Cut adrift or towed astern: sailors’ wives in mid-nineteenth century Portsea Island considered in perspective

Abstract

For nineteenth-century Royal Navy sailors, whalers, fishermen, ferrymen, and merchant seamen, seafaring meant different things: longer or shorter absences at sea, larger or smaller crews, better or worse pay, greater or lesser danger, and differing public perceptions of their seafaring identities. What these mariners had in common was life in a self-contained, almost exclusively male community, surrounded by the sea. Sailors' women, meanwhile, existed in their many thousands on shore, relating to the seafarer as his spouse, mother, grandmother, sister, the parent of his illegitimate child, as foster carer to his motherless offspring, or as purveyor of nursing care, alcohol, or sexual services. They were members of a wider civilian community to whom breadwinner absence was not the norm, and for whom the term “sailors' women” had ambiguous connotations. This paper takes as its focus a community of women in mid-nineteenth-century Portsea Island, Hampshire, whose lives were formally connected with Royal Navy sailors via ties of kinship and financial obligation. It considers these naval women alongside non-seafarers' wives living in the same community, while maritime and military comparators are provided in the form of spouses of New England whalers and Victorian soldiers' wives. Drawing upon naval allotment registers, parish records, census returns, and newspaper reports, it argues that just as seafaring varied from trade to trade, so the lives of “sailors' women” varied more widely than this portmanteau term suggests. It concludes that while our understanding is enhanced by seeing them in terms relative to their menfolk and to other female contemporaries, they should also be considered as women with identities of their own.

Keywords:

• Royal Navy
• naval wives
• seafarers' families
• naval allotments
• sailors' women

Notes

1. Henderson and Carlisle, Marine art and antiques.

2. Creighton and Norling ‘Introduction’, x.

3. Norling, Captain Ahab had a wife; Trustram, Women of the regiment.

4. Burton, ‘Whoring, drinking sailors’, 85.

5. van der Heijden and van den Heuvel, ‘Sailors’ families', 297, 305.

6. In the Scottish east coast herring fishery, ‘herring girls’ – wives and daughters – worked as gutters and packers in large numbers, leaving home to follow the boats, usually by train, from port to port down the coast as the herring shoals migrated southward. Thompson, Wailey and Lummis, Living the fishing; van der Heijden and van der Heuvel, ‘Sailors’ families’; Willson, ‘Icelandic fisher women's experience’.

7. Rodger, Command of the ocean, 407.

8. Lincoln, Naval wives and mistresses, 15; idem, ‘Waiting and hoping’.

9. van der Heijden and van der Heuvel, ‘Sailors’ families', 297.

10. Rodger, Wooden world, 132.

11. Walton, ‘A great improvement', 34–5, 45; Lavery, Able seamen, 20–1.

12. Higgs, ‘Occupations and work', 68.

13. Laslett, The world we have lost, 101, 111; Wrigley and Schofield, Population history of England, 436–7.

14. Rodger, Wooden world, 78.

15. Norling, Captain Ahab had a wife, 65–6.

16. Laslett, ‘Family as a knot’, 355.

17. Trustram, Women of the regiment, 30; St John Williams, Judy O'Grady and the colonel's lady, 63–5.

18. Trustram, Women of the regiment, 31.

19. Dickens, ‘The girls they leave behind them', 545.

20. Hurl-Eamon, ‘Fiction of female dependence', 482.

21. Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1859, Session 1 [2469]: Report … manning the navy.

22. van der Heijden and van der Heuvel, ‘Sailors’ families', 301.

23. Trustram, Women of the regiment, 56; Skelley, Victorian army at home, 70.

24. Trustram, Women of the regiment, 63; Venning, Following the drum, 13, 35–6; Skelley, Victorian army at home, 183–4.

25. Higgs, ‘Occupations and work', 63, 70.

26. Lavery, Able seamen, 85.

27. Ibid.

28. Trustram, Women of the regiment, 105.

29. Brereton, British soldier, 65–6.

30. Dickens, ‘The girls they leave behind them', 545.

31. St John Williams, Judy O'Grady and the colonel's lady, 72–3.

32. Trustram, Women of the regiment, 40.

33. Norling, Captain Ahab had a wife, 156–9.

34. Ibid., 16–17, 36–7, 48, 148–9.

35. Ibid., 123.

36. Ibid., 28, 143–5.

37. Brereton, British soldier, 65–6; Skelley, Victorian army at home, 30.

38. Brereton, British soldier, 49.

39. St John Williams, Judy O'Grady and the colonel's lady, 63, 74.

40. Macmillan, ‘Camp followers’, 90.

41. Trustram, Women of the regiment, 143–4; Venning, Following the drum, 27–8, 34; Hurl-Eamon, ‘Fiction of female dependence', 482; Hurl-Eamon, Marriage and the British army, 41–2.

42. Laslett and Wall, Household and family, 31, 60–2, 126, 150.

43. Rodger, Wooden world, 76–8; Kemp, British sailor, 167–72.

44. Norling, Captain Ahab had a wife, 7, 238.

45. Druett, Hen frigates, 22; Springer, ‘Captain's wife at sea’, 94–6.

46. Norling, Captain Ahab had a wife, 238.