By Julia Jones
The focus for the Essex Book Festival 2025 is Community. The richness and diversity of Essex. Our extraordinary history and heritage, and the people who have shaped it and continue to shape our wonderful county. Our wonderful coastline and the many islands forming the Essex ‘Archipelago’…
‘Community’ is generally felt as a good word: warm, friendly, sharing, banding together, helping each other. Community can often be experienced at its most intense when people are brought together by some external pressure — living surrounded by the sea, for instance — or when they are facing a calamity, such as an inundation or a threatened invasion. Awareness of community can be a joyous coming-together as people celebrate deliverance from threat or a fact of daily life as groups of people help each other survive and be happy. ‘Community’ may even have some similar resonances to the famously untranslatable Danish concept of ‘hygge’ with its ten ideals of atmosphere, presence, pleasure, equality, gratitude, comfort, togetherness, harmony, truce, and shelter (as identified by author Meik Wiking in The Little Book of Hygge).
But if community is such a strong and positive concept — a human survival mechanism — what happens to those who are outside the community — outliers, people who have been ex-communicated, perhaps for failure to conform to community expectations? Communities imply boundaries, whether they are as tangible as the water encircling an island, or whether they are the shared ideals and practices which bind communities of belief. Community is indeed a way of looking at Essex, the county of coastline, islands and the marshland experience. But it is not always a comfortable way. Think of the c19th practices of the Essex Peculiar People, banding together to live good lives, to worship and stay sober, yet so resistant to outside interference that the most committed early believers would let their children die rather than accept medical treatment.
Essex is also a county of obstreperous individualists – and I love it for that. I’m glad to have been asked to be part of this year’s festival, talking about my new book Stars to Steer By, because I hope that this will make some sort of reverse contribution to the exploration of community. STSB celebrates twentieth century women who went to sea. These women were necessarily non-conformist individuals because the traditional concept of sea-faring has either excluded women or marginalised us.
I have Charles Kingsley’s 1851 poem ‘Three Fishers’ singing in my head as I write this blog:
Three fishers went sailing out into the west,
Out into the West as the sun went down.
Each thought on the woman who loved him the best
And the children stood watching them, out of the town.
For men must work and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden and the waters be deep,
And the harbour bar be moaning ………
(If you notice that two words in the first and second lines ‘out into’ have been changed from ‘away to’ Kingsley’s poem, it’s because what I’m hearing is Joan Baez’s beautiful mid 1960s version, not the c19th century original.)
Charles Kingsley was writing from Clovelly in Devon; his fishermen can reasonably sail west into the setting sun, whereas our Essex coastal communities face east, as do the vast majority of North Sea harbours and river mouths from the Thames to John O’Groats. But whether west, east, north, south the traditional gender roles within the maritime communities are polarised: ‘For men must work and women must weep’. This is similarly true of island Britain’s historic naval and trading communities – men go down to the sea in ships, and may never return, for ‘storms be sudden and the waters be deep’. The role of the women, apparently, is to remain behind, to care for the children and keep the home fires burning. But what if they too wanted to set out? If not to fish, then perhaps to race, to explore, to escape the conformities of the land. As my research led me to look more critically at the accepted picture I found more and more exceptions: women speaking out for active participation, for adventure in their own right.
‘To enjoy racing to the full, you should have it all in your own hands, with no one to say you ‘nay’, otherwise that spirit of independence – so rarely enjoyed by our sex – is lost. The sensation of being master of your own vessel, with the helm in your hand and a willing crew to do your commands unquestionably, these are elements that should be experienced to be enjoyed.’ (Barbara Hughes ‘Cruising and small yacht racing on the Solent’ 1898)
In Kingsley’s poem the three stay-at-home wives tend the harbour light but, historically, lighthouse keepers and the crews of light vessels marking the navigational hazards around the British Isles have been male. The official exclusion of women from active participation in almost any aspect of sea-faring life has been far more structural than, say, in agriculture or even mining.
