by Siân Evans
The survivors were picked up from the water, and the nurses in other boats tended to them by ripping up their aprons for bandages. The Britannic sank exactly fifty minutes after it was hit, and 1,035 survivors were eventually rescued by three British ships who, alerted by radio, had raced to the scene. The casualties would undoubtedly have been far higher had the ship been carrying sick and wounded soldiers when the incident occurred, as it would have been almost impossible to evacuate any bed-bound patients successfully. Thirty people died at the scene, but many more suffered life-changing wounds from the propellers.
While Britannic’s rescued male crew and officers were returned promptly to England, arriving in Southampton on 4 December, the nursing staff, including Sheila, were stranded for weeks on the island of Malta, unable to return to Britain. They were finally sent back on a former French cargo ship, an uncomfortable and seemingly interminable journey. They arrived at Southampton at last on Boxing Day and took the train to Waterloo Station, where their matron-in-chief ordered them to go home, rest and await further orders. Sheila was eventually posted to work in an army hospital in France, to her relief, as she was glad to be back on dry land. After a lengthy period of recovery in Malta, Violet was sent back to Britain via Sicily and through Italy by train. On her return she accepted that there were now almost no posts for women afloat while hostilities continued, so she put her linguistic knowledge to good use and took a job at the London branch of the Banco Español del Río de la Plata of Buenos Aires. It was as a result of this traumatic episode aboard the Britannic, her third maritime catastrophe, that Violet gained the soubriquet of The Unsinkable Stewardess. She wore a wig for the rest of her life to conceal the injuries sustained to her scalp.
The Britannic was the largest vessel to be sunk during the First World War, and remains the largest passenger liner ever sunk. In a curious footnote, in 1976, when she was eighty-six, Sheila Macbeth Mitchell responded to a worldwide appeal for witnesses to the sinking of the Britannic from French naval officer Jacques Cousteau, who wanted to explore the recently discovered wreck on the seabed. Sheila not only supplied him with uniquely detailed information about how the vessel came to grief, but she also flew to the Aegean and descended to the seabed in a miniature submarine with the divers, though she feigned disappointment that they were unable to retrieve the alarm clock she had left on the bedside cabinet of her cabin sixty years before.
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Given that many of the ocean-going ships were deemed male-only environments while hostilities lasted, in November 1917 the Royal Navy created the Women’s Royal Navy Service (WRNS) – a body later known as the Wrens – to provide land-based support for the men fighting at sea. The female workforce ashore was also galvanised to support the war effort, particularly in support of the beleaguered merchant navy
By the end of August 1914, 30,000 men were volunteering to join the armed forces every day, and there was a desperate shortage of skilled labour as they left their previous occupations for military training. In keeping with the national drive to free up the male workforce for the armed services, women were recruited for manual jobs, including working in the shipyards, which was a radical departure from the pre-war expectations of genteel paid employment deemed suitable for the fairer sex. A newspaper article on women shipbuilders grittily reported:
They are working in blacksmiths’ forges; they red-lead iron work, and do certain portions of the paint work. All over a shipyard they may be seen tidying up, shifting scrap iron, carrying baulks of timber, pieces of angle iron, and iron bars … A more valuable part of their work perhaps is done with machinery, especially in the joiners’ shops … In the engineers’ section of the shipyard, also, they work screwing and boring machines, sharpen tools, and in many other ways help in this department. Experienced girls are very skilful in manipulating such powerful machines as those used for cutting angle-iron and for keel-bending. They drive electric cranes and winches, work which demands the greatest steadiness and care. The proportion of women employed in engineering works is greater than that in the shipyards, on account of the larger number of machines available. As time goes on, and the value of women to the shipbuilder grows, the percentage of women workers engaged in the construction of merchant steamers will doubtless increase.6
Following the outbreak of war, Cunard continued to service and repair its own ships, but also supported the war effort by servicing and maintaining naval craft in its dockside facilities. Cunard already ran a complex, multi-faceted shore-based operation; it owned extensive premises on land, warehouses, repair shops and engine works, and employed hundreds of highly efficient managers, clerks and administrators, all based ashore but working in support of its ocean-going fleet. In October 1915 the company converted its Branch Engine Shop in Bootle into the Cunard National Shell Factory. Managed by Alexander Galbraith, who had the pioneering idea of recruiting some 900 local women, as well as 100 men to work there, the factory produced the first 6- and 8-inch shells made in Britain using female labour, along with a variety of other weaponry. As a bold experiment in bringing women into munitions manufacture, the Cunard Shell Factory was a triumph, and it was much imitated; by 1918 there were nearly 1 million women employed in British munitions and engineering works. The Lady Shell Workers, as they were known, were committed to supporting the war effort in their limited free time, putting on concert parties for wounded soldiers and performing at fundraising events, at which a spirited rendition of ‘God Save the King’ always closed the concerts.
