On the morning of Sunday, 3 September 1939, wireless sets all over Britain were turned on and tuned in to the BBC Home Service. The nation waited with bated breath while a refined female voice finished dictating a recipe for shepherd’s pie. After a short pause, at eleven fifteen the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, veteran of the Munich Agreement, took to the airwaves. He made the solemn announcement that as the British government had received no response to their final ultimatum to Berlin, the deadline had expired, ‘and consequently, this country is at war with Germany’.
Although the outbreak of hostilities had long been anticipated, the actual declaration of war came as a shock. All over the globe there were people and goods in transit. Previous plans were abandoned, and new ones made, as expatriates of all nations headed for home, or hurried to leave one country for another.
The Queen Mary was at sea when war was declared; it had left Southampton on Wednesday, 30 August 1939, heading for New York via Cherbourg. This was to be its last voyage as a passenger ship for six years, and every berth was taken. Public rooms had been turned into dormitories, and the capacious baggage alcoves on the main decks were converted into berths for six passengers at a time, with curtains hastily installed for privacy. There were Americans aboard who had signed on as crew, working their passage to get back to the USA. They were employed in the kitchens, washing dishes or chopping vegetables. Many of them returned to Europe within a few years to fight in the forces helping to free Europe, travelling once again on the Queen Mary, now a troopship. On board there were a total of 2,331 passengers and a crew of 1,231. Among the stewardesses were Edith Sowerbutts and Nin Kilburn. On the passenger list was the world-renowned theoretical physicist Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa, and the comic movie actor and radio personality Bob Hope, with his wife. When the news reached the ship that Britain had declared war on Germany, Bob Hope performed a special show for the passengers, singing his signature tune, ‘Thanks for the Memory’ with rewritten lyrics.
The same day that war was declared, the first British merchant seamen and women were killed in the new conflict. At 7.45 p.m., less than nine hours after Chamberlain’s broadcast, a German submarine torpedoed a British-owned Donaldson Line ship, the Athenia, 200 miles off the northwest coast of Ireland, before surfacing to rake the vessel with gunfire. Three-quarters of the passengers on board were women and children, many of them American. The Athenia sank and 118 died, including five stewardesses and fourteen male crew members. The attack on the Athenia was in direct contravention of the Anglo-German Agreement of 1935 restricting submarine warfare.
When the Queen Mary docked in New York on 4 September 1939 the ship was ordered to remain in port alongside the Normandie until further notice. After the passengers left, Edith and her colleagues hurriedly disembarked; they were being sent home immediately on another ship. A team of painters was already at work on the Queen Mary, painting its hull battleship grey. The Mary was left with a skeleton workforce to sail the ship back to Britain at a later date. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew were bussed downtown to join the Georgic, which was already loaded with passengers. ‘This is the end of our lives, girls,’1 predicted Nin Kilburn, the chief stewardess, anticipating unemployment (though in fact she was called back to serve on the Franconia, the ship that was to take Churchill to Yalta at the end of the war).
The Georgic had also been camouflaged with grey paint, and seemed small, cramped and shoddy after the vast and luxurious Queen Mary. Decks A and B were allocated to passengers, while female Cunard crew were housed on C and D decks, in tourist-class accommodation. Edith shared a four-berth cabin with just one other stewardess, a tippler who dosed her morning tea liberally with whisky. Edith objected to the fumes in an enclosed space at such an early hour. The ship zigzagged alone across the Atlantic, with no protecting convoy, a long and hazardous voyage, with the constant menace from U-boats. Lifeboat drills were frequent, and life jackets and gas masks were carried at all times, so great was the threat of imminent attack. Edith also took with her everywhere her ‘ditty-bag’ – a fabric carry-all containing whisky, bandages, cotton wool, safety pins, aspirins, ‘plus the very necessary items for female hygiene. One never knew if all the excitement or stress might precipitate “the curse”. Some among us were quickly inconvenienced by periods arriving too soon, doubtless due to the general upheaval of hurriedly changing ships, plus apprehension of war. Not me.’2
Edith also kept a tight grip on her money, the generous tips that she had garnered from her last Queen Mary voyage, in a purse safely secured to her suspender belt, along with a cherished and unopened bottle of perfume, a gift from an American passenger. This perfume was the last she would own for a number of years, and was called Froufrou of Gardenia, a floral scent she always associated with sailing days on the glamorous ocean liners.
The flight of the Georgic was a blend of adrenalin and boredom, as the seafaring professionals were unaccustomed to spending free time on board a ship. The refugee stewardesses had no specific duties, given that the ship already carried a full complement of staff, but out of habit and with few alternative clothes, they wore their uniforms every day, adorned with any jewellery they possessed, in case the ship was torpedoed. Mrs Kilburn, suddenly relieved of her normal working duties, learned to play bridge, and it became her abiding passion. She developed into an accomplished and formidable bridge player, and the game occupied her throughout her retirement, providing her with a circle of friends well into old age (she died at eighty-four). Edith also played cards with the men from the Queen Mary, the waiters, stewards and bellhops, to pass the time when they were not on submarine watch on deck. Certain somehow that there wasn’t a ‘torpedo with my name on it’, Edith also took lengthy, luxurious early morning baths – this was reputedly a favourite time of day for submarine attacks, so it was a risk.
The possibility of a watery grave seemed very real to most people aboard. The church service held on Sunday morning was uncharacteristically well-attended, and the congregation sang ‘Nearer my God to Thee’, thought to have been the last hymn played by the Titanic’s orchestra in 1912 as that ship went down. The Cunard stewardesses clubbed together to buy a small bottle of whisky, costing six shillings, from the ship’s bar, to be brought with them ‘for medicinal purposes’, if they had to take to the lifeboats. However, every evening, as darkness fell, bringing relative safety, the temptation to mark surviving another nerve-jangling day afloat proved too strong, and they would share out the whisky as a tipple to aid morale. Consequently, they would have to buy a replacement bottle the following morning.
