Finished with Engines: the life of Victoria Drummond, marine engineer

A thirty-minute lecture. About 3,900 words, which is thirty minutes at a measured 130 words a minute. Timings in the margin are cumulative. Page numbers refer to The Remarkable Life of Victoria Drummond, Marine Engineer by Cherry Drummond (Institute of Marine Engineers, 1994), from which every quotation is taken.

Draft status: written from an uncorrected OCR of the book. Every quotation and date should be checked against the printed page before delivery. See README.md for the list of things to verify.

The opening uses the Engineering Icons Tube Map (Transport for London and the Royal Academy of Engineering, 1 November 2023); see Sources in README.md.

0. The apron (before the clock starts)

Walk on wearing the Tube map apron. Slide 1 is the ordinary Tube map. Say nothing until they have noticed.

You will have seen this map before. Some of you are wearing it. It is Harry Beck’s diagram of the London Underground, and I want you to hold it in your heads for a moment, because three years ago Transport for London and the Royal Academy of Engineering did something to it.

Slide 2: the Engineering Icons map.

For National Engineering Day, the first of November 2023, they took every one of the 274 stations on the Tube and the Elizabeth line and gave it the name of an engineer. Each line became a theme. The Central line is life and health. The Northern line is computing. Harry Beck himself is Oxford Circus. Brunel is Ealing Common. Ada Lovelace is Warren Street. And on the Piccadilly line, the dark blue one, the theme is transport, mobility and flight.

Slide 3: zoomed in.

Green Park has become Sir Frank Whittle, who invented the jet engine. One stop towards Knightsbridge, where Hyde Park Corner ought to be, is a name most people in that carriage would not recognise: Victoria Drummond. The small star beside her name means she was given a national honour. She is the only marine engineer I can find on the map. This is who she was.

Slide 4: title. Start the clock.

1. Christmas Day, 1978 (0:00 to 2:00)

On Christmas Day 1978, in a nursing home in Sussex run by nuns, an old lady of eighty-four died. She had been silent for years. A week earlier her niece had brought her a branch of holly from the family home in Scotland, hung with silver balls, and the old lady had looked at it, smiled, and said one word: “Christmas.”

Her niece wrote that she was surely dreaming of Christmases long past. Christmas in the South China Sea. The Christmas lights of Hong Kong. Hot Christmases under the Southern Cross on a coal-burning steamer in 1922. And Christmases longer ago still, at Megginch Castle in Perthshire, singing carols round the tree in the hall, wearing the pendant that her godmother had given her at her christening.

Her godmother was Queen Victoria.

The old lady was Victoria Drummond. Between 1922 and 1962 she made forty-nine voyages as a ship’s engineer. She was the first woman in Britain to hold a Board of Trade certificate as a marine engineer. She was bombed in the Atlantic and kept her engines turning, alone in the engine room, for which she received the MBE and Lloyd’s War Medal for Bravery at Sea. She sat the examination for Chief Engineer thirty-one times and was failed every time, because she was a woman. She sailed as Chief anyway, under foreign flags, and took her last ship through the China Sea at the age of sixty-seven.

Her niece ended the biography with the two phrases an engineer rings down on the telegraph at the end of a voyage. “Finished with Engines.” And then, perhaps, as her spirit left the land, “Full Away.”

Tonight I want to tell you how she got from the nursery at Megginch to the engine room, and what it cost her.

2. A godmother and a nursery carpet (2:00 to 6:00)

She was born on the fourteenth of October 1894, the second of three daughters of Captain Malcolm Drummond of Megginch, who was an Equerry to the Queen. Everyone had wanted a boy. In her own words: “At the time, the Queen was the only person who had rejoiced at my birth. Everyone else had wanted a boy and were disappointed when I arrived. However, the Queen wired: REJOICE AT BIRTH OF LITTLE DAUGHTER.” (page 27)

She was christened Victoria Alexandrina, and the Queen sent a jewelled pendant. It lived in her father’s safe and came out on birthdays and at Christmas. But she wrote, of her childhood: “A daisy chain was as valuable to me as the jewelled pendant my godmother had given me at my christening. But inside me I always had a feeling of being different from my sisters because my godmother was Queen Victoria.” (page 1)

Megginch is in the Carse of Gowrie, between Perth and Dundee, and the family had been there since the seventeenth century. There was an admiral among the ancestors, and a captain in the East India Company whose ship, the General Elliot, turned on the weathervane. In the nursery the carpet was the sea. A cardboard lifeboat put out from the coastguard station to rescue ships wrecked on the table legs, and on one occasion the kitten became a white horse to pull it down the slipway.

