by Siân Evans
By contrast, some intrepid women went to sea in order to become sailors themselves, and disguised themselves as youths so they could join merchants’ ships as cabin boys, where they were less likely to face scrutiny, exposure or censure than in the Royal Navy. In 1859 The Times newspaper reported a curious case of ‘A Female Sailor’, an unnamed woman who was charged at the Newport police office in Monmouthshire with wearing seaman’s clothes. It emerged that for ten years the woman, accompanied by her husband, had ‘scorned her proper clothes’ and had travelled the world working as a sailor, loading and unloading cargoes with the rest of the crew, without her true gender being revealed until her secret was accidentally discovered on arrival at the docks of Newport. The story was related in a tone of some puzzlement; a cross-dressing married woman who succeeded in passing herself off as a hard-working sailor for a decade transgressed every social boundary.3
In Victorian Britain, seaports were a vital part of the industrial economy. They were the gateway through which raw materials from all over the world were imported, and the route by which manufactured goods churned out by the burgeoning factories and mills were taken overseas for sale. The docks of Liverpool, Bristol, Cardiff, the City of London, Southampton, Glasgow and Harwich were teeming with ships of all sorts, from vessels exporting coal and importing cotton and timber to mail boats and passenger ships, whose main cargo was people.
Women’s lives were tied to the shipping trade long before they started to travel and work on the ships. For shipowning families, their livelihood might be invested in a single ship, captained by a family member and manned by local seamen, or they might own a number of vessels and employ crew for specific commissions, carrying cargo and passengers around the world. In smaller, family-run firms, the women often played an active part in the business; acting as clerks, they attended to business matters while the men were away. Ports such as Portsmouth or Plymouth had ample opportunities for women to make a living, from running inns catering for travellers, or lodging houses for the crew on shore, to owning chandlers’ stores and selling provisions to shipowners. They might work as seamstresses, sailmakers, laundresses or cooks, or own a small shop. Those were the more respectable port professions, but there was also the flourishing business of prostitution, as there was always a ready market for transactional sex in any port. In addition, there were the pubs and the gambling dens, where a recently returned sailor could soon be relieved of a large amount of his pay, and rich pickings existed for pickpockets of both genders.
By the 1880s, as emigration to the New World grew, passenger ships increasingly carried women and children as well as men, and in response the shipping companies took on female crew to attend to their specific needs. In addition, ships were designed and marketed to appeal to potential female passengers. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, forward-looking companies such as Cunard stressed their vessels’ comfortable facilities and underlined the emphasis on safety, important considerations when a passage to America from Europe could take weeks and was often memorable for unprecedented levels of physical misery. The vast majority of Europeans travelling west across the Atlantic in the latter half of the nineteenth century were relocating permanently to North America. Between 1860 and 1900, 14 million people emigrated from Europe to the United States, of whom 4.5 million travelled from Liverpool, half of them on Cunard ships. The founder of the line was Samuel Cunard, a Canadian businessman who had won the first British contract to deliver mail by ship across the Atlantic. His new vessel, a no-frills paddle-steamer, RMS Britannia, was primarily intended to transport mail and cargo, but it also had accommodation for 115 passengers. On its inaugural voyage on 4 July 1840, Samuel Cunard was accompanied by his daughter, so confident was he that the ship was safe.
When merchant vessels like RMS Britannia began carrying female passengers, it was considered desirable to have a woman crew member on board, so that ‘proprieties could be observed’, and so women were afforded new opportunities in the maritime trade – opportunities that allowed them to travel. They acted as chaperones, ministering to the passenger if she was unwell, ensuring her privacy and dealing with all the personal hygiene issues likely to arise on an ocean-going trip lasting many weeks. While the crew might have private misgivings about having women on board, they were overruled by the captain or master, especially if he was keen to have his own wife along on the trip.