The tension increased as the Georgic approached the Irish coast, favourite haunt of U-boats in the Great War. At night the ship was completely dark and no one was allowed to smoke on the outside decks. The ship finally sailed up the Thames to the London docks. The buildings along the shore were blacked out, a contrast with their last sight of land – vibrant, brilliantly lit New York. A disembodied voice came from a small craft floating below on the Thames: a naval officer speaking through a megaphone hailed them through the murk. ‘Who are you?’ ‘Georgic, from New York,’ came the reply from the bridge. The ship docked, and the relieved Cunard staff and crew felt they deserved a celebratory drink before they disembarked. A waiter volunteered to go landside and bring back supplies. He returned with just three bottles of light ale; all he could find. Edith and the stewardesses realised they really were at war, and the next morning they scattered to their homes, in London, Edinburgh, Southampton and Liverpool, deflated and anxious. ‘I admit to feeling slightly low spirited as the taxi deposited me at my garden gate one grey day late in September 1939. For over 2 years I had been a member of the crew of the liner Queen Mary. I now had the feeling that my life would never be the same again. It was not.’3
Both Edith and her sister Dorothy, who had been on the Britannic, managed to get home to the house they shared with their mother. They were no longer required as stewardesses, because their ships had been requisitioned for war service, so they reluctantly took clerical jobs on land. Edith discovered that her membership of the National Union of Seamen entitled her to ‘danger money’ for her hazardous return journey across the Atlantic in wartime. She received an extra sixteen shillings, the equivalent of the Sowerbutts family’s weekly grocery bill.
Meanwhile Edith’s former ship, the Queen Mary, stripped down, armed, camouflaged and fast enough to outrun submarines, became known as the Grey Ghost, shipping Allied troops to theatres of war all over Europe and the Middle East. Hitler offered a bounty of $250,000 and the Iron Cross to any U-boat commander able to sink it, but without success, though the Queen Mary had a particularly narrow escape in 1942. A Nazi radio station erroneously announced that the ship, packed with US troops, had been sunk off the coast of Brazil, but in fact the plot had been foiled. A young American diplomat based in Rio de Janeiro, John Hubner, had discovered that a suspiciously large radio transmitter had been imported to Brazil by the German firm Siemens and Company, and was being held for delivery. Hubner persuaded the Brazilian police to mount twenty-four-hour surveillance on the Siemens store. A German arrived to pick up the transmitter, was arrested and interrogated. He gave up the names of his associates, and the location of a Nazi radio station in the hills above Rio de Janeiro. Hubner and the police rounded up the gang, and the radio station outside Rio was also raided, just as it was transmitting a message to Nazi submarines regarding the sailing of the Queen Mary, which had put in at Rio for fuel and supplies. The ship was far too big to hide, and German spies had learned its top-secret sailing time and its route and planned to transmit this to summon lurking U-boats. The discovery of the plot and the seizure of the radio station led to an immediate change of plan for the Queen Mary and it escaped before the U-boats could target the ship, but so certain was Berlin their attack would be successful that it prematurely announced the sinking. The former Queen Mary served for the duration of the war and would prove decisive during the D-Day invasion. Together with the other Cunard flagship, the Queen Elizabeth, the Mary transported more than a million troops as part of the war effort.
The Queen Elizabeth’s top-secret flight to America was one of the most audacious escapes of the conflict. The huge new Cunarder had still been under construction on the Clyde in 1939 when war was declared, and it was essential it was taken to America for completion and to escape possible damage from German bombers. The Elizabeth was hurriedly given a rudimentary fit-out, and painted grey, and by spring of 1940 it was generally anticipated that at some point it would undergo initial sea trials, but details were intentionally kept vague. On 3 March 1940 Hugh McAllister, the husband of Cunard’s swimming star Hilda James, was on board the Queen Elizabeth, testing the newly installed radio equipment. He was puzzled to hear the engines were running, and went out on deck, only to discover that the ship was heading towards the sea. No warning had been given; the captain and the senior officers had received top-secret instructions and had sailed, regardless of the numerous workmen still on board. Even the captain had been left in the dark about the ship’s true destination: he believed they were merely heading round the British mainland to Southampton, but once they had gained the open sea and he opened the second set of sealed instructions, he discovered they were to head to New York immediately, at full speed, in order to outrun any U-boats. Hugh McAllister therefore sailed to America with the Queen Elizabeth; he had no choice. His work now was to complete the radio fitting aboard the ship in New York, and he was not able to return to Britain for nine months.
For many female seafarers, their chances of working at sea shrank rapidly during the early days of the Second World War. Passenger ships were requisitioned for troop transport, and hardly any civilians now chose to travel. But some passenger traffic persisted despite the hostilities, and brave seafaring women were willing to run the risks of being torpedoed or drowned. Maida Nixson, an English-born former journalist and writer who had fallen on hard times financially, had applied to become a stewardess in 1937. This last throw of the dice was a desperate attempt to avoid being forced by a well-meaning but domineering friend to accept a grim job as the resident matron of a hostel for factory girls in Hoxton. Her ‘maiden voyage’ as a rookie stewardess, sailing from London to Argentina, had engendered in her a love for her new career: ‘Someone had told me that after two trips, sea-life exerts so powerful a magnetism that one can never leave it and be content. Well, one had been strong enough for me. That drop of sea water was fizzing in my veins. I was going back to the sea.’4 Maida wanted to work as a stewardess despite the hostilities and restrictions of wartime. She was disappointed at not being recruited to join the crew of a British-owned Blue Star Line passenger vessel bearing interned Italians and Germans, who were being taken to Canada. Within weeks she learned that the ship, the Arandora Star, had been torpedoed by a U-boat in the Atlantic on 2 July 1940; 868 people survived but 865 had died. However, Maida managed to get a job in 1940, escorting women and children evacuees, sailing from London to New Zealand, to escape the war.
Maida’s passenger ship was to sail across the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, then across the Pacific. Civilian ships sailed in convoys with a naval escort, zigzagging across the oceans in order to deter submarine attacks. The accompanying naval vessels were equipped with depth-charges to destroy enemy submarines once detected, but often the first indication of one in the vicinity was a torpedo strike on one of the convoy. So dangerous and omnipresent was the threat from U-boats that mothers were told never to leave their children below decks in case of a sudden torpedo attack. Passengers had to carry their life jackets wherever they went on board, and staff had to wear them at all times. For stewardesses it was difficult to make beds and perform their other duties as life jackets were unwieldly garments reaching from neck to hips, restricting bending. Boat drills were frequent; it was vital that all on board knew how to escape from the ship in lifeboats in case of attack. By the time they reached the Panama Canal, the radio news carried nightly stories about the London Blitz.