Two grandparents matter to the story. Her grandmother, Lady Amherst, worked a lathe and belonged to the Worshipful Company of Turners. Watching the small girl at the lathe, she said: “That child has neat fingers. Some day I will teach her to turn. She might even make an engineer.” (page 25)

And there was the sawmill at Didlington, the Amherst house in Norfolk, where the child polished nuts and bolts and, one day, chalked a diagram on the board to show how she thought the engine worked. “Of course there were many corrections from the mastermind in charge, but he agreed the engine did work like that.” (page 33)

Aged about eleven, in a holland pinafore and a pink sunbonnet, she went to Morton’s engineering works at Errol and asked the proprietor, “How can I learn to be an engineer and go to sea?” He told her, smiling, that she would have to serve an apprenticeship. She noted that he smiled at the sunbonnet, and did not think he took her seriously. (page 36)

Two things then happened to the comfortable world. In 1906 the Amherst agent gambled away the family fortune and shot himself; Didlington was sold and, as she put it, “The whole solid background of my childhood vanished as if it had never been.” (page 39) And in 1914 came the war. She was presented at Court in 1913, danced at the Atholl Gathering, and went to Normandy with her father in the summer of 1914. “I think we all knew,” she wrote, “it was the end of a golden age.” (page 51)

3. Three shillings a week (6:00 to 10:00)

On her twenty-first birthday, the fourteenth of October 1915, her father said: “Now you are twenty-one, you can choose your own career.” She answered, “I’m going to be a marine engineer.” She added, “I don’t think he took me seriously.” (page 53)

She meant it. On Monday the eighteenth of October 1916, after a week’s trial, she started as an apprentice at the Northern Garage in South Street, Perth, at three shillings a week. She cycled the ten miles home to Megginch each evening and went to evening classes at Dundee Technical College. The foreman, Mr Malcolm, had been a Chief Engineer on the Clyde. His advice on the first day was this: “What you don’t understand, ask, and try and keep all your fingers. Remember always, a hand for yourself and a hand for your master.” (page 55)

She was burned by solder, blown up by a blow-lamp, and broke her collar bone and ribs when a ten-ton lorry came off its jacks. She summed the years up in one line: “Every one’s apprenticeship days are much the same. One is always black, hungry and tired by the end of each day.” (page 55)

Notice how the family dealt with it. This was war work, which made a lady in a boiler suit socially possible. Her Aunt Ayia, who ran a tea barrow at Perth station that served a million and a half cups of tea to troop trains, introduced her proudly: “This is my niece Victoria, who is doing war work in a garage.” (page 55)

But a garage does not make a marine engineer. In 1918 she went to the Caledon Shipbuilding yard in Dundee. The manager said, “So you want to be a marine engineer and go to sea. Just sit down and tell me about it.” (page 60) She started in the pattern shop under a foreman who had been an apprentice when the first Tay Bridge was built, bought her own tools for just under five pounds, and made a box for them. She moved on to the finishing shop, to valve gear, to the drawing office, and to trial trips on the Tay. Once she climbed the yard crane, and stayed up until the head of the firm telephoned to order her down.

Her fellow workmen, she wrote, “gradually got used to the idea of having a woman working with them.” (page 63) Rather more than that: “Very often I was given a piece of cake in the afternoon, or a paper of sweeties was slipped in my tool box by a workmate. There was no doubt that I was being spoilt by everyone!” (page 67)

In 1920 came the works test: file a two-inch steel cube true, using only a file, a rule and a square. “He sent for me the next morning and told me I had passed top. It was under two thousandth out with micrometer on all sides. I was delighted.” (page 71)

And there was a promise. On the platform at Dundee West station her father had introduced her to Mr Wirtley, a director of the Blue Funnel Line. “Let me know when you have finished your apprenticeship, and I promise you, I will give you a ship.” Mr Wirtley died before she finished. In 1922, in the slump, the Caledon yard laid her off. She went to Liverpool, and Blue Funnel honoured a dead man’s promise.