As the passenger trade grew in the late Victorian era, some shipping companies actively recruited small numbers of British women to work at sea, predominantly as domestic employees on passenger ships. The Merchant Shipping Act of 1875 required all passenger ships carrying migrants of both sexes to carry on board a matron, who would look after the interests of female and child migrants in steerage, ensuring they were kept segregated from male passengers if travelling unaccompanied, and that they were not importuned by the crew. On the upper decks, too, stewardesses fulfilled the combined roles of chambermaids, personal maids and sometimes nurses, tending to female passengers in physically uncomfortable and cramped conditions. At first, stewardesses were the wives of ship’s stewards and travelled merely as their husbands’ assistants. By the 1890s they were increasingly recruited from the ranks of ‘company widows’, married women whose deceased spouses had been sailors or ships’ officers.
In an era before any form of social welfare, widows were often left facing destitution, and they needed to find respectable, regularly paid employment to maintain their families. Stewardesses often had young children, who would be left in the care of relatives or friends while the mother went to sea to earn an income to support her offspring. Women with very young offspring preferred working the short-haul trips across the English Channel, though it was far more lucrative to sign on for a lengthy ocean trip lasting weeks, sailing from Liverpool or Southampton, to North or South America. Basic salaries were modest: a stewardess working for Royal Mail in 1879 was paid £3 a month, the modern equivalent of less than £50 a week. However, there were tips to be earned from passengers for good service, and at least the stewardess had bed and board provided while afloat, which was a consideration in households where money was tight.
Stewardesses of the Victorian era were distinctively if repressively dressed in dour uniforms which suggested the garb of prison warders, nuns or nurses. Victorian society was rigidly segregated by gender at all levels and throughout all classes, and life on board ship reflected these social mores. It was generally believed that a decent woman’s place was in the home; any respectable female should aspire to be a ‘domestic angel’, maintaining a household, caring for a family. The culture on board ships tended to be ruggedly masculine, and most of the men aboard were completely unused to females in the workplace. The Captain’s Lady had a certain status because her husband was the boss, and it was understood that she travelled under his protection. Nevertheless, ship’s officers and crew members tended to find it hard to know how to deal with women as fellow workers. Were they ‘ladies’, who should be regarded as the fairer sex, or were they ‘shipmates’ in skirts? Where were the boundaries? Many sailors, although usually married and having families (sometimes several simultaneously, in different ports), had only limited contact with working women throughout their adult lives, encountering them primarily as barmaids, landladies, shopkeepers, cooks, brothel-keepers or prostitutes. Those women who wanted to work at sea also risked their reputations ashore, because they might be assumed to be soliciting for sex, as prostitution was the female trade most often associated with the gritty, commercial reality of ports, harbours, docks, pubs and sailors.
As a result, seafaring men’s initial reactions to having female shipmates working alongside them ranged from dubious mutterings and muted disapproval to outright bullying or sexual harassment. If the women were lucky, a certain amount of creaky gallantry might be expended on them, though this also could be disadvantageous. Stewardesses had to be careful in their dealings with the crew and male officers on board, maintaining a fine line betwee
n personal reticence and affability, and had to be adroit at sidestepping unwanted male interest. They should be neither too friendly, nor too distant. They were not allowed in male quarters, neither could they work alone in a cabin with a man, nor attend to a solo male passenger. While not on duty, the female crew were expected to keep to their cabins, in case their mere presence on board inflamed male ardour. To circumvent this potential clash of the sexes, the shipping companies preferred to recruit older women, who were determined to maintain their dignity. In addition, male and female crew were discouraged from fraternising socially while off duty, although friendships among shipmates inevitably developed, and, as one former stewardess fondly recalled if she was able to totter off a ship on arrival at port, she could always find a congenial male shipmate with whom she could explore the city.