One of Maida’s fellow stewardesses on this voyage was called Nancy Bell, and they became good friends. There were many children, both accompanied and unaccompanied, on the ship and constant vigilance was essential; there were so many dangers for mobile, fearless youngsters. One juvenile, Jimmy, travelling with his absent-minded mother, was spotted one afternoon on the main deck, standing on the ship’s rail, balancing on the balls of his feet as the ship rolled and pitched across the ocean. Onlookers froze in horror; Nancy Bell had the presence of mind to creep forward towards him. She grabbed Jimmy, catching him just as he let go of the funnel-stay, pulling him to the deck. Jimmy protested vociferously; Nancy handed him over to his chastened mother, then went to Maida’s cabin to have hysterics and a tot of Scotch. As Maida observed, ‘She was one of those people who rise to the occasion and collapse at the proper time, after the event.’5
On their return journey the Pacific was appropriately peaceful, but once through the Panama Canal they turned towards the war zone of the North Atlantic. From Nova Scotia they set out as part of a convoy, escorted by the armed cruiser Jervis Bay. On the afternoon of 5 November 1940, Maida and Nancy were standing at the rail looking at the convoy, when Nancy had a premonition that they were about to face a terrifying ordeal. Her occasional claims to second sight were given credence by many of the crew, who tended to be superstitious, and she had startled and impressed Maida by predicting ‘a great slaughter from the skies’ a day or two before the Blitz started. The conversation turned to disaster preparations; a fellow stewardess, Barbara, announced she planned to change into trousers if the ship was torpedoed, as skirts would not be ‘decent’ if they had to climb down ropes or jump into the sea. Nancy pointed out that jumping into water often wrenched off trousers, and that if Barbara feared exposure, she would have to stay bobbing about in the water, rather than risk the shame of being rescued half-naked. Resourceful Nancy planned to be wearing her bathing suit and her furs if she abandoned ship.
At 5 p.m. the same day, the convoy was attacked by a German raider, the Admiral Scheer, and the Jervis Bay attempted to protect the Allied vessels by engaging with the enemy in order to give the convoy time to scatter. Maida, Nancy and the passengers watched in horror from the deck. Outgunned, the Jervis Bay was quickly consumed by fire and sank, still firing salvoes as it went down. The Admiral Scheer circled the remaining unprotected ships, and attacked four of them, sinking three. Then it approached Maida and Nancy’s ship. Two mighty crashes rocked their vessel. A sheet of flame rose from the stern, and they assumed they had been hit. In fact, the chief gunner had jettisoned the anti-submarine depths charges in the bows to minimise the risk of damage, and one had exploded spectacularly but harmlessly underwater. The Germans assumed they had fatally hit the ship, and went in search of other prey, allowing Maida’s captain valuable time to take evasive action.
The crew and gunners remained at battle stations, while passengers and stewardesses sheltered in the dim and packed alleyway just below the main deck, wearing their life jackets and clutching their ‘shipwreck’ bags, awaiting instructions to take to the lifeboats. The stewardesses removed their distinctive white headscarves to make them less visible as targets, because the Germans had been known to machine-gun survivors in boats or in the water. A tense wait ensued, as the ship dodged and weaved, engines straining, trying to stay out of the range of the Admiral Scheer, which continued to send shells thundering in their direction as darkness fell. A moment’s light relief was provided by the youngest stewardess, ‘Jock’ McCrae, describing their assailant as a ‘packet bottleship’, a spoonerism that provoked brittle laughter. To keep their spirits up, they sang rousing choruses of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, competing with the gradually receding sounds of shells. Almost incredibly, it appeared they had managed to escape. After a tense and largely sleepless night, dawn broke and they were alone on the ocean, as the rest of the convoy had followed orders and scattered. As a single unescorted ship, they were now in dire peril from German raiders, and there was the ever-present menace of submarines. No wireless messages could be transmitted in case they were picked up by the enemy, giving away the ship’s position. Later, Maida learned that the Germans had officially announced the sinking of her ship, as part of the havoc they had wreaked on the convoy.
For a fortnight, the ship travelled alone across the Atlantic, ‘as solitary as the Ark’ in Maida’s words, heading for Britain. Those on board kept busy with a regime of frenzied cleaning and polishing. By a miracle, they were not detected by the enemy; the ship crept into Liverpool Bay just as a severe nighttime blitz started, so they headed for Milford Haven, only to find it also under aerial bombardment from the Luftwaffe. Inching into Barry Docks, they saw that the harbour was littered with floating mines, so they headed across the Bristol Channel and finally found sanctuary in Avonmouth. Passengers and cargo were unloaded safely; they had had an extraordinary journey, from New Zealand to Somerset, and a miraculous escape.
By the summer of 1940 German forces had swept through Europe and France had fallen. In the skies, the Battle of Britain raged as Allied planes desperately fought the German Luftwaffe for air supremacy. U-boat bases were established at Atlantic ports much nearer to the transatlantic shipping routes, and submarines went hunting Allied shipping, to devastating effect.
The possible invasion of Britain by German forces seemed an imminent threat, and many families feared for their children, especially as nightly aerial bombing increased over the major cities. Some who could afford it, such as Lady Diana Cooper and Vera Brittain, sent their children abroad to friends or relatives, but for most this was not an option. In June 1940 the British government founded the Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB), evacuating children to the relative safety of the British dominions, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It was a popular scheme: within a week of its launch more than 210,000 applications were received for just 20,000 places. Disadvantaged families from the areas deemed most at risk were prioritised. Children, known as called ‘seavacs’, would be looked after during voyages by volunteer adult escorts, and families clamoured to get their children sent to safety, though with mixed feelings. One teacher commented sadly, ‘We are sending away our crown jewels’, and it was common to see files of small children trudging along railway platforms, clutching their few personal belongings, gas masks slung over their shoulders.
In June 1940, CORB employed Edith Sowerbutts. An able and competent administrator now in her late forties, with a genuine commitment to welfare, Edith was perfect for the job. She knew the North Atlantic merchant fleet and its ships, she had worked in emigration offices, and she was familiar with Canada, America and Australia. Her role was to find suitable men and women to act as escorts to the thousands of children to be despatched overseas. London was badly bombed day and night at this time, but the CORB team, housed in Thomas Cook’s offices near Piccadilly, worked on processing applications from thousands of volunteers, surrounded by teetering stacks of files and paperwork.
Crossing the Atlantic was not without risks, even for juvenile civilians. On 29 August 1940 the Volendam left Liverpool carrying 320 children under the CORB scheme. On its second day out it was torpedoed seventy miles off the Donegal coast of Ireland. They were lucky; the ship was still close to land, it was a calm night and the ship’s lifeboats were safely deployed, so all the children survived.
However, another ship, the City of Benares was not so fortunate. Though usually based in London, in September 1940 Edith travelled to Liverpool to oversee the embarkation of ninety CORB children on a passenger ship bound for Canada. Edith arrived in Liverpool and checked in to the Adelphi Hotel in time to avoid an air raid. She always travelled light – just a suit, coat, spare underwear, nightdress and umbrella. Her family had no idea of her whereabouts or her job as she had signed the Official Secrets Act. Edith did not even know the name of the ship going to Canada, but she had an identifying code number for it. She carried typed details of the ninety children due to embark, hidden underneath some knitting in a stout paper carrier bag from a department store. Her homely disguise belied her official and highly confidential mission, though she also thought it unlikely she would ever be mistaken for a beautiful spy.
