I was placed in a life-boat with a number of seamen and had to take charge of it while it was lowered to the water 70 feet below. Immediately it become water-borne I had to disengage the ‘falls’ so that it could be got away from the ship’s side with expedition. This done, I just took my place with the other members of the crew and pulled an oar. That was the hardest part of the job.17
The examiner told one of Blanche’s shipmates that he had made the test twice as hard for her as for any male candidates, to avoid allegations of gender favouritism. Blanche did have one advantage: having grown up in the coastal town of Salcombe, in Devon, she had handled boats from a young age, but successfully launching a large and heavy lifeboat from the side of a liner while commanding ten crew members was a challenge. Nevertheless, she passed and when the Majestic next sailed for New York on 7 January 1929, Blanche Tucker was authorised to command Lifeboat 27.
The second seafaring woman to get her ‘lifeboat ticket’ was a Mrs Berry, a stewardess on the Olympic, a company widow whose husband had also worked for White Star. The third was conductress Edith Sowerbutts, who qualified in May 1930. Writing decades later of her decision to undertake this training, resourceful Edith revealed that in her job description, the section headed Lifeboat Drill merely stated that she should ‘assist ladies’, and gave no further instructions. She thought the best assistance she could offer her charges would be the practical ability to launch and command a lifeboat. Edith was tutored by her officer shipmates, and becoming a certificated boatman was a qualification that gave her great satisfaction.
While Edith relished her role and responsibilities as a transatlantic conductress, by the end of the 1920s she had serious financial worries. Most of her passengers were impoverished would-be émigrées, unaccompanied women and children travelling in third class, and consequently she received very few tips on top of her basic salary. Her income was expended on maintaining a modest but comfortable home for her widowed mother and her rather shy sister Dorothy, and she would join them there between voyages. However, Mrs Sowerbutts had been injured in a road accident, and the family were now struggling to pay the medical and household bills. Drastic measures were called for: Dorothy was winkled out of her dead-end job in an office, which paid a pittance, and sent to sea to make some real money. Edith had approached her old friend Mr Gosling, the victualling superintendent at Southampton, requesting any available sea-going vacancy for her sister. Such jobs were at a premium; the company’s widows had first preference, and applicants needed sea-going connections, but Edith had clout. Sheltered Dorothy was bundled into the Southampton-bound train at Waterloo Station with a small trunk, and embarked on her own maiden voyage, as a stewardess for White Star Line. Perhaps surprisingly, she quickly blossomed into the role; no longer a ‘shrinking violet’, she proved to be an immense success in her new life.
The ships on which Dorothy sailed mostly offered leisure cruises, linking the east coast of America with the Mediterranean ports, or the West Indies. The stewardess’s workload was heavy, with long hours, little free time while afloat, and no paid overtime. However, while the salary was low, a competent and pleasant stewardess could bring home a very respectable income if she earned tips, perhaps as much as £500 or £600 a year. Dorothy Sowerbutts found her new life very congenial; she was pretty, and keen on clothes, and she delighted in the affordable fashions available in the competitively priced downtown stores of New York.
Edith suffered personal tragedies too. In her memoirs she alluded briefly but movingly to her intention to marry a man she had met, but he had passed away unexpectedly, leaving her resigned to be single. She was very depressed about her loss, and wrote: ‘in 1929, my spirits were low. The bottom had dropped out of my world. I had just lost a very good friend. My personal sadness, which lasted a long time, had to be very private. I had to carry on with the job regardless.’18 Edith tried to be philosophical about her loss. ‘He died suddenly. Looking back, it would not have worked out. I used to note the fortunate ladies who had so obviously married the men who loved them. I wondered what it might be like, to be so cherished and pampered, mink coats and all. In the end I settled for a modest home of my own, worked for and paid for by all my own efforts.’ Nevertheless, Edith was rarely short of male companions, and recalled in her eighties, ‘I did not do so badly, with my freckled face and my specs.’19
In a career spanning nearly twelve years at sea, Edith took off only two days through seasickness; it was a life that suited her, even though it was physically demanding. Now that the Sowerbutts sisters were both established in decent jobs, they were earning independent salaries and supporting their elderly mother, and, although life was not ideal in many ways, they counted themselves fortunate.
In the case of Edith, it is also apparent that women were gaining new status on board the great ships. Her responsible role as a conductress, the champion and guardian of unaccompanied women and children, occasionally brought her into conflict with some of the crew who looked down on third-class migrants from all over Europe. However, conductresses were the first merchant seawomen to hold officer status, and Edith and her contemporaries often gained respect within the all-male hierarchy on board for their tenacity and determination on behalf of their passengers. Qualifying to ‘man’ a lifeboat on equal terms with any crew member was also a practical demonstration of Edith’s ability and commitment, and gained her grudging respect.
By the end of the 1920s a small number of remarkable and unusual women were choosing maritime careers previously deemed entirely masculine. Those who were successful tended to be well-connected and supported by their families, but nevertheless they were pioneers, demonstrating that women had capabilities and aptitudes largely unsuspected in the halcyon days before the Great War. Victoria Drummond was employed as a fully qualified ship’s engineer, and Elsie McKay was both a marine engineer and interior designer on P&O ships. Various new roles for women afloat included occupations that had previously existed only on shore. Now that transatlantic travel was booming, enterprising women, many of them originally from modest backgrounds, went to sea equipped with a serviceable trade or marketable skill. Ann Runcie the hairdresser found she could make a much better living afloat on the Cunard ships than in her native Liverpool, while her fellow Scouser Hilda James was promoted from being a swimming instructress to a cruise directress. By providing valuable services to the female passengers, seafaring women between the wars benefited greatly from the expansion of the transatlantic travel industry.