by Siân Evans
So, this was the end, then: no more unaccompanied women and children; no more happy, carefree days in New York and Philadelphia … It was farewell to delousing and bath sessions, immigration queries from cranky officials who had been forced to rise too early in the morning to meet incoming ships – it was adieu to sea breezes and force nine gales, and sayonara to starlight and gardenias … And how one missed people, lots of people, all ages, types and nationalities. In my handbag was just the usual round-voyage payoff for thirty days. Atlantic conductresses were thus summarily cast off as their ships came into the home port, just like that! Each one of us, according to our age and qualifications, had to seek work ashore, and that in a country where unemployment was rampant – over 2 million out of work in Britain.1
Once again, Edith blew the dust off her loathed typewriter, and she spent the next three years working in a number of temporary or freelance jobs in London. Some of them were casual evening work, undertaken after already completing a tedious day in an office, but all of them were poorly paid. At least there was some administrative work available, and she could scrape a living, sufficient to keep the Sowerbutts family housed and fed. Edith chafed at being ‘stranded on the beach’, as seamen called the lay-off between voyages and hankered after the chance to return to her old, familiar shipboard life. However, for a number of her female compatriots the dire financial situation was the impetus that propelled them across the Atlantic for the first time.
Those who had grown up in the most deprived parts of the British Isles were spurred on by the complete paucity of employment at home and resolved to try their luck overseas. For them a one-way transatlantic journey was a gamble, a brave leap into the unknown. One such woman was Mary Anne MacLeod, who emigrated from Scotland to the USA in 1930, celebrating her eighteenth birthday at sea on a liner heading for a new life in New York. Born in 1912 in the Outer Hebrides, on the Isle of Lewis, home for Mary Anne was the village of Tong, a huddle of cottages three miles north-east of Stornoway. She was the youngest of ten children; her father Malcolm was a fisherman and crofter, who also worked as a truancy officer for the local school, and her mother was already forty-four when Mary Anne was born. Life was harsh in this small rural community where the fishing industry was in decline. Raised in a Gaelic-speaking household, Mary Anne left school aged fourteen, presumably to help on the croft but she was keen to get away, and with three older sisters having already emigrated to the USA, either working or married, she had ample incentive to escape to the New World.
Certainly the Old World did not offer much; the population of Lewis were very poor, surviving through subsistence farming and herring fishing. The climate was harsh, and most people lived frugally in an inhospitable setting. The economic depression was exacerbated by the loss of many of Lewis’s menfolk. More than 6,200 men from the Western Isles had gone to serve in the Great War, and 800 had been killed in action, more than one in eight. Of those who had survived the carnage of the trenches, a cruel tragedy struck in the early hours on New Year’s Day 1919, within sight of home. Two hundred and eighty-four demobbed servicemen were packed on to a requisitioned yacht, the Iolaire, which was to carry them back to Stornoway, the capital of Lewis, after long years of war. The vessel set out on the last day of 1918, overladen with exuberant, homesick men, but it sailed into a howling winter storm, the crew lost their bearings and the yacht was wrecked on submerged rocks near the entrance to Stornoway Harbour. Two hundred and five desperate men drowned within metres of their homes, their bodies later washed up in the harbour and on the beaches where they had played as children. The sinking of the Iolaire was a further devastating blow to the people of Lewis, wiping out almost an entire generation of young men. As the Scotsman reported on 6 January 1919: ‘The villages of Lewis are like places of the dead … the homes of the island are full of lamentation – grief that cannot be comforted.’ It was the worst peacetime shipping disaster in British coastal waters of the twentieth century.