4. Tenth Engineer, SS Anchises (10:00 to 14:00)

Blue Funnel’s steamers were coal burners. The Anchises had twenty-four fires. She signed on as Tenth Engineer at ten pounds a month. “I don’t think I shall ever forget,” she wrote, “the feeling of excited elation on signing my first articles.” (page 75) It was only afterwards that she went back to the office: “Excuse me, sir, but I forgot to ask where she is going?” “Australia!” was the reply. (page 77)

They sailed from Glasgow on the second of September 1922, by way of Cape Town to Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. She kept the four-to-eight watch, scaled evaporators, overhauled pumps, and measured the coal in the bunkers with the Chief. A fortnight out she slipped at the top of the fifty-foot ladder in the after well, and a greaser caught her by the shoulder. The Chief banned her from the well.

The passengers were a separate world. One lady said to her, “You must find it hot working in that, but I suppose you wear white linen in the engine room!” (page 82) In Brisbane she was the guest of the Governor. The Australian Institute of Engineers gave her a gold brooch in the shape of a rudder. She came home to Birkenhead in January 1923 and wrote: “I felt quite proud of myself, having made a voyage half round the world as Tenth Engineer. No one ever thought I would stick it out, but I did.” (page 92)

She made five more voyages in the Anchises. The Second Engineer, Mr Quayle, whom she called the Hedgehog, became the closest friend of her working life. He teased her without mercy. The Chief once wrote a mock entry in the log: “Between Cape Town and Adelaide Miss Drummond attacked the Second Engineer and hit him in the engine room. You will be put in irons and tried in Australia.” (page 95) The evidence was a scratch from a file.

The 1924 voyage went east, to Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. At Singapore a telegram told her that her father had died. The engine room stood at a hundred and six to a hundred and eighteen degrees. “I only fainted three times from the heat,” she wrote. “All the same I did not miss my watch.” (page 107)

At the end of that voyage she asked Blue Funnel for a reference to sit her Second Engineer’s certificate, and they let her go. When she had passed, at the third attempt, they would not take her back. “It was a great shock to me that they would not have me. I suppose they feared a scandal.” (page 112)

She was now the first woman in Britain to hold a Board of Trade certificate as a marine engineer. It was October 1926, the month she turned thirty-two.

5. The Tiger and the Hedgehog (14:00 to 17:00)

Lord Inchcape’s British India Line took her, as Fifth Engineer of the Mulbera, a nine-thousand-ton oil-fired turbine ship on the East Africa and India runs. Her own comment on the interview was characteristic. The company said, “Your powers of persuasion have prevailed,” and she replied, “It is now up to me to do my best.” (page 112)

The Second Engineer of the Mulbera was Mr Lamb, known as the Tiger. “He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He told me on the first day that he didn’t want me there and since then had been alternately kind or nasty.” (page 121) In Calcutta he put her on night work, eighty-four hours a week; she lost two and a half stone in three weeks. A passenger was heard to say, “I am sorry for Miss Drummond, having to work with so many of her social inferiors!” (page 124)

Then there is my favourite exchange in the whole book. At Colombo a colonel demanded, “What are you?” “An Engineer Officer of this ship.” “But can you do it? Can you mend it?” “That is what I am here for.” (page 135)

In April 1928 the Hedgehog died of pneumonia aboard the Anchises and was buried at Cape Town. The news reached her at Aden. “It just knocked the bottom out of things for me and my whole career felt like a collapsing pack of cards.” (page 139) He had told her once that “you are never down until you say it yourself.” (page 140) She stayed aboard to complete the sea time she needed, and left the Mulbera in December 1928 with a reference that called her “attentive to her duties, civil, willing and obliging. She is of exemplary character.” (page 150)

She had her sea time. All she needed now was the Chief Engineer’s certificate.

6. Thirty-one times (17:00 to 20:00)

In October 1929 she sat the Board of Trade examination for Chief Engineer and failed. She sat it again in 1930 and failed. Then, as she put it, she failed “with the utmost regularity.” Her old teacher, Mr Martin of Dundee, coached her year after year. “If only I could do a perfect paper,” she wrote, “then they would not be able to fail me.” (page 155) Mr Martin would ask, “What did they fail you for this time?” (page 155)

In 1936 he confronted one of the examiners, a Mr Pemberton, who admitted privately that “it was a question of sex. They would not pass me because I was a woman. The examiners would not admit this but had told Mr Martin privately.” (page 161)

Meanwhile she had to live. There was no ship for a woman in the Depression. She and her sister Frances imported goldfish, trading as Golden Fisheries from their house at 143 Kennington Road in Lambeth. She mended cars, took photographs, and bought on commission at the trade fairs in Leipzig, Prague and Vienna.