Edith met the escorts and their excited young charges at Fazakerley Cottage Homes to go through the formalities and have final medical checks. All the children had been provided with warm woollen winter clothes for the voyage by Marks and Spencer, as part of their support for the war effort. One five-year-old, Leonard Grimmond, was so excited that he was sick down Edith’s coat, but she forgave him – he was the youngest of five siblings, and their family had been bombed out in London. The children were to join the City of Benares, a ship that was now under the control of Cunard White Star Line. Edith also met an old friend, Mrs Whatmore, former senior bath attendant on the Queen Mary, who was in charge of linen for the voyage. The two former colleagues had lunch on board the ship with the evacuees before it departed. Edith described the joyous mood:
It was like a school outing, only lots better – there was a carnival atmosphere. The children were so thrilled, and delighted with the varied menu in the big dining saloon. We stayed on board all afternoon, and were able to watch the lifeboat drill. The children, wearing lifebelts, were thoroughly instructed in all procedures and assisted in and out of the lifeboats by Lascar seamen and Goanese stewards. The scene is etched in my memory.6
The City of Benares left Liverpool on 13 September under the command of Captain Nicholl, as part of an escorted convoy of nineteen ships bound for Canada. Six hundred miles out to sea, the escort ships departed to meet another convoy heading for Europe. The City of Benares was sailing in darkness when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat on 17 September 1940. It was 10 p.m., heavy seas were running, and it was bitterly cold. The ship went down in twenty minutes. Many children were immediately drowned; others found themselves adrift in the dark in partially swamped lifeboats manned by distraught, sodden and scared strangers. Those who had managed to get into boats mostly succumbed overnight to exposure, as they were wearing nothing more than thin nightclothes.
Edith remained unaware of the tragedy for days. She was in Glasgow with another group of evacuees when she was unexpectedly visited by her boss, Geoffrey Shakespeare. He broke the news that the City of Benares had been sunk, but Edith was sworn to secrecy until each and every bereaved family had been visited and told of its loss. Out of ninety CORB children, only three girls and three boys had then been rescued. Edith and Mr Shakespeare were taken out to a destroyer at Gourock to meet one of the adult survivors, and the three boys; the three girls had already been taken to hospital with an escort, Mrs Lilian Rose Towns, a schoolteacher. Edith was haunted by the sight of the shocked and dazed faces of the survivors, walking as though in a trance.
Edith was appalled to think that only six of ‘her’ CORB children had survived, but eight days after the sinking, another lifeboat was sighted drifting on the ocean by a Sunderland flying boat. Piano teacher Mary Cornish and Father Roderic Sullivan, a Catholic priest, were rescued, with six more boys. Mary Cornish was awarded the OBE for her outstanding heroism. It was some small solace for Edith to discover that two siblings who she had particularly liked, Bessie and Louis Walder, fifteen and ten years old, had both survived. Louis was in one boat, while his sister managed to cling to an upturned lifeboat until rescued. Altogether 294 lives were lost, including 81 children. Among them were Michael Brooker and Patricia Allan, who had survived the sinking of the Volendam weeks before. While Edith gathered together the juvenile survivors, worried parents who had expected to hear that the ship had arrived safely in Canada besieged the organisation. Nothing could be said publicly until each bereaved family had been personally visited and informed of their losses. Edith particularly remembered a little girl from Liverpool, Aileen Murphy, whose father had put her on the ship himself – he was in an RNVR uniform. He phoned Edith seeking news, but she was sworn to secrecy, even though she knew Aileen was not among the few survivors.
Edith was now faced with the harrowing business of reuniting traumatised survivors with their families. Two youngsters, Rex Thorne, aged thirteen, and Jack Keeley, eight, had each lost a sister in the disaster. Edith accompanied them on the sleeper train back to London. She recalled: ‘they talked together like two little old men, asking each other, ‘“When did you last see your sister?”’7
When the news of the catastrophe broke, so great was the public horror that the CORB evacuation initiative was abandoned. Questions were asked about why the protective escort did not stay with the Children’s Ship, when U-boats were known to be operating beyond the west coast of Ireland. Families decided they would rather risk the bombs together than send their children across the oceans alone to face such hazards. All 600 children on board ships about to sail were returned to their homes. CORB was largely wound up; Edith left the organisation in November 1940 and became involved in welfare work in London. Based in Hampstead in north London, she was put in charge of requisitioning empty buildings to rehouse people who had been bombed out elsewhere.
Towards the end of the Second World War, Edith was invited to Liverpool by Miss Prescott, the lady superintendent for Cunard. Miss Prescott wanted to discuss her ambitions for re-staffing Cunard passenger ships with female staff when peace returned. Many experienced stewardesses had been hurriedly laid off when the war started, and inevitably they had found new careers ashore, which they were now reluctant to leave in order to resume a life afloat. Edith was one of them; after welfare work she had moved to personnel work, and was now living with her ailing sister. Miss Prescott had hoped she could persuade Edith to return to Cunard as a senior stewardess on a prestigious vessel, but Edith declined. She never forgot her involvement in the City of Benares tragedy, and did not resume her career at sea, even after peace was restored.
The story of the sinking of the City of Benares reverberated round the world and caused international outrage. The tragedy had a profound effect on Austrian-born Hedy Lamarr, who had escaped an unhappy marriage and the growing political menace of National Socialism in 1937 by crossing the Atlantic on the Normandie. In the process she reinvented herself as a glamorous Hollywood film star. Hedy’s family were Jewish, and by autumn 1940 her widowed mother, Trude Kiesler, who had also left Austria to escape the Nazis, was becalmed in London, hoping to get a visa for America and passage on a liner to join her daughter. The sinking of the City of Benares, and the possibility that other passenger ships could meet the same fate, galvanised the inventor in Hedy. She collaborated with a friend and neighbour, the Hollywood-based composer George Antheil. They both had personal incentives to assist the Allied war effort: Hedy wanted to ensure her mother’s safe passage to the States, while George was mourning his brother Henry, a diplomatic courier, who had died on 14 June 1940, when his plane was shot down over the Baltic Sea.