Trinity House, the corporation appointed in 1514 to oversee the safety of mariners around the British Isles – managing lighthouses, light vessels and navigational marks — has its operational headquarters in Harwich. One of the women I interviewed for Stars to Steer By, was Jill Kernick, who now lives in the Isle of Wight. She was the first woman to work at sea for Trinity House – a small personal triumph of the 1980s. Jill was the daughter of a merchant seaman and never wanted to do anything other than follow in her father’s wake. When she was 16, in 1974, she attended her school’s careers fair. Heading straight for the stand run by the General Council of British Shipping she asked about becoming a navigation officer. ‘We don’t have women at sea,’ was the crushing reply.
There was nothing else Jill wanted to do so she stayed at school and studied modern languages at A-level. In 1975, however, the Sex Discrimination Act was passed. Jill began applying to shipping companies for a cadetship, and this time she was successful. She loved her training, and her work as a junior officer on merchant ships, but the advent of containerisation meant that world trading conditions were changing. In 1983 she and many other merchant seafarers were made redundant. Jill didn’t give up. With her second mate’s certificate AND those extra two years at school learning French, she was the only suitably qualified candidate when Trinity House needed to find sea-going supervisors for a cable laying project Sangatte-Folkestone. She thus became their first sea-going female officer.
Keeping a static mid-Channel watch over a cable-laying project wasn’t enough for Jill. She wanted active work on the Trinity House buoy tenders, the vessels constantly employed around the coast, checking and maintaining the navigation marks. This was a skilled, potentially dangerous job – women weren’t suitable, she was told. Jill persisted, certain that she had the necessary courage and agility, and I’m happy to say that the Trinity House senior captain who took her on, recognised her skills and encouraged her initiative, was Essex resident Richard Woodman, distinguished maritime author and Trinity House Elder Brother, who died in October 2024.
Image: Jill Kernick services a navigation mark for Trinity House
Stars to Steer By celebrates more than one hundred 20th century women who went to sea in many different capacities. Generally, this was for adventure and personal challenge rather than employment. A few became famous. I tell the stories of Ann Davison, the first woman to sail alone across the Atlantic; Naomi James, the first to sail alone around the world; Tracy Edwards, the first to lead an all-woman crew in a global race: Heather Thomas, the first to lead an all-woman crew in a global race and win.
These weren’t easy achievements as they all had to battle disbelief and prejudice as well as the natural hazards of the sea. Finding sponsorship was hard: one company wrote to Clare Francis, saying ‘they could not believe that a little thing like me could cross the Atlantic and they would not like to encourage me to do so.’ Clare and Naomi, like Jill Kernick, were making their breakthrough achievements in the mid-1970s, the decade of ‘Women’s Lib’. I was initially surprised that none of them identified with the feminist movement. They were pure individualists, driven by their own sense of adventure and appetite for challenge.
Today, looking back, both Jill and Naomi feel that perhaps they should have shown more awareness. At the time, Naomi explains that she felt then that she needed to separate herself from all the male/female stereotypes that didn’t feel relevant to the person she was – not risk exchanging one set for another by identifying as the champion of a cause. Now she sees feminism as ‘an aspect of equality, which matters to us all’. Clare felt passionately that she should be able to take on a challenge for its intrinsic appeal, rather than being labelled a ‘women’s libber’. Sharon Sites Adams, the former dental assistant from Los Angeles who, in 1969, became the first woman to sail solo across the Pacific, simply ignored the gender argument, commenting, ‘I didn’t see what there was about it that I couldn’t do.’
Sharon’s name is unlikely to be familiar to readers, not only because she’s an American in a book focused on British women, but because, in her time, she was an outlier among outliers. Naomi James or Clare Francis were sailing in the age of Francis Chichester, Robin Knox-Johnston, Alec Rose, Chay Blyth when maritime adventure was still seen as part of the British national psyche and a single-handed round-the-world achievement could merit an instant knighthood. There was no equivalent public interest within Sharon’s American West Coast community. Even so, I have been shocked to discover how easily women’s achievements have been overlooked within our public narrative. An understanding of both the power and the limitations of community may help explain this.