Mary Anne was six when the Iolaire sank, and in subsequent years she was aware of the general shortage of eligible menfolk, and the surplus of ‘spare women’. By the late 1920s the recession was biting hard on Lewis. Many young people left the islands to find work, often going to join relatives already in the United States or Canada, where they were assured jobs were waiting for them. Mary Anne applied for and received her immigration visa for America, number 26698, on 17 February 1930. She boarded the SS Transylvania from Glasgow on 2 May 1930, heading for a new life in the New World. Her vessel was a three-funnelled twin-propeller liner, an Anchor Line ship, which arrived in New York on 11 May, the day after Mary Anne’s birthday; the passenger manifest shows a handwritten alteration to her given age, from seventeen to eighteen. A photo survives of her standing on deck on board the ship, wearing a sweater bearing the initials MM. She was five feet eight inches tall, with a fair complexion, fair hair and blue eyes, and had $50 in her purse.
On the Transylvania’s passenger list for all aliens (that is, anyone not already a US citizen) Mary Anne MacLeod made three declarations: first that she was moving to the USA permanently; second that it was her intention to seek American citizenship; and in the section asking ‘whether alien intends to return to country whence he [sic] came’ the answer she gave was no. She also declared that she would be living with her sister Mrs Catherine Reid, 3520 6th Avenue, Astoria, Long Island. In addition, she listed her occupation as a ‘domestic’, a catch-all description meaning some kind of household servant or maid, like her sisters. Despite the general tightening of American immigration rules for all nationalities throughout the 1920s, British-born servants were still very much in demand in the north-eastern states and cities in the 1930s. Indeed, the American immigration authorities had relaxed the annual quota on 1 July 1929, so that the number of emigrants from Great Britain and Northern Ireland entitled to enter the United States was increased briefly from 34,007 to 65,731, and Mary Anne was one of the beneficiaries.
In May 1930 the Stornoway Gazette reported:
There is quite an exodus of young people, male and female, from this parish for Canada and the United States. Our straths and glens will soon be peopled only with middle-aged and elderly people. Most of these young people take kindly to the life of those distant lands but they never forget the ‘old folk at home.’ They leave home with a determination to succeed and because of their courage, endurance and reliability they are generally successful … Several have left from here this week and we wish them bon voyage.
Mary Anne’s decision to go to New York was partly as the result of a scandal that had struck the MacLeod family in 1920. Her older sister, Catherine Ann, born in 1897, also known as Kate or Katie, become pregnant out of wedlock, and was sent to Lanarkshire to have the baby. Her daughter, named Annie, was born in Airdrie on 5 December 1920. No father’s name appeared on Annie’s birth certificate, and when the new mother and child returned to Tong in 1921 Annie was handed over to be raised by the rest of the MacLeod family. Mary Anne, the youngest of the ten MacLeod siblings, was eight years old when her niece arrived and, as was often the case in large, poor families of the time, probably had an active role in taking care of Annie, playing with the little girl as she got older. Meanwhile, Catherine assessed her options. It would have been difficult for her to continue to live in Tong, a small, tight-knit community, where everyone knew about the baby, and speculation about the unknown father would have been rife. It was a conservative and rigid society, adhering to the strict beliefs and practices of the Free Presbyterian Church, and by the standards of the day Catherine was ‘damaged goods’; no local man with any thoughts of respectability would marry her now, especially as there was a shortage of suitable men. It was time to try her luck overseas.
In 1921 she set out for New York to find work as a domestic servant, and a new start in life. In Manhattan Kate married a butler from Scotland, George A. Reid, on 26 March 1926. Four years later they were joined by her immigrant sister Mary Anne, also following a well-trodde
n family path, for two other elder sisters had emigrated to the USA in the 1920s, and found themselves expat husbands – Christina Matheson and Mary Joan Pauley, who had been in domestic service when she married an English footman, Victor Pauley.
It was thought that Mary Anne was staying with her sister as part of a ‘holiday’ in New York, and that she had no intention of emigrating to the States until she met her future husband. However, as the offspring of an impoverished crofter, it is highly unlikely she would have taken a vacation to New York; the more prosaic truth is that she had deliberately gone to America to seek work as a domestic servant, as her sisters had done successfully before her, and she declared as much on her immigration documents.