She was in Vienna in March 1938, the week of the Anschluss. She refused to give the Hitler salute, and when a German soldier laid hands on her: “Like a flash, I turned and hit him squarely with my strong left hand, as hard as I could.” (page 166) Afterwards a sentry asked, “Was he not wonderful?” She said coldly, “There were so many people, we did not know which one he was.” (page 169)

Over the years she sat that examination thirty-one times. She never passed it. Hold on to that number, because in a moment the same Ministry will tell her what to do with her talents.

7. Bonita, 25 August 1940 (20:00 to 25:00)

When war came she wrote to the Board of Trade, to the Ministry, to every shipping company, enclosing her certificates and references. “No one would have me. They might be short staffed, but that was no reason to employ a woman engineer. And certainly not in war time.” (page 177) So she became an air raid warden in Lambeth.

An old donkeyman from the Mulbera gave her the advice that shaped the rest of her life: “If the Red Duster won’t have you, go foreign.” (page 178) In March 1940 she signed on as Second Engineer of the Har Zion, a tramp with a crew of Spaniards, Hungarians, Czechs and Germans. Naval inspectors came aboard and, she wrote, “looked amazed and disgusted. ‘Fancy having a woman Second, you can see it’s a foreign ship!’ I was rather amused.” (page 181) The Har Zion was later lost with all hands but one.

In August 1940 she joined the Bonita, seven thousand tons, Panamanian flag, Hungarian captain, as Second Engineer. She loaded china clay at Fowey and sailed on the twenty-third of August, unescorted, for America.

On Sunday the twenty-fifth, at five to nine in the morning, about three hundred miles out, a four-engined German bomber found her. It made four passes over thirty-five minutes. It dropped twenty-five bombs and machine-gunned the decks between them. In the engine room the water-service pipe fractured and the voice pipe to the bridge was blown away. She sent the fireman and the greaser up on deck. “‘Get out,’ I shouted. The ship must be doomed, I knew that now. My duty was to keep the engines going as long as they would turn.” (page 187) And she stayed there alone. “Was this the end, I wondered, banged and buffeted in this inferno of noise and steam? It didn’t seem a good way to go.” (page 187)

The Bonita normally made nine knots. With the near misses lifting the stern and the safety valves screaming, she coaxed her up to twelve and a half, and the captain used the speed to dodge. The bomber ran out of bombs and went home. The mate, a man called Warner, kept a diary that the newspapers printed. He asked her how she had done it, and she told him: “Oh, I just talk nicely to them. You can coax or lead engines to do what you want, but you must never drive them.” (page 189) Warner’s own verdict was this: “She gave them a chance for their lives and stayed alone where she knew she had none.” (page 189)

They reached Norfolk, Virginia, where the press made her a heroine and the ladies of the city raised money for a canteen in Lambeth in her name. She came home in a convoy of thirty-nine ships from Halifax. Four arrived.

In July 1941 she went to Buckingham Palace for the MBE. In September Lloyd’s gave her their War Medal for Bravery at Sea. Her comment: “Nobody seemed to want me I thought. But Lloyds of London did.” (page 202)

In between, she wrote to the Ministry of Shipping. She had by now a Panamanian Chief’s certificate but not a British one. She pointed out that she had sat the British examination thirty-one times, and asked for an oral. “I want to be all the help I can during the war period. I would rather go down with a Chief’s certificate than with a Second’s.” (page 197) The reply from Mr Isaac at the Ministry suggested that “your talents would be equally well employed, for example, in the training of women as assistant engineers ashore.” (page 197) She wrote back that on her last ship the Chief had been “totally incapacitated, apparently through nerves, under enemy action,” and she had taken full charge. Her own summary: “I was a better and more experienced engineer than many then serving under Chief’s tickets. But I was a woman and they would not let me pass the exam.” (page 198)

She served through the rest of the war: attacked again by a Focke-Wulf Condor in the Czikos, where she chased her own watch back down the ladder; eight months round the world in a Blue Funnel ship as refrigeration engineer; and finally in the tanker Karabagh on the D-Day run, and at Antwerp on VE Day with ten thousand tons of aviation spirit under her feet. “You would make a fine bonfire!” another ship signalled. “‘Well done, Miss Drummond,’ said Captain Charlton, and I felt quite pleased at that, and quite pleased, too, that I had survived the war.” (page 223)

8. Chief at last (25:00 to 28:00)

After the war she was in her fifties, without a British Chief’s ticket, and in her own words “tired of sailing on small, dirty boats with often disagreeable Chiefs.” (page 239) So she went foreign, for good.