More than a decade ago, I was invited to the EBF to talk about Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory (2012) my biography of detective novelist Margery Allingham’s father, Herbert. Before the Allinghams came out of London to live in Layer Breton Rectory, Essex, Herbert had been a magazine editor. I learned from him how hard magazine editors work to develop a sense of community with their readers. A magazine provides information or entertainment in varying proportions, according to its type, but it also presents its regular readers with a distinctive world. A world shaped as much by the readers’ assumed preferences as by the editor’s personal interests.
The magazine with which I’m most involved is Yachting Monthly, a respected periodical which has been running since 1906. Both my father and uncle wrote for it quite regularly from about 1938 and I feel an instinctive affection towards it. When I took over its book pages, however, I was startled by the absence of books by women. When I looked back further, I found issue after issue with no articles by women, no books by women, no letters from women, no mention of women’s achievements. Yet I knew we existed, I knew we could read and write. I’d been there. During WW2 the magazine was edited by a woman, yet readers were given no hint of her identity and later, when she wrote a couple of instructional books, she used a male pseudonym. She was certain no one would buy them if they knew the author was a woman.
Yachting Monthly was not unusual. During the c20th, the yachting community saw itself as male and the magazine (and others like it) both endorsed and abetted that view. Partly this reflected ‘Corinthian’ ideals of self-reliance, hardihood, adventurousness which were seen as distinctively masculine characteristics. When family cruising became more popular, such holiday sailing was presented in a hierarchical manner, with Dad as Skipper and Mum as Mate (or Cook). Women who wanted some different experience were quietly overlooked.
I noticed this particularly in the case of Nicolette Milnes-Walker, the first woman to sail across the Atlantic alone and without stopping. The national press at the time was full of her achievement, in both Britain and America. The yachting magazines ignored it completely. I could only assume that her face didn’t fit. At the 1972 Boat Show Max Aitken of the Daily Express gave her a special Yachtswoman of the Year award, alongside Chay Blyth, but when I came to check the lists, held by the Yachting Journalists Association, as part of my research, her name had gone and the people I contacted had never heard of her.
Yachting is only one aspect of our relationship with the water. If you’re having a conversation with someone who says they ‘go sailing’ it can take several minutes of delicate probing before you discover whether they’re racing round the cans in a dinghy on a Saturday afternoon, propping up the yacht club bar as soon as the sun ‘goes over the yardarm’, moored for the night up a muddy creek with the water birds calling or setting off to circumnavigate the world. Then there’s fishing, trading, environmental exploration, defence. Essex can provide examples of them all. Yet where are the women in the history of maritime Essex? Stars to Steer By is a celebratory book, highlighting inspirational women from many areas of the British Isles. From Essex there are two women working in the distinctive world of the Thames sailing barges: two different decades, two quite different experiences, saying something, perhaps, about changing social attitudes.
I’ll leave you with an image that I find haunting, it’s about isolation in the midst of community. Burnham-on-Crouch is Essex’s best known yachting centre, ‘the Cowes of the East Coast’. Yacht clubs, moorings, marinas, racing, social and competitive activity – all the attributes of a busy, successful community. Yet Miranda, one of my interviewees for Stars to Steer By, described the first three and a half years of her childhood spent with her mother alone on an old prawning boat in Burnham, swinging with the tide, while her father went to work. He had left his wife and children for Miranda’s mother, who had been disowned by her own family when she became pregnant with Miranda. They had a charcoal stove, no running water and very little money. Once a week they had a bath in one of the yacht clubs. Unsurprisingly Miranda’s mother suffered from depression and later made several suicide attempts.
‘For men must work and women must weep?’
Not necessarily. For Miranda grew strong and rebellious, struck out on her own, managed a successful sailing career, high levels of skill, a happy marriage and two daughters who are developing their own independent careers at sea. A Star to Steer By…
Julia Jones will be discussing her hugely entertaining and inspiring book, Stars to Steer By: Celebrating the 20th Century Women Who Went to Sea, at Frinton Library on Wednesday 11th June 2025.