In 1930 Mary Anne met Frederick Christ Trump at a party. He was a property developer of German heritage, and ran a family firm with his formidable mother, Elizabeth. He was seven years older than Mary Anne, ambitious and on the make. The attraction was instant, and Fred told his mother the same night that he had met the woman he intended to marry. Fred Trump had been just twelve years old when his father died in the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, and he took over the family’s real estate business, building houses. The stock market crash of 1929 occurred when Fred was twenty-four, and as a means of helping the American economy, President Roosevelt announced major public building programmes. Between 1935 and 1942 the Trump family’s property empire boomed through those liberal economic initiatives.
In the summer of 1934 Mary Anne returned home to Scotland for three months, to see her family and perhaps to announce her engagement. Details are sketchy, but there was a Mary MacLeod from Tong, aged twenty-two, named on the incoming passenger list of the SS Cameronia, a ship that arrived in Glasgow on 11 June 1934. She is described as a nurse, and in fact there are a number of Mary MacLeods (with various spellings) from Lewis listed as crossing the Atlantic that summer, so the truth is elusive. (Though interestingly, her eldest daughter, Maryanne, mentioned many years later that their mother worked as a nanny during her early years in the States; it may be that she gave a different answer about her occupation in 1934 to match her most recent employment.) Nevertheless, it was definitely Mary Anne MacLeod who travelled back to New York on the SS Cameronia, arriving in the USA on 12 September 1934. She was already an American citizen in all but name, because she was travelling on a ‘re-entry permit’ obtained from Washington on 3 March 1934. These prized and valuable permits were only granted to immigrants intending to stay in the States and become US citizens. Once again, her occupation was given as ‘domestic’, and the documentation stated she would be living with her sister Catherine Reid at Glen Head, Long Island. However, by April 1935, according to a later census of 1940, Mary Anne was living at 175/24 Devonshire Road in New York, the Trump family residence. This was a prosperous middle-class area of Long Island known as Jamaica, in the borough of Queens.
The wedding had taken place in January 1935; Frederick Christ Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod were married at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, and held a stylish wedding reception for twenty-five guests at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan. The Stornoway Gazette, keen not to miss a detail (‘Tong Girl Weds Abroad’), reported that the bride wore a ‘princess gown of white satin with a long train and a tulle cap and veil’, and her bouquet was of ‘white orchids and lilies of the valley’. The couple honeymooned with a weekend in Atlantic City, but Fred’s dedication to business was such that he was back at work on Monday, and Mary Anne commenced married life in Jamaica, Queens. Fred’s real estate development business prospered and by 1940 the burgeoning Trump family were living in a house built by Fred, a large, red-brick, white-columned home positioned on top of a grassy hill. Mary Anne ran the house with the help of a live-in Irish-born maid, Janie Cassidy, also a naturalised citizen. Astute, attractive and charming, Mary Anne had a great deal of stamina and as the matriarch of a real estate business she was ambitious that the family should do well. Fred’s business as a property developer was booming; he would buy land, build residential accommodation on it, then sell or rent out apartments to tenants.
Their first child, Maryanne, was born in April 1937, then Fred Junior in 1939; Elizabeth in 1942; Donald John in June 1946, and Robert in 1948. Mary Anne was very ill following the birth of Robert and her life hung in the balance for some time. On her eventual recovery, Mary Anne embarked upon a career in charity work, mostly around the family home on Long Island. She worked tirelessly, volunteering at a local hospital, and was actively involved with schools, charities and social clubs, while Fred worked closely with young Donald in the family’s flourishing property empire. Mary Anne adopted an immaculate bouffant hairstyle and dressed smartly, and was rumoured to have her chauffeur drive her in her Rolls-Royce to pick up the bags of coins from the automated laundries the Trumps installed in the basements of their apartment blocks. Her son, Donald, attributed his own sense of showmanship to his mother, remarking in his book, The Art of the Deal, ‘She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand.’ She would often return to her Scottish roots by visiting Tong, would attend the local church and easily reverted to speaking Gaelic to her relatives and the neighbours.