On the twenty-fifth of April 1948 she sailed for the first time as Chief Engineer, in the Eastern Med, which she described as “a rotten old tub, built in 1909.” (page 232) Then came a Norwegian run to the White Sea in the Elsie Beth, with frostbite; a Maltese ship raised from a wartime sinking; a Chief in Trieste who told her, “I hate having you here and I would not have done if the owner had not insisted.” Her answer: “All right, get another Second.” (page 233)

In 1952 a Greek owner had her supervise the building of a ship at Burntisland, and then, on the thirty-first of January 1953, at Aarhus in Denmark, she joined the Markab as Chief Engineer. Ten thousand tons. Panamanian flag, Lascar crew. “I was preparing for the excitement of going through the Suez Canal as Chief Engineer of a 10,000 ton boat, something I had wished for all my life.” (page 243) That voyage took her to Japan, to Communist China, to Romania and Turkey, through an Atlantic hurricane with nine thousand tons of iron ore in the holds, and to Buenos Aires. She was paid sixty-four pounds a month. Her Second Engineer, who bullied her all the way round, was paid a hundred.

In 1956, after her mother died, and after one more attempt to get the Board of Trade, her MP, the Institute and even Winston Churchill to move on the certificate, she gave up. “I had sat the examination 31 times and each time I had been failed. The only reason I had failed was because they did not want to give a woman a Chief’s Certificate. So I decided not to take the exam again.” (page 280)

9. The China years (28:00 to 30:00)

In 1959, aged sixty-four, she became Chief Engineer of the Grelrosa, a ten-thousand-ton ship of the Jeb-Shun company of Hong Kong, laid up for eighteen months at Milford Haven. She was the only engineer aboard until the Chinese crew flew in. “One of them brought me a bunch of flowers; I was very touched.” (page 288) They took her with scrap iron to Japan, to Hainan, to Dairen in the bitter cold, where she thawed the pipes with a paraffin torch, and to Shanghai and Hong Kong. When the owner met the ship he said, “So you are Chief, and the little ship got here all right.” She wrote: “I sat at the head of the table surrounded by my Chinese engineers; I felt very proud.” (page 299)

In the same ship, renamed Shantae, she fought a fire in the hold at sea in March 1960, and remembered the magic-lantern picture of a burning ship she had seen as a child. In the Shun Fung, “the happiest ship,” she went through Suez again as Chief and thought of the Tiger, and of the Hedgehog: “So often then and in the Mulbera I had thought, ‘Some day I shall go through the Canal as Chief.’ And now there were so many times that I had.” (page 319) She was on deck for Typhoon Alice in Hong Kong harbour in May 1961: “I was soaked through, bruised all over, very black, splashed all over with oil and very tired.” (page 334)

Her last ship was the Santa Granda, a rusting Liberty ship. In December 1961, in the China Sea, she found ten frames corroded through in the forward hold and the plates working. She told the captain to make for the nearest port and stood a double watch below for four days until they reached Whampoa. “I was never more glad in my life to have arrived at any port, so thankful, so very very thankful.” (page 341)

She paid off on the thirty-first of March 1962, aged sixty-seven. Her fuel and stores accounts were correct to a figure. Her Chinese Second Engineer came to her in tears: “Take me with you, Chief, take me with you! Never another Chief the same, Chief very, very good.” (page 336) The crew gave her a silver junk. “This had been my last voyage and the Santa Granda my last ship,” she wrote, “but I did not know that then.” (page 351)

10. Full Away (closing)

She lived on with her sisters at the house in Kennington Road, and once a year went to the Institute of Marine Engineers for the annual meeting, where people remember an old lady who “listened avidly to all the engineering lectures and took notes in an old exercise book.” They did not know who she was. The Institute named a room after her in its old building in Mark Lane; the building has gone, but her name is now on the Tube map.

She never got the piece of paper. She got the job done, forty-nine times, in every ocean, in peace and in war, and she left one sentence that the dust jacket of her biography rightly puts first. If you are good at something, and can be of useful service, then you should be allowed to do your job.

Finished with Engines. Full Away.