Meanwhile Cunard was given the task of establishing and running the National Aircraft Factory Number 3, to build planes for the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, which amalgamated in 1918 to become the Royal Air Force. Forty-one per cent of the 2,600-strong workforce were female; photographs of the ‘covering room’ show scores of women dressed in pinafores and caps, busy attaching canvas to the wooden frames that formed the wings of planes. The factory constructed 126 fighter planes by 1919, a large contribution to the fleet of the new RAF.
On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, at 11 a.m., the guns finally fell silent, marking the end of fifty-two months of carnage and slaughter. The Shell Factory closed days after, having manufactured 410,302 missiles. Three weeks later, on the evening of 7 December, a grand farewell party was held for the women employees. There were speeches of thanks and celebrations, the guests danced to the Cunard Orchestra, and it was announced that King George V was to be presented with a book of documentary photographs taken at the Shell Factory, at his request. The Lady Shell Workers received letters of heartfelt thanks for all their war work from Sir Alfred Booth, the Cunard chairman, and ‘a memento of your share in the great victory … a souvenir in the form of a 4.5˝ H.E. shell, with the compliments of the Cunard Steam Ship Company’.
For Violet Jessop, now working for a bank in the City of London, the formal end of the hostilities was a hollow triumph. One of her beloved brothers had been killed in the closing days of the war, and she did not have the heart to join the seething and excited crowds out in the street. She recalled:
I went into the manager’s office with a letter I had been translating for him. We were the only two left in the building. There were tears in his eyes. We wept openly as we discussed the contents of the letter. His old heart was torn by the news that his youngest son had just been killed in action during the same engagement as my poor Philip. We had our grief in common, and to neither of us did that Armistice Day bring a message of joy.7
More than 9 million men had been killed in the Great War, 942,135 of them from the British Empire. During the four years of conflict, Cunard had lost twenty ships through enemy action, including the Lusitania, the most high-profile passenger ship to be sunk during the First World War. The final tally represented 56 per cent of the company’s pre-war tonnage. Even the Carpathia, which had steamed to the rescue of so many Titanic survivors in 1912, was sunk. Cargo vessels bringing vital supplies to Fortress Britain were also decimated by the German U-b
oat fleet. Among Cunard’s many losses was the Vinovia, sailing from New York laden with brass and munitions, which was torpedoed and sunk in the English Channel on 19 December 1917, with nine crew members killed. That vessel was commanded by Captain Stephen Gronow, the author’s great-great-uncle; he survived a night in the open sea, and was rescued the following morning, unconscious and suffering from hypothermia, but he recovered and returned to service on the Aquitania when peace returned.
While the material losses were considerable, it was the human losses that were the hardest to bear. Some 650 of Cunard’s crew members and officers were lost at sea in the hostilities. A source of pride, however, was the way in which the company had coped. The ships had covered more than 3.5 million miles as part of the war effort, carrying 9 million tons of food, munitions and raw materials. Their main area of operation was the North Atlantic, but they also travelled to the Mediterranean and the far north of Russia. Cunard alone transported 900,000 troops, half a million of them American soldiers joining the war in Europe.
But the victorious nations felt little in the way of triumph, just exhausted relief, as they attempted to make some sense of the peace. In Britain there was hardly a household that hadn’t suffered a bereavement or serious injury. There was a palpable absence of old pals and contemporaries, ‘missing in action’ or ‘lost in France’. The survivors of the four years of war were now returning, some of them maimed, gassed, blinded or disfigured, or mentally affected by their experiences.
With hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors needing repatriation, the ocean liners that had served as troopships during the war were once again pressed into service. Surviving ships were refitted and once again put on to passenger routes, as shipping companies commissioned new vessels to replace their lost fleets. With so many people on the move between continents, it was inevitable that they would be taking with them more than memories and souvenirs; the Spanish flu pandemic, which swept the world in 1918–19, killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, approximately 250,000 of them in Britain.
For women the first year of peace was a period of transition. Injured or traumatised ex-servicemen returned to Britain after the war expecting to take up their old jobs; indeed, many of them had been promised by their employers that they could return to their previous posts after the victory. While the men had been fighting in the trenches, many Civvy Street roles had been largely occupied by women. It was a thorny problem: the women who had been recruited and welcomed into office jobs in order to ‘free up a man for the front’ were now surplus to requirements. Cunard’s staff magazine, Cunard Line, lost no time in dropping unsubtle hints to its female workforce: ‘The day is coming soon when the rightful inhabitants will be welcomed back to the office and many of the ladies must lay down their pens sadly – yet gladly – and retire into private life. May it truthfully be said on that day that they have carried on.’8
While individual women might be prepared to relinquish a specific ‘man’s job’ to a former soldier returning from the front, in general they had no inclination to return compliantly to the domestic hearth after the Great War. A month after the Armistice, in December 1918, British women were granted the vote for the first time (though not all women: for the next decade, enfranchised females were only those who were householders and aged thirty or over). This was both a concession to the pre-war impetus to introduce women’s suffrage, and an acknowledgement of the vital role women had played in support of the war effort. The fundamental changes to women’s lives were more profound than gaining the vote. Four years and three months of hostilities had transformed the nature of British civilian society. For the first time, large numbers of women of all classes and backgrounds had found useful, interesting and remunerative employment outside the home. For younger women, the Great War had overturned all their previous assumptions, and revolutionised every notion of how their future lives might be lived. Galvanised by the war effort and encouraged to demonstrate their patriotism, they had learned to drive motor vehicles, helped to construct munitions and aeroplanes, and trained as nurses or stenographers. For the first time women had been actively recruited and welcomed into offices and banks, factories and canteens. They had been employed alongside men, in clerking and administrative positions. Their abilities and skills had been required and valued, because they were filling vacancies left by men called up for the forces. As a result, many young women had developed a new sense of independence and self-confidence. They had a sense of their own agency, and had proved to themselves that they could earn an independent living. The most outgoing and enterprising were realising that they could be citizens of the world, especially if they were prepared to travel. And in order to do that, they had to go to sea.