In the mid-nineteenth century very few women formally worked at sea; according to Dr Jo Stanley, in Southampton, out of 4,500 local inhabitants listed on crew logs between 1866 and 1871, only twenty were women. However, the numbers of female passengers increased greatly towards the end of the century, not least because the means of travelling became less arduous and less dangerous. Women of all nationalities were crossing the Atlantic in both directions out of necessity or choice – to emigrate, to join their families, to find work in the New World or a husband in the old one. It was recognised by the major shipping firms that socially superior female passengers should be specifically catered for; Cunard introduced the first lounge exclusively for women on SS Bothnia as early as 1874. This ship was also the first to have a system of electric bells in the first-class cabins to summon assistance, an innovation much appreciated by any passenger laid low by seasickness.
By the 1890s there was a boom in passenger shipping, and the major ports of Britain became the embarkation points for emigrants from all over Europe as well as the British Isles. In 1893 large transatlantic liners started to leave from Southampton as well as from Liverpool, which had previously been the main embarkation port for North America. The White Star and Cunard shipping lines joined P&O in setting up offices and infrastructure in Southampton, which was just an hour from London by train. With the growth in the number of female passengers, gender-specific roles such as bathing attendants, nursery nurses, laundry attendants and masseuses were also created aboard the big ships. The shipping companies received applications for women’s roles on board the ocean-going ships far beyond the number of positions available. The jobs were physically demanding, and those taking them would be living away from home – often in cramped, communal quarters – but, in an era of limited job opportunities for women, the idea of going to sea and earning an independent living was appealing to many.
As the new century dawned, wealthy women passengers required experienced, discreet, knowledgeable female attendants to assist them with the everyday business of sea travel. Even if a lady was accompanied on a voyage by her husband, members of her family and her maid, she still needed a stewardess, whose role was to minister, to reassure and to provide practical assistance to all of them. No respectable woman, travelling alone or with her spouse, would want a male steward to enter her cabin to bring her food, change her bedding, deal with the slops and chamber pots, or care for her when she was ill or seasick. Neither should a lowly steward catch sight of an upper-class woman in déshabillé, or looking anything other than perfectly groomed, poised and fully-clothed. In an era when getting the mistress into or out of her clothes could take twenty minutes of a competent maid’s time on dry land, it can be imagined how much more difficult the task was in the confines of a pitching, rolling and ill-lit ship’s cabin during a winter storm. In addition, lady’s maids were not immune to seasickness, while experienced stewardesses tended to be more resilient and experienced, adept at solving the everyday problems on board that seemed unfamiliar and even alarming to the passengers. Consequently, there was a growing demand for stewardesses to meet the surge in transatlantic female travellers, although the limited positions available were not easy to secure. As a careers book for women from 1894 discouragingly described it:
One would imagine that there were not many women who would care to occupy the post of stewardess on board an ocean liner, yet when a vacancy occurs there is never a lack of applicants. In fact, every steampacket company has a long list of names from whom a choice is made when necessary … the work is hard and disagreeable; it demands untiring energy, and a temper which nothing can ruffle; it shuts one off from home and from home comforts.
Besides possessing some knowledge of nursing, a stewardess must be proof against sea-sickness, even in the worst weather, and she must at the same time be able to sympathise with those who in this respect are weaker than herself. This is a combination not often met with. No; a stewardess is certainly not overpaid.4
It is easy to dismiss stewardesses as merely ‘floating chambermaids’, ocean-going servants, but in fact their expertise, their ‘sea knowledge’ and practical skills made them far less subservient than their domestic equivalents. They saw themselves as ladies who assisted their passengers, rather than serving them. A stewardess’s interactions with each individual passenger lasted only for the length of that voyage and were transactional in nature. She reported to the chief steward, who in turn reported to the purser, and she was employed by the shipping company to provide care and support to a specified number of passengers while they were in transit.
By the early twentieth century, the liners ploughing between Europe and North America were the largest man-made objects ever created. Wrought from mighty steel components, riveted together in shipyards by tens of thousands of skilled workers, and powered by engines that consumed hundreds of tons of coal per day, these behemoths were at the cutting edge of industrial technology. Engineering expertise was dedicated to carrying hosts of people thousands of miles, year after year.