Their joint invention was a blend of Hedy’s inspiration and George’s development. They wanted to invent an improved radio-controlled torpedo that could be used by Allied forces to attack German submarines. Hedy and George invented a secret method of avoiding jamming, which might interfere with their torpedo and send it off course. By manipulating radio frequencies at irregular intervals between transmission and reception, their system made a secure communications channel which it was impossible for outside agencies to disrupt. George and Hedy patented the invention in 1941 and provided the details to the US Navy, but at the time it was shelved as having no practical application. Meanwhile Hedy joined the war effort, touring the States and raising $25 million in sales of War Bonds (worth some $343 million today). Her mother reached the USA safely, and eventually joined her in California
In truth, Hedy and George’s invention was far in advance of its time, but during the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s their system was used on US Navy ships. It subsequently had many military applications, and what became known as ‘spread spectrum’ technology later revolutionised the digital communications explosion, as it was the basis of fax machines, cellphone technology and other wireless operations. It was not until 1997 that Lamarr and Antheil’s extraordinary invention received official recognition, when they jointly won the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award. In the same year, Hedy was the first female recipient of the BULBIE Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, given to lifelong inventors, and known as the the equivalent of the Oscars for inventors.
Crossing the Atlantic on a blacked-out Allied ship during the Second World War was a fraught and nerve-racking experience because of the ever-present threat of submarines and gun attacks from German ships. For civilians who had inadvertently found themselves on the wrong continent it was also extremely difficult to obtain a ticket, and any voyage involved circuitous and lengthy diversions, which added to the heightened sense of combined tension and frustration recorded by a number of female travellers.
After spending nearly twenty years living abroad, writer and activist Nancy Cunard, the great-granddaughter of the shipping line’s founder, was travelling round South America when France fell to Germany in 1940. Restless and troubled, and estranged from her family, she decided to return to embattled London, where she had spent her teenage years. She undertook a succession of journeys, ‘hopping’ from Chile via Mexico to the West Indies, on to Cuba, north to New York and finally got a berth on a ship going to Glasgow. Her arduous travels took almost a year, and she didn’t arrive back in London until 23 August 1941.
As usual, Nancy wrote obsessively while travelling, recounting the dreadful conditions in which she had seen African-American workers living, the Civil War in Spain and the Spanish refugees confined in French concentration camps. Human rights were her great passion. On arrival in New York from Cuba on the Marqués de Comillas, she could not go ashore because she did not have an American in-transit visa, but she was allowed on to Ellis Island at her own request, despite the justice department forbidding her from landing on American soil. There she spent five days mustering her influential American friends and chivvying immigration officials into providing asylum for a Chinese author who had been facing deportation back to Chiang Kai-shek’s China, where he faced certain death. Her appeal was successful, and he was allowed to stay in the States. The authorities were not sorry to see her go; Nancy’s confrontational championing of black rights in the 1930s, from her flagrant inter-racial relationship with African-American pianist Henry Crowder to her fund-raising in defence of the Scottsboro Boys – nine African-American teenage boys who had been falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931 – had left her persona non grata, despite her illustrious surname.
The British ship sailing from New York to Glasgow via Newfoundland on which Nancy finally obtained a passage was part of a convoy of vessels taking passengers, food and supplies to Britain. She was unaware their flotilla was to be joined by the HMS Prince of Wales, carrying Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He had recently met President Roosevelt off the coast of Newfoundland, and his presence had to be kept secret from the Germans at all costs. It was difficult to ascertain how many ships were in the convoy but numbers varied between forty-four and seventy-two.
Nancy kept a vivid journal of the transatlantic voyage, which lasted from 31 July to 21 August 1941. Wartime restrictions were imposed; no smoking was allowed on deck, which Nancy found irksome, as she smoked constantly. The portholes were screwed shut and there were blackout shutters covering every window, in case of submarines, battleships or planes. The passengers learned their lifeboat drills, and the radio news featured carefully edited tales of the Blitz, and accounts of British heroism. On 15 August she saw on the starboard side:
a monumental battleship with a full and stately flurry of spray at her prow, her guns pointing skyward, a great bridge between her two funnels. It is Churchill, returning from his talk with Roosevelt on the Prince of Wales, six or seven cruisers accompanying them. This majesty passes us quickly, crosses in/out and comes by the right and the ship’s other side – to see and be seen. Churchill’s showmanship – a delight to us all.8
The following night there were air raids and surface attacks, followed by anti-aircraft fire. The convoy reached Iceland, and the onward journey to Scotland was hazardous with icebergs and mines, which were detonated by an escorting vessel. The seas were rough and there was a great deal of seasickness and illness on board. On arrival in Glasgow, she wrote: ‘How modest and even almost unimpressed are those who have charge of this great procession over the ocean … Yes, remarkable … the Might of Britain. Inspiring.’9 Nancy returned to London by train and stayed there for the next three years, dodging the bombs and living in straitened circumstances in bedsits, just a few minutes’ walk from her estranged mother, who held court in a grandly furnished but cramped suite on the seventh floor of the Dorchester Hotel.
There were many tales of individual bravery by women on the Atlantic during the Second World War. Victoria Drummond, the first woman to qualify as a marine engineer in the 1920s, had given up her job ashore and joined the war effort, becoming a second engineer in the Women’s Mercantile Naval Reserve, and assisted with the evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940. According to the Evening Standard, Councillor William Lockyer, the Mayor of Lambeth, who was a friend of the family, said: ‘She has been bombed during her voyages, but all she says about it is “They are such bad shots.” Once a submarine attacked her ship with torpedoes, but missed.’10
Victoria Drummond was the second engineer and the only woman aboard the cargo ship Bonita when the ship was attacked mid-Atlantic by a German plane. They were 400 miles from land. The first salvo from the bomber threw Victoria against the levers on the control platform in the engine room, and nearly stunned her. When the stokehold and engine room staff had done all they could to get an extra knot or two out of the ship, she ordered them above, giving them a chance of survival while she stayed alone below, where she had little hope of escape. Each time the plane bore down on the ship to drop its bombs and strafe the decks with bullets, the captain would take evasive action, a finely judged manoeuvre requiring a surge of extra power from the engine room. With one hand holding down the throttle control, while the enemy plane roared overhead, Victoria coaxed the engines from nine to an unprecedented twelve and a half knots, just enough to avoid a direct hit. The attack continued for thirty-five minutes, and eventually the frustrated enemy pilot, short on fuel, was forced to retire. One of Victoria’s fellow officer colleagues left a vivid account of the conditions in the engine room during the bombardment:
It must have been hell down there. Two cast iron pipes were fractured, electric wires parted, tubes broken, and joints started, but her iron body and mighty heart stood it. The main injection pipe just above her head had started a joint and scalding steam whizzed past her head. With anyone less skilled down there that pipe would have burst under the extra pressure, but she nursed it through the explosion of each salvo, easing down when she judged from the nearness of the plane’s engines that the bombs were about to fall, holding on for all she was worth to a stanchion as they burst and then opening up the steam again. If the pipe had gone, we would have stopped and it would have been all up. By getting the speed it gave the helm a chance to move the clumsy hulk, and literally every second mattered in the swing.