Fred Trump died in 1999, and Mary Anne in 2000. The Stornoway Gazette recorded her passing: ‘Peacefully in New York on 7th August, Mary Anne Trump, aged 88 years. Daughter of the late Malcolm and Mary Macleod, 5 Tong. Much missed.’ By crossing the Atlantic, Mary Anne left behind abject poverty in Scotland, and within twenty years she was a New World matriarch, the socially mobile wife of a wealthy real estate developer. She was a mother to five children, one of whom, Donald Trump, was to become President of the United States. Four of the MacLeod sisters were economic migrants; faced with financial hardship, social censure and lack of opportunity at home, they were prepared to take risks and embark on new lives on a distant continent, a long way from a tiny Scottish croft.
The possibility of permanent emigration to America or Canada remained an appealing prospect to many British-born women. Edith Sowerbutts, a globetrotter before she went to sea as a career, was very tempted to leave her unconvivial, poorly paid temping jobs in London and apply to emigrate to the USA, but decided against it because of her family commitments, particularly caring for her ailing and elderly mother. Those who felt themselves to be stuck in the economic mire of the early 1930s were particularly susceptible to the alluring image of life in America, as portrayed through sophisticated and engaging Hollywood movies, avidly watched in cinemas all over Britain. Accomplished screen performers such as Fred and Adele Astaire had enormous international appeal, and frequently took the Atlantic Ferry to fulfil professional engagements, performing in person in London or New York. Popular entertainers of all kinds were much in demand on both sides of the Atlantic, despite the economic strictures of the Depression. This was an era that saw many cross-cultural exchanges between Europe and the North American continent, from song-and-dance acts to the more highbrow pursuits. There was a great vogue for inviting female authors on lecture tours to promote their books, and to debate the pressing cultural issues of the day. British writers, such as Vera Brittain, were very popular in the United States between the wars, and they were aware that the opportunity to travel and reach new audiences could have a profound impact on their subsequent careers, not to mention their sales.
E.M. Delafield was the pen-name of Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, a writer who found fame and an appreciative audience with her humorous book, The Diary of a Provincial Lady. The book takes the form of a journal apparently kept by a rather insecure upper middle-class woman who is living with her family in rural Devon, trying to maintain standards despite being perennially short of money. Originally published in instalments in Time and Tide magazine, it appeared in book form in December 1930 and rapidly became a bestseller. In the sequel, The Provincial Lady Goes Further, the heroine becomes established as a writer and fulfils her dreams of making brief forays to London, to give ‘talks’, much to the resentment of Cook, the French governess, her two
children and her taciturn husband, Robert. With the second instalment also proving popular, in 1933 Elizabeth Dashwood’s American publisher, Cass Canfield of the firm Harper’s, invited her to undertake a lecture tour of the USA and Canada. It was an exhausting itinerary: between 4 October and 2 December 1933 she travelled from New York to Chicago, Cleveland, Ohio, with a swift diversion to Toronto and Niagara in Canada, then on to Buffalo, Boston and Washington D.C. She encountered strangers and well-wishers, experienced wonderful generosity and occasional mutual cultural bafflement, visited Harlem and the mansions of the wealthy, attended endless parties and attempted to answer probing questions on the issues of the day. She was struck by the hospitality and warmth of her reception. Elizabeth Dashwood wanted to visit the family home of Louisa M. Alcott, author of Little Women, in Concord, and having been told that this would not be possible, called on the support of Alexander Woollcott, the renowned literary critic from the New Yorker magazine, and radio star, whom she had met over cocktails and sandwiches in Manhattan. Mr Woollcott replied that he would gladly ‘mention it in a radio talk’, if her visit to the Alcott House and Museum went ahead. The tour organisers were so impressed by her august media connections that they arranged for Elizabeth to have an exclusive tour of the house, which she found to be a fascinating insight into the world of her literary heroine.