by Siân Evans
After the repression and mounting sense of fear they had experienced in Germany, the voyage on the Queen Mary was a revelation. ‘We ate kosher on there, and they had a synagogue. We had services in that synagogue, and on Shabbat they had special services. It was just wonderful.’ When they reached New York, and saw the Statue of Liberty, he remembered, ‘You felt free for the first time, after so many years.’17
Those working on board the transatlantic ships were aware of the palpable fear among most of their Jewish passengers as the international political situation deteriorated. Edith Sowerbutts, while working as a stewardess on the Queen Mary in 1938, was located on B deck for one voyage, and the cabins in her care were en route to the ship’s Jewish prayer room, which was open to all classes of passenger. Every day, she would encounter Orthodox Jews from third class nervously asking for directions to the synagogue, and she and the male bedroom steward would direct them. Among the first-class staterooms on B deck were some cabins occupied by a cosmopolitan group of Dutch Jews. They were obviously accustomed to wealth, but they had left everything behind them, convinced they knew what would happen if they stayed. At the end of the voyage, Edith and the bedroom steward were summoned together to the staterooms, to be thanked with courtesy, and offered a substantial tip each, which she was sure they could probably ill afford. The steward, whom Edith had previously considered a rough diamond, politely declined, saying: ‘From people like you, we take nothing. We thank you, the stewardess and I, and wish you luck. It has been our pleasure to look after you.’18 Edith wished she had thought of that speech.
Dorothy Scobie, who came from a working-class Liverpudlian family, was enraptured by the sight of the models of ships in the Cunard Building when she was a child, and longed to go to sea. She was employed as a stewardess on a number of the less prestigious Cunard-White Star ships crossing the Atlantic from Liverpool, from 1937 till the outbreak of war, and her career afloat eventually spanned more than twenty-three years. Fares on the Liverpool to New York route were usually keenly priced because the ships were smaller and older, but Dorothy noticed there was a rising demand from European passengers needing the cheapest possible one-way tickets to America. In the summer of 1939 she also observed a psychological change in her third-class passengers. Many of them were refugees from Russia, Hungary, Germany, Latvia and Austria, who had already made arduous journeys from their homes to get to a British port, and across country by rail to Liverpool to pick up a ship to the United States. They were perpetually anxious and seemed poor; in particular, many of the Jews fleeing Germany and Austria by this stage had very few possessions, as they had either escaped in a hurry with what they could carry, or had had all their property confiscated by the authorities before they left the country. Dorothy recalled:
These people had embarked in Liverpool and none of them had big trunks. Always they counted and recounted their dozens of suitcases and brown paper parcels. Hat boxes, string bags and attaché cases. Most of the men had briefcases which they never let out of their arms … What sorrows had they left behind? Indeed, whom had they had to leave behind? What traumas had they already witnessed in their short lives?19
Many European refugees followed on the transatlantic ships, hoping to escape the coming conflict, but not all would find sanctuary.
9
Women under Fire
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 o
f 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