I saw her once during the action when I had to dodge along to the W.T. room and looked down the skylight, hoping to be able to shout a few words of cheer to her. She was standing on the control platform, one long arm stretched above her head and her hand holding down the spoke of the throttle control as if trying by her touch to urge another pound of steam through the straining pipes. Her face, as expressionless as the bulkhead behind her, and as ghastly white in colour, was turned up towards the sunlight, but she didn’t see me. From the top of her forehead down her face, completely closing one eye, trickled a wide black streak of fuel oil from a strained joint. That alone must have been agony. She had jammed her ears at first with oily waste to deaden the concussion and then tore it out again, for fear she would not hear some vital order from the bridge – not knowing that all connection with the bridge was cut. She was about all in at the end, but within an hour was full of beans and larking about and picking up spent bullets and splinters. All round her, by the way, the platform was littered with bullets that came down from the skylight.11
Victoria Drummond was commended for her bravery, which on 9 July 1941 the London Gazette recorded ‘was an inspiration in the ship’s company, and her devotion to duty prevented more serious damage to the vessel’. Edith Sowerbutts had long followed Victoria’s pioneering career, and later wrote in her characteristic forthright manner: ‘Her record is fantastic – forty years at sea; she was made an MBE in the Second World War. Yet, the young engineers who served in my ships opined that she was “crackers” – had she joined us, she would have been in for a rough time.’12
Victoria Drummond was a remarkable seafaring woman doing a job otherwise exclusively occupied by men, but there were many other wartime acts of bravery among women who found themselves working at sea on more equal terms. Medical Officer Dr Adeline Nancy Miller was on the armed troopship Britannia, owned by Anchor Line of Glasgow, when it was shelled by a German raider, the Thor, on 25 March 1941 just off the west coast of Africa. As the Britannia was losing speed, the captain gave orders to abandon ship, and a message to this effect was conveyed to their attacker. But the Thor continued to bombard the Britannia, holing many of the lifeboats. As the Britannia began to sink, the German raider sailed away. Dr Miller calmly attended to the wounded and the dying. She managed to save many lives, and the survivors took to the remaining lifeboats. One single lifeboat certified to hold fifty-eight people contained eighty-four, and it took twenty-two days before they made landfall. The lifeboat in which Dr Miller spent five and a half days, caring for the sick and wounded, was picked up by a Spanish cargo steamer, the Bachi. By a coincidence the Bachi was then intercepted by the Cicilia, the ship on which Dr Miller’s father Thomas was employed as ship’s surgeon. He had heard the radio reports of the sinking of the Britannia nearly a week before and had believed his daughter was dead. His relief when Adeline climbed on board and embraced him was profound. She was awarded the Lloyd’s Medal and the MBE.
The steely determination of the merchant fleet during six long years of war made Fortress Britain a reality, and while passenger travel across the Atlantic was vastly reduced, some civilians did still make the crossing, in convoys, sometimes using ships belonging to neutral countries. A small number of British seafaring women also worked on the ships in various capacities on a voluntary basis, and their hazardous role was commended by influential journalist Hannen Swaffer. He cited an indignant forty-seven-year-old stewardess called Margaret Thomas, from Edmonton:
Does nobody realise that stewardesses and ships’ nurses are still regularly putting to sea, sharing the ever-present dangers equally with the men, and without the physique of the men with which to meet those dangers? Yet so many stewardesses have volunteered for active service that we have to wait months for a ship. And we know what we are up against, when we have been once. But no mention is ever made of the women in the Merchant Service, still carrying on in the face of appalling danger, and under intense nervous strain. It is high time that somebody rectified that omission, and that everyone realised that British women are still sailing the seas under the ‘Red Duster’.13
The majority of stewardesses were laid off, and many of them – such as Dorothy Scobie – joined the WRNS, the Women’s Royal Naval Service, along with women who had no previous maritime experience. The WRNS had been disbanded after the end of the Great War, but was now reactivated by the Admiralty. Its motto had been ‘Never at Sea’, a phrase open to two interpretations: while it implied they were resourceful and able, it was also accurate because initially they were only deployed on land, in support roles. A BBC Radio broadcast by the Duchess of Kent in January 1941 encouraged women to join the WRNS as cooks, waitresses, clerks, bookkeepers and typists. There were also more senior roles in ciphering, signalling and wireless telegraphy, and it was stressed that every job taken by a woman enabled a male naval officer to be released for more active duties with the fleet. The appeal was successful and women joined the WRNS for training of all kinds, eventually taking on more than 200 roles. They were not allowed to work on ships in active combat zones, though a number of them did operate small harbour launches and tugs, or acted as pilots for large vessels. Their contribution to the war effort was graphically brought to public notice when twenty-two WRNS personnel and one nursing sister were drowned in August 1941. The SS Aguila was taking them from Liverpool to Gibraltar, where they had volunteered to serve as cipher officers and wireless operators. The Aguila was part of a convoy of twenty-one vessels, and it was attacked by a ‘wolfpack’ of twelve German U-boats, each of which took turns to pick off a total of fourteen ships. The Aguila took a direct hit from a torpedo and sank within ninety seconds. When the news broke, other WRNS staff donated a day’s pay to a memorial fund, and the £4,000 raised funded an escort boat, the HMS Wren, to accompany future convoys.
The WRNS worked ashore or close to port until 1943, when thirty women were deployed on former passenger ships, taking high-level figures to secret meetings and international conferences. The WRNS personnel on board encrypted and decrypted top-secret messages, but were always subordinate to their male colleagues. However, being a Wren did provide some women with the opportunities to train in what had traditionally been men’s roles, and after D-Day in 1944 they followed the Allied forces into liberated Europe, providing support services and logistics. One of them was a field tele-printer operator, who was landed with her fellow Wrens in Normandy, and their unit set up in newly-liberated Paris. She became Laura Ashley, the world-famous textile and fashion designer. By the end of the war, more than 75,000 women had served in some capacity in the WRNS, and 303 of them had died on active service. In recognition, the navy retained a regular force of about 3,000 women in peacetime, though they did not serve regularly at sea until the 1970s.