3
Sail Away: Post-war Migration and the Escape from Poverty
In the immediate aftermath of the Great War there was a considerable demand for all forms of travel, and people on both sides of the Atlantic were desperate to take to the seas again now that the only perils they faced would be natural ones – storms, mountainous waves, icebergs and seasickness – not enemy torpedoes or floating mines. Naturally, there had been passengers who for a variety of reasons had braved the Atlantic on Allied vessels, despite the risks from lurking U-boats, but the numbers had slowed to a trickle, particularly after the sinking of the Lusitania. There had also been wartime limits on movement for British civilians under the Defence of the Realm Act, combined with the strictures of rationing, but now would-be passengers could venture overseas once again. Many felt the need to escape the all-pervasive sense of gloom that seemed to hang over the British Isles like a pall, and those who could afford a ticket grabbed the first opportunity to book a transatlantic trip on one of the recently demobbed, hastily converted or newly requisitioned great liners.
To meet the surge in demand, the shipping companies hurried to locate and sign up their pre-war female workforce, and to replace those who had left the industry to pursue other opportunities when they had been laid off. Experienced stewardesses were particularly highly valued, especially if they had gained nursing qualifications in the interim, as many had. Perhaps surprisingly, considering her harrowing experiences, Violet Jessop gave up nursing and chose to return to the seaborne life as a stewardess in 1920, when the opportunity presented itself, and she was not alone. Fannie Jane Morecroft, survivor of the sinking of the Lusitania, resumed her career with Cunard in 1919, and went on to become the chief stewardess of the Lancastria, a position that brought her the considerable honour of a stateroom to herself and a further decade of lucrative employment at sea.
Violet and Fannie, like most female employees, had been made redundant by the shipping companies as the danger to Allied shipping increased, but a very small number of seafaring women had continued to sail throughout the hostilities, and they had accumulated war service stories of their own. Cunard publicly celebrated those who had been employed on its ships throughout the war years. One was a veteran stewardess called Miss J.S. Cole, who was torpedoed three times during the Great War. A profile of her appeared in Cunard Line in May 1921:
Miss J.S. Cole, stewardess, RMS Caronia, whose photograph is reproduced on this page, had the unpleasant experience of being torpedoed three times during the hostilities. She was in the Alaunia when the ship, having landed her passengers and mails at Falmouth, after a voyage from New York, was torpedoed on her way to London, near the Royal Sovereign Lightship, on 4th October 1916. Miss Cole escaped the further attentions of the enemy until 4th February 1918 when she was one of the complement of the Aurania, which was torpedoed off the north coast of Ireland. In the following July Miss Cole had her third baptism of fire, being stewardess in the Carpathia, which fell victim to a U-boat some 120 miles west of the Fastnet.
Two stewardesses on the Saxonia, Mrs Agnes Stevens and Mrs Emily Dawkins, were similarly featured in Cunard Line. Agnes was originally from the Isle of Man, had two sons and one grandchild, and had worked as a stewardess for eighteen years. She
had been born on a ship owned by her father, and had spent most of her life afloat. Emily had seven sons and six grandchildren and had been a stewardess for sixteen years. Although it wasn’t stated directly, as both women were styled ‘Mrs’, it was likely that both were widows left with children, hence their need to work on ships. They had served together as nurses at sea during the Great War, and proudly wore service ribbons on their uniforms. The inseparable cabin-mates recalled being torpedoed while working on the Ausonia, off Queenstown in Ireland, close to the site where the Lusitania was sunk:
We were down below in our room, knitting. We heard the alarm, we climbed up and looked through the port, and we saw the thing – the torpedo – coming towards us. It struck us but we discharged a depth bomb and got the submarine. Of course, we passed through the submarine zone time after time, but we were never on a ship that sank. We used to tell the soldiers not to worry, that we were mascots, and that as long as we were on a ship it wouldn’t go down [ … ]
