Ou est le Capitaine? -- Julia Jones

Golden Globe prizegiving 

'Ou est le capitaine? has long been one of the more irritating FAQs for solo women sailors and members of all-female crews, as on-shore officials or casual passers-by look automatically for the man in charge. Perhaps it’s finally falling out of use in the wake of consistent female achievement? Look at Barry Pickthall’s photo of the crowds at Les Sables D’Olonne cheering Kirsten Neuschäfer, winner of the 2022-23 Golden Globe Race: consider 80-year-old Jeanne Socrates, the oldest person (not woman) to have sailed round the world alone and unassisted via the Southern Ocean’s five great capes, who has recently set out again to cruise across the Pacific. Last year I wrote about the appointment of Jude Terry as Britain’s first female Admiral and the achievement of England’s Lionesses football team, building on the determination of their 20th predecessors. Currently the military buzz is around Lt General Sharon Nesmith possibly becoming the next Chief of the British Army. How long will it be before this level of achievement is no longer news?

In  that same blogpost (August 2022) I wrote about our new edition of Rozelle Raynes’s Maid Matelot, her account of her WW2 service as a teenage Wren Stoker. Rozelle’s cousin Hugh Matheson described this as her ‘shout for freedom’; freedom from her inheritance, her social position, the expectation that she would spend a season as a debutante then marry a Suitable Partner. Writing 25 years later, Rozelle remembered a night in 1943 when a southerly gale was blowing up Southampton Water, the sea was running wind over tide, cold waves breaking over the bows of their open boat. As she bent over the old 4-cylinder Kelvin engine for which she was responsible, she felt icy water running relentlessly down the back of her neck, ‘And suddenly I knew, with a blinding flash of insight, that this was my ideal situation in life.’  

It couldn’t last. All categories of Boats Crew Wrens were abolished in November 1945 and Rozelle had no option but accept demobilisation and return to her life of upper-class privilege. At her farewell interview the kindly RN Commander ‘muttered something about making himself personally responsible for seeing I was offered an interesting job in a boatbuilding firm.’ ‘I suddenly lost all control and bursting into floods of tears ran blindly from his office into the brave new world outside.’ Even today there’s still some distance to go before women working in boatyards is felt to be normal. There were no such employment opportunities for Lady Rozelle in December 1945.

scrubbing decks

Rozelle successfully refused her London Season. Instead, she and two friends found work as yacht hands in the summer of 1946, accepting wages of £1 a week, a bullying employer and a working day that began at 0400. They were not sacked for any lack of willingness, only as a result of the owner’s incompetence and fraud. She was deeply disappointed. ‘If the child had a boat of her own,’ Rozelle’s mother suggested tentatively, ‘it might perhaps settle her and stops her going off on these very undesirable voyages in other people’s boats?’

Despite their grand titles and impressive estate, Earl and Countess Manvers were not especially cash-rich in the late 1940s. However Rozelle had had been left £100 in war savings bonds and the plumber employed to fix the boiler in her parents’ London house had a friend on the Essex coast with a converted life-boat to sell. Despite her mother’s dismay when she discovered that this small vessel had only a bucket for use as a lavatory, her parents paid the difference and Rozelle became proud owner of the Imp, a small and leaky motorboat with an unreliable engine.

Imp being towed

Engine failure and a grounding on the Maplin Sands soon revealed how much she had to learn. She built her confidence cruising in company with the friendly members of the Hurlingham Yacht Club from moorings in Putney. ‘I bought a smart yachting cap with the club’s gold badge on the front, and I made a point of waving to the captains of all the biggest ships I passed on the river – one captain waving to another as I told myself.’ 

This didn’t help when Imp’s rudder blade split twelve miles out from Dover on her first attempt to cross the Channel. Her friend Winkle, a former Wren, poured them both a couple of stiff rum toddies, after which they used the bread knife to saw out a piece of engine casing, then attached it to the remaining rudder stock with a combination of cod-line and suspender belt before limping mournfully back into harbour.

Cross-Channel success was not achieved until 1949 when Rozelle and another ex-Wren, Margaret Boggis, found their way through the wilderness of wrecks still outside Dunkerque and brought up for the night in their first foreign port.

‘Ou est le capitaine?’ asked a bibulous fisherman, sitting on a bollard above the Imp and peering into her cabin. 'Je vois seulement deux jeune filles... ou est le pilote?' He reeked of ‘Gauloise Bleu, raw garlic and Pernod’ and soon collected a crowd of copains to gawp at the new arrivals. Rozelle attempted to ignore them, focusing on the soup she was preparing for her and Margaret’s supper. She got angry when she felt herself being slapped by something cold and wet, and heard laughter ‘like gale- driven surf’. The object was a giant plaice being lowered from the quayside -- a gift to welcome the two young women to France. Classics teacher Margaret raised her can of lager, ‘Vive la France!’

‘Vive les jolies filles d’Angleterre,’ an old fisherman replied. 

Rozelle told this story in her second volume of autobiography, The Sea Bird. We are almost ready to publish this as a sequel to Maid Matelot. It’s an incremental tale, covering almost two decades after she was forced to leave the Wrens, detailing the small acts of determination that enabled her to adventure alone and escape ‘the fetters of the land’. Slowly, doggedly, she built her knowledge and competence, though it took a shipwreck, where she and her friend Winkle were lucky to escape with their lives, to persuade her she must make the transition from engine to sail. Again, she had much more to learn before she could explore the coasts of Europe single-handed, trusting to the kindness of strangers. 

By the end of the 1950s she had sailed her 25’ Folkboat, Martha McGilda, two thousand miles to Finland, with a small outboard engine and occasional help from friends. She had ventured defiantly close to Soviet Russia to raise a courtesy flag. 

 

Hand-drawn map of her journey to the Aland Islands

Five years later she achieved a personal happy ending when she married for the second time. 

Second time?

In 1953 Rozelle had succumbed to expectations and married a Suitable Partner. He was a gallant Major from the Coldstream Guards and is never mentioned in her story -- except perhaps once, obliquely, when she says she was ‘at a gloomy crossroads’ in her life and needed time to think. All the way to the Gulf of Bothnia.

‘Now or never, which is it to be? But I knew, instinctively, that there was really no question of turning back, so I leapt into action, glad to be fully occupied at last.’ There’s more to this decision than the recognising the necessity to leave a sheltered harbour and warm cabin for a cold wet night, picking a lonely course through the skerries, with the barometer falling and the compass unreliable. The excellence of The Sea Bird, in my view, is that she is not necessarily speaking to the exceptional sailor – or even solely to sailors. Yes, she was exceptional but there are many people who have to nerve ourselves to make our individual positive decisions to act, not procrastinate.

‘Waar is de Kapitein?’

‘Ik ben der Kapitein.’

Rozelle reflects, ‘In the old days, when I was sailing around single-handed, I often wondered about how I would feel if I had to share the boat permanently with someone else.’ She divorced her husband in 1961 and took a job as a purser on a cross Channel ferry. The experiences of The Sea Bird did more than earn Rozelle her Captain’s hat – or get her to the Aland Islands,  or (unexpectedly) give her the self-knowledge and assurance to cope with the new challenge of double-handed sailing – they also gave her the confidence to write.  

Claudia Myatt's front cover
based on a sketch by Rozelle Raynes

 

Last week (July 4th 2023) I signed a contract with Adlard Coles to write more about the experiences of 20th century women sailors -- the Lionesses of the Sea.