As in the First World War, British women were keen to help the war effort, and they were often employed in shipyards. In 1943 The Times approvingly reported that women were fulfilling 114 different jobs in shipyards, evidence that female workers could be employed on any task that did not require either years of specialist training or considerable physical strength:
As electricians, painters, tool maintenance hands, sheet metal workers, wiremen and on the many other processes which go to make ships, women are doing excellent work, and their skill at welding has been generally acknowledged … At a time when few men are available, it is interesting to read that all-women gangs, under a woman supervisor produce the best results. In mixed gangs the men are, it is stated, inclined to use the women as assistants or labourers, whereas when women are working alone their self-confidence and enthusiasm grow, and they become more effective.14
By summer 1944 there were some 13,000 women working in marine engineering in British shipyards, and they were the counterparts of America’s famous Rosie the Riveter, helping to build and repair ships. The entry of America into the war following the bombing of Pearl Harbor was decisive in changing the theatre of war in Europe and on the Atlantic. Previously the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth had been bringing Australian troops to fight; but in 1942 they were back on the transatlantic run, bringing men, munitions and machines to Europe, at full speed.
As the fortunes of the war gradually changed, the Allies began to prepare for the invasion to be known as D-Day. Up to 15,000 service personnel per voyage would be packed aboard the Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth, occupying every available space. So congested were the corridors and public spaces that a one-way system was introduced for passengers. Commodore Sir James Bisset noted that the Mary was so difficult to handle under such circumstances that he was concerned for its stability. On one voyage the ship carried 16,500 people, which is still a record today. All told, the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth each made nearly thirty trips eastbound, carrying American soldiers to Europe, and prisoners of war westwards to internment.
The catering staff were constantly cooking to provide two substantial meals a day for all on board, and dining was in shifts. The whole trip still usually took five days and the troops passed their time playing card games, dice and poker, even though, in theory, gambling was forbidden. WAACs, the American Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, were also transported on the Queen Mary. They were strictly segregated from the male passengers, and everyone was barred from smoking on deck, in order to maintain the strict blackout.
On three occasions the Queen Mary carried the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, in conditions of utmost secrecy, to meet President Roosevelt and discuss the progress of the war, the arrangements for D-day and its aftermath. Naked flames were not allowed in cabins at any time, but special allowance was made for the British premier to have a candle burning constantly so he could smoke his trademark cigars. He was listed on the passenger manifest as Colonel Warden to conceal his identity.
In the summer of 1944, as the preparations were finalised for the Allies to invade Europe, there was one American woman who was on the wrong side of the Atlantic, and she was willing to resort to desperate measures to cross the ocean and witness the battle. Martha Gellhorn, inveterate transatlantic traveller and war journalist, had first managed to get to Europe by writing the copy for a brochure for the Holland-American Line, a Dutch passenger shipping firm. She became a foreign correspondent, travelling through Nazi Germany, Spain during the Civil War, and experiencing the Blitz in London. She wrote for a number of illustrated American magazines, especially Collier’s. Martha Gellhorn had married the writer Ernest Hemingway and they were living in Cuba. She wanted to cover the invasion of France by the Allied forces in 1944 and so needed to get to Britain to join the invasion fleet, but her travel options were limited.
Resourceful Martha managed to secure a passage on one of the most dangerous vessels afloat, a cargo ship heading for Liverpool, packed with dynamite. There were forty-five Norwegian sailors on board; the captain and first mate had a rudimentary grasp of English, but otherwise she was unable to communicate for eighteen long days. The deck was covered with small, amphibious personnel carriers, so there was almost no space in which the solitary passenger could stretch her legs. The hold was filled with high explosives, and there were no lifeboats; there was no point with such a hazardous cargo, as the slightest accident would engulf the vessel in a fireball. Smoking was forbidden, though the captain permitted Martha to smoke in her cabin if she used a bowl full of water as an ashtray. The food was appalling, it was extremely cold, and there was no alcohol on board, for safety reasons. While at sea, Martha’s ship avoided icebergs, dodged submarines and had gunnery practice. Fog descended, and the captain was concerned about the unpredictable manoeuvres of the interweaving Liberty ships accompanying the convoy, muttering that ‘they try to handle them like a taxi’.
On the grounds of her gender, the British government would not allow Martha Gellhorn to join the 558 writers, radio journalists and photographers provided with official press credentials so that they could follow the Allied troops storming the Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944. No women were to be part of the press corps covering this dangerous military venture. To her intense irritation, Martha’s estranged husband, Ernest Hemingway, was the single representative commissioned by her previous employers, Collier’s, to cover the D-Day landings. Undaunted, Martha managed to get aboard a hospital ship, and stowed away in a bathroom. She found a nurse’s uniform and changed into it, and in disguise she proved rather useful to the crew; she was the daughter of a surgeon, and could speak fluent German and French, so could act as an interpreter as well as carry out rudimentary nursing duties. In conditions of great secrecy, the ship – one of nine medical vessels to sail with the D-Day fleet of 100,000 troops and 30,000 vehicles – joined the invasion force heading across the English Channel to the French coast. The crew of Martha’s ship were English, but the medical staff were American, comprising four doctors, fourteen orderlies and six nurses: ‘from Texas and Michigan and California and Wisconsin, and three weeks ago they were in the USA completing their training for the overseas assignment. They had been prepared to work on a hospital train … instead of which they found themselves on a ship, and they were about to move across the dark, cold green water of the Channel.’15
When they reached the coast of Normandy, Martha was astounded that there could be so many diverse vessels in one place. Fierce battles ensued as the Allied troops forced their way ashore to face German bombardments, and before long water ambulances were bringing wounded combatants of all nationalities out to the hospital ships moored off the coast. The medical staff were working at full stretch – the patients had to be lifted aboard, triaged, sent for surgery or treated for their wounds. Their clothes and boots had to be cut off them, most of them hadn’t eaten for two days, and they were desperate for water, food, coffee, cigarettes and pain relief. Martha spoke to many of them, in German and French, realising they were extremely young and very frightened; she carefully explained to one young German that the orderlies dare not move him as he might bleed to death. There were more wounded stranded on the beach, and Martha volunteered to go ashore as a stretcher-bearer. It was a hazardous business; her party landed at dusk and trekked up a beach over pebbles the size of melons to a Red Cross tent. Martha helped supervise the transfer of the wounded to craft that could take them to the hospital ship as soon as the tides were right. Once back on the ship, with every bunk filled with injured servicemen of many nationalities, they sailed for the English coast where the wounded were taken to hospitals on land. ‘Made it’ was the terse but heartfelt verdict of the chief medical officer.
Martha exchanged her nurse’s disguise for her own clothes, left the ship and took the first train to London. She was promptly arrested and detained but escaped during the night, making her way to the home of an RAF pilot she knew. He was flying to Italy the following day, so she hitched a ride with him to the next theatre of war.