The ship itself was a complex, technologically advanced, floating city in microcosm, virtually self-sufficient in terms of supplies, victuals, fuel and skilled labour. One seafaring officer around this time referred to his ship, RMS Aquitania, as ‘the steel beehive’, because of the way it constantly hummed with creative activity, purpose and a sense of common enterprise. Each vessel had been designed and engineered specifically to cross one of the world’s widest and least predictable expanses of water every week, in order to deposit its wide and varied human cargo safely on the American side, and to return with people wanting to explore Europe.
The captain was the ultimate authority at sea, and he made the crucial decisions about the vessel, its passengers, crew, cargo and course. It was an extremely responsible job, as the fate of hundreds, if not thousands, of people on board were dependent upon his decisions. To qualify, a man needed decades of experience at sea, working his way through the strict and exacting merchant navy hierarchy. ‘Master before God’ was the impressive term written on his ticket, his ‘licence’ to captain a ship. Many captains were extrovert personalities, and some cultivated their personal foibles or larger-than-life characteristics, which added to their popularity among passengers and ensured repeat custom. To be invited to dine at the captain’s table was a great honour for distinguished passengers.
There were three main departments on board, each of which reported to the captain. The deck officers’ duties encompassed safe navigation, manoeuvring, steering and docking of the ship, and care of the mail, baggage and cargo. The engineering department oversaw the performance and maintenance of the ship as a complex, moving vehicle. The victualling department was headed by the purser; he was the officer who had the most contact with the passengers of all classes, and he managed all the female staff who worked on board the ship, as well as the catering staff. He needed numerous assistants, such as stenographers, to fulfil administrative roles, as well as stewards and stewardesses, swimming pool attendants, barmen, hairdressers, bath stewards, bellboys, barbers and the band. In reality, most of these roles were managed by the purser’s deputy, the chief steward. Passengers who ‘knew
the ropes’ would butter up the purser, as he was the ultimate arbiter, in charge of assigning cabins, smoothing out problems, organising entertainment and excursions, changing money and storing valuables. Ambitious travellers hoping to get to know their wealthy celebrity fellow passengers would be grateful to the purser for ensuring proximity to the object of their attentions
Among the ship’s company there was some resentment between the different roles. Deck officers thought of themselves as socially superior to the rest of the crew, and were instructed to mingle with the first-class passengers and to be charming. They often looked down on the engineers, dismissing them as ‘grease monkeys’, but the engineers saw themselves as the real talent on board, the masters of their complex, sophisticated ocean-going machine. But some of the friction between the different departments on board can also be attributed to clashing assumptions about masculine and feminine roles. The more rugged elements of the ship’s company could be disparaging at the thought of a steward ‘fawning’ over his passengers while waiting at tables, or tucking them up in a sheltered deckchair with a warm rug over the knees. Making beds, tidying cabins, and pressing evening clothes were not deemed proper men’s work by the officers or engineers. By contrast, the care-giving and nurturing roles traditionally associated with women were gradually accepted by their male colleagues as having a place on board passenger ships. Nurses and stewardesses were seen by their more enlightened male shipmates as ‘ministering angels’, so long as they confined their activities to looking after their charges.
The structure of the early twentieth-century ship reflected the social hierarchy of the Edwardian era, divided laterally by strata, like geological deposits. Indeed, strenuous efforts were made to keep the more prosperous passengers totally unaware of the conditions in which the less well-off were travelling. A single ship could be carrying millionaires, moguls and monarchs on its upper decks, and thoroughly respectable clerics, merchants and middle-class families in its second-class quarters. The passenger manifest would list the names and titles of those who were able to travel in some luxury. A traveller’s experience of a transatlantic voyage was largely dependent on how much they paid for their tickets. Cunard’s flagship, the Mauretania, boasted luxurious regal suites, each with two bedrooms, a dining room, a butler’s pantry, a reception room and bathroom, with dramatic views of the ocean beyond the porthole. By contrast, cabin accommodation for third-class passengers hundreds of feet below in the same vessel consisted of a windowless cell containing two rows of upper and lower bunks, separated by a toilet seat placed over a bucket.
