Maiden Voyages

by Siân Evans

  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 commende
d 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