Her account of the D-Day landings was vivid and personal. She focused on the human tales of bravery and endurance, but what is also remarkable is her own commitment to getting the story by travelling the Atlantic on a dynamite ship then stowing away on board a hospital ship. This was not the first eyewitness account of war at close quarters related by Martha Gellhorn, and it would not be her last, but it was a milestone in her remarkable sixty-year career.
Following D-Day, while the war in Europe intensified, transatlantic passenger numbers gradually increased. Even though conditions were still dangerous, there were renewed opportunities for some merchant seawomen to resume their former careers. Maida Nixson, whose accidental career as a stewardess had begun in 1937, had longed to go back to sea, and had already risked enemy torpedoes and death by drowning, escorting evacuated mothers and children around the globe to safer countries. The WRNS could only offer her domestic work in port, so Maida became an assistant nurse in a hospital. However, during the last year of the war she found a job as a stewardess again, this time dealing with war brides and their offspring.
In late June 1944 Maida set sail in a largely empty passenger ship from Liverpool to New York, to help organise the transport and resettlement of American and Canadian wives of British airmen. The pilots and ground crew had been sent to the States and Canada for training in the early years of the war, and those who had married local girls wanted to be reunited with them, now that the risk from German raiders and submarines was so diminished. As usual, the ship zigzagged across the Atlantic, so progress was slow; meanwhile radio news reports spoke of the destructive flying bomb attacks on Britain. Maida’s five fellow stewardesses on this trip included the widow of a steward who had lost his life, along with many of his shipmates, in their valiant attempts to save children trapped below decks when their vessel was torpedoed.
On arrival in New York to pick up the American brides and offspring, the crew were amazed by the contrast with the darkened and war-ravaged British ports to which they were accustomed: ‘The skyline of New York must always be considerably overwhelming, and the sight of that great serrated artificial cliffside a-dazzle with blinding radiance made an almost shocking impact on our nerves. Our eyes accustomed to darkened England refused to credit the glare, we felt inclined to call “Put out those lights!” By night, even more than by day, the city had a look of bizarre unreality.’16
On sailing day, the ship was swamped by hundreds of young women, accompanied by small, hot toddlers and crying infants. Someone thrust a large, damp baby into Maida’s arms, and disappeared into the crowd. It took Maida some time to locate the mother of this unwanted burden, and when she succeeded, she was virtually accused of kidnap.
Extra bunks had been put into the cabins, and below decks there were dormitories housing twenty-six beds at a time. Conditions were cramped and difficult – six stewardesses each had around 130 passengers to look after and there were 99 infants aboard. Most of the passengers had never travelled before and, though nervous, were uncomplaining. The ship was blacked out from dusk to dawn, and it was extremely hot, being July. Meals were eaten in relays, and all passengers had to be off decks by 10 p.m.
Some British people were aboard, having spent the war years in the States, and they were privately dubbed ‘bomb-dodgers’ by the stewards. On arrival, the women and children were handed over to the RAF. Customs officers discovered a thriving smuggling ring on board, mostly in bird seed, which sold for £1 a pound in savagely rationed Britain, and in Cuban cigars, perhaps easier to understand. A transatlantic voyage in wartime was a great chance for shipboard crew to trade in forbidden or unavailable commodities, and considerable ingenuity was exerted to hide contraband from the customs officials.
Cunard alone had transported 2.473 million people and 9 million tons of cargo during the Second World War. Winston Churchill would later bestow the greatest compliment on Cunard when he remarked that the contribution of the two Queens and Aquitania had shortened the war in Europe by at least a year. Winston Churchill had good reason to be profoundly grateful for the crews’ professionalism and dedication. In March 1946 he sailed on the Queen Elizabeth to the United States to deliver what would come to be known as his ‘Iron Curtain speech’ in Fulton, Missouri. During the course of that voyage he agreed, at Cunard’s request, to write a foreword for a projected war history of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth that Cunard planned to publish:
Built for the arts of peace and to link the Old World with the New, the ‘Queens’ challenged the fury of Hitlerism in the Battle of the Atlantic. At a speed never before realized in war, they carried over a million to defend the liberties of civilization. Often whole divisions at a time were moved by each ship. Vital decisions depended upon their ability continuously to elude the enemy, and without their aid the day of final victory must unquestionably have been postponed. To the men who contributed to the success of our operations in the years of peril, and to those who brought these two great ships into existence, the world owes a debt that it will not be easy to measure.17
The war in Europe ended with the German surrender to Allied forces, and was marked by the celebrations of VE Day, 8 May 1945. Worldwide, tens of millions were dead, and many more were homeless or displaced. Many European countries were in ruins, with devastated economies no longer in control of their industrial infrastructure. Help from America in the form of the Marshall Plan was delivered in naval and merchant vessels crossing the Atlantic.
In the months following the end of the war, the great ocean liners helped to repatriate American troops and airmen. With 15,000 General Infantrymen – GIs – aboard (including 4,000 accommodated in sleeping bags in corridors), the Queen Mary received a hero’s welcome in New York City. Newsreel footage of the ship’s arrival shows the decks teeming with cheering, waving servicemen as they pass the Statue of Liberty. The great ships brought home the prisoners of war, repatriated the dispossessed, and carried the stateless to new lives in the New World.
For seafaring women the experiences of wartime had been salutary and a test of their mettle. There were those who had worked aboard the great ships in the 1920s and 1930s, during the golden age of transatlantic travel, when the appeal of the role lay partly in its proximity to celebrity and glamour, and the opportunity to make an independent living. Many of these women, in choosing a career afloat, had demonstrated that they were resourceful and adventurous, and they were willing to use their sea knowledge and their people skills to support the war effort in tougher times. There had been tragedies: Edith Sowerbutts wrote movingly about the sinking of the City of Benares, and she did not return to working at sea after that ship was lost. There were also instances of extreme bravery, such as Maida Nixson’s determination to escort evacuated women and children to places of safety, and Victoria Drummond’s extraordinary courage in sticking at her post to save her ship and fellow crewmates from enemy attack. Intelligence and stubbornness had also characterised many of the women who had travelled as passengers on the ships during wartime: expatriate Nancy Cunard, who took months to reach war-torn London, and Martha Gellhorn, consummate war writer, who claimed a berth on a dynamite ship to cross the Atlantic, then stowed away on a hospital ship to cover the D-Day landings.
For women of all nationalities who had survived the years of conflict, the post-war world offered new challenges and huge decisions. Many of them had met and married men from overseas, and they now faced moving from one continent to another in order to join their husbands. The merchant navy rose to the challenge by recruiting a new generation of women seafarers, primarily to help reunite far-flung families who had been sundered by war.