Late, great engineers: Victoria Drummond - Britain’s seafaring engineer

Few real-life engineers have appeared in comic strips, but in February 1943 True Comics ran the illustrated story of ‘Miss Victoria’ under the banner ‘The Lady is an Engineer’. Published as an educational resource by the Parents’ Institute, the comic operated under the editorial principle that ‘TRUTH is stranger and a thousand times more thrilling than FICTION’. In the case of Victoria Drummond, the UK’s first woman marine engineer, who overcame prejudice and discrimination, who oversaw the building of ships and was decorated for bravery under enemy fire, the publisher’s slogan is, in fact, entirely applicable.

Drummond’s 1979 obituary in Lloyd’s List goes some way to explaining, beyond simply being a sign of the times, why the True Comics copywriter preferred the word ‘lady’ to ‘woman’ for the title of the piece. As a member of the aristocracy, ‘her family – the Drummonds of Megginch, near Errol in Scotland – were active in Court circles’. Her biographer and niece, Cherry Drummond, 16th Baroness Strange, observed in The Remarkable Life of Victoria Drummond – Marine Engineer that the transition from her privileged background to her chosen profession was not a smooth one. Neither did her position of social influence nor her ‘wholehearted approval’ encourage her to campaign on behalf of women’s rights. ‘I had no time to waste being an active suffragette’, she said. ‘Instead of chaining myself to railings, or hacking up golf courses, I was determined to do something that no woman had done before in Great Britain. I determined to become a Second Engineer in the Merchant Navy’.

Victoria Drummond (1894-1978)

Victoria Alexandrina Drummond was born in 1894 in the last decade of the reign of the queen she shared her name with, and who was also her godmother. Her father was Captain Malcolm Drummond of Megginch, a fifteenth century castle in what was then Perthshire in central Scotland, as well as being Groom in Waiting to Queen Victoria. The family motto was marte at arte – which translates roughly as ‘by fighting or skill’. Victoria’s brother John (later 15th Baron Strange and London restaurateur) rendered it more colloquially as ‘by hook or by crook’. This seemed particularly apt when her gilded upbringing was reined in by the family’s wealth taking a hit in the Panic of 1907 financial crisis.

According to her biographer, the young Victoria would visit the engineering works of Robert Morton and Sons at Errol, where she made enquiries into how to become a marine engineer. Lloyd’s List describes how ‘instead of following the accepted paths for young ladies of good family, Miss Drummond showed from an early age a most un-girlish interest in things mechanical’. By the early years of the Great War, Drummond was apprenticed to the Northern Garage in Perth where her foreman, who had worked in the Clyde shipyards, supported her ambition to go to sea. After which she was taken on by the Caledon Shipbuilding & Engineering Company in Dundee, working as a pattern maker for metal casting, over time moving up to the finishing shop and the drawing office.

During her three-year stint at Caledon she joined the recently founded Women’s Engineering Society and was elected a graduate of the Institute of Marine Engineers. After being made redundant, Drummond went to Blue Funnel where she made her first trip to sea (from Liverpool to Glasgow) aboard the passenger liner Anchises as Tenth Engineer. The ship on which she served until 1924 would later take her to Australia and China. As her biographer notes, most of the crew and passengers had a positive attitude to having a woman engineer on board. But the suspicion of impropriety between her and Second Engineer Malcolm Quayle (which Drummond emphatically denied) ultimately led to her departure from both Anchises and Blue Funnel.

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By October 1926 Drummond had got her Second Engineer’s Certificate and, in so doing, became Britain’s first certified female marine engineer. Despite which work was scarce, and she was only able to find work as Fifth Engineer in the British-India Steam Navigation Company’s Mulbera, on which she travelled to East Africa, India and Ceylon. Again her experience at sea was mixed, with the Second Engineer hostile to her presence, while passengers who had doubted her status as engineer were won over by her competence.

Leading up to the Second World War she found herself on shore living in Lambeth close to her sister Jean and living with her other sister Frances, with whom she operated a business selling freshwater fish called Golden Fisheries. During this time she repeatedly failed her Board of Trade examination for Chief Engineer. Her biographer states that she was failed because she was a woman. She would fail the exam 31 times before passing the Panamanian chief engineer’s exam, for which the examiners did not require data on the candidate’s gender.

When war broke out in 1939, despite an unblemished record and glowing references from her superior officers in the Merchant Navy, Drummond was unable to find employment as a Second Engineer, and so enlisted with her sisters as air raid wardens in Lambeth. Hoping to find a ship to take her, Drummond visited the Royal Docks in east London where she ran into a crewmate from Mulbera in a café. This chance meeting led to her being given a berth on an old cargo ship registered to the Protectorate of Cyprus called Har Zion. After a baptism of fire with an undisciplined crew, and a clash with the Third Engineer, on its return to London in July 1940 Drummond left the ship. The following month Har Zion was sunk by the German submarine U-38 with the loss of all but one of the 37 aboard.

By 1941 Drummond appears to have become famous as a woman engineer. In Lambeth an ambulance was named after her, paid for with funds raised from public readings by the future American Poet Laureate Robert Frost. Also named after her was the Victoria A. Drummond Canteen close to Lambeth North tube station which provided cheap meals for local residents whose homes had been destroyed by enemy bombing. From this point on to the end of the war Drummond served on several ships including: Danae II (‘the worst ship I ever sailed in’), Perseus (where she was bullied by the Second Engineer), Karabagh (whose Master, Captain Charlton, proposed to her), and Bonita on which she was described by the First Mate Mr Warner as ‘the most courageous woman I ever saw’. For her part on this difficult voyage she was awarded the MBE, given to her by George VI. Under constant threat of attack, a page from one of her service logs reads in part: ‘8 lots of great explosions & machine gun fire – all around. Great vibration.’ Meanwhile the mansion block Restormel House where she lived close to the Oval cricket ground had been bombed.

Drummond spent her post-war years up until retirement in 1962 at sea, often as either Chief or Second Engineer with various shipping companies and bringing her career total of ocean voyages to 49. In 1952 she supervised shipbuilding in Scotland with the Burntisland Shipbuilding Company, overseeing completion of the Master Nicos through to launch. It was a career development she had hoped to nurture, but she was often sent by her employers back to sea or took leave to spend time in London with her sisters.

The last three years of her career were occupied with the Jebshun Shipping Company of Hong Kong, where she worked on unreliable ships, often with safety issues: the Grelrosa needed extensive work to pass its Lloyd’s inspection; the Shantae caught fire en route to Hong Kong, and the Shun Fung had been laid up and needed extensive work to make the vessel seaworthy. Her final ship, Santa Granda, had structural problems with Number One Hold so severe that it was at one point minutes from sinking. After getting the ship to Hong Kong for repairs, Drummond found herself in conflict with the owners. When she advised them that it would fail the Lloyd’s inspection, they immediately transferred the insurance from Lloyd’s to a French company.

In protest Drummond handed in her notice and returned to London where in retirement she spent the next twelve years with her sisters in Lambeth, attending meetings of the Institute of Marine Engineers and writing her memoirs. In 1974 she broke her leg and was admitted to St Thomas’ Hospital