Maiden Voyages

This book tells the stories of women who sailed in ocean liners in the days before the cheap and easy availability of air travel. It focusses primarily on the “Atlantic Run” between Europe and North America during the first half of the 20th Century. 

It includes many female celebrities who are still well-known today such as Wallis Simpson, Marlene Dietrich, Josephine Baker. Others may have faded from memory, like the author E.M. Delafield, Olympic swimmer Hilda Davies or society “fixer” Elsa Maxwell. 

Other women made their mark at sea in different ways. Violet Jessup was a stewardess who famously survived the sinkings of both Titanic and Britannic, but undeterred, kept working on liners for many years afterwards. There’s even an appearance by domestic servant, Mary Anne MacLeod, who left her Scottish island home and arrived in New York with just $50 to her name. She found herself a wealthy husband and one of her four children has the name of Donald J. Trump. 

The research is expansive and effusive (and at times awkwardly repetitive). We are given great swathes of information on the building and history of the ships and their owners, plus the politics, social and cultural mores of the era and what the characters got up to before and after their voyages. If you want to know about Lady Nancy Astor or Diana Cooper or Hedy Lemarr or any of the other famous first-class passengers, there is already a wealth of historical information to be found elsewhere, and all this just diverts focus and makes the narrative top-heavy.  

Also, there’s major emphasis on the Cunard and White Star Line ships, with brief coverage of French, German, Italian or American vessels, and virtually nothing on other companies who plied the same route, such as Canadian Pacific Steamships (on which members of my own family crossed the North Atlantic several times).

Thus, it is discovering the experiences of the working women on board these ships that is the best part of this book. In particular, the few extracts from the memoirs of the redoubtable Edith Sowerbutts. She brings to life what it was like to be a woman at sea, the conditions endured and how her career was always precarious and susceptible to changing fortunes and world events. According to the bibliography, Edith’s memoirs are held by the Imperial War Museum but remain unpublished. This is surprising, as she was a remarkable woman who, as an early “conductress”, looked after countless women and children emigrating from England and Europe to better lives elsewhere. She lived long enough (died 1992) to have witnessed the progression of women into prominent roles at sea and wrote:-

“Nobody had visualised that female staff, other than the very necessary stewardesses, would ever be carried on ocean liners … We, of my generation, comprised the thin edge of the wedge. Women would eventually be signed on for seagoing positions once considered to be male preserves.” 
 
Three stars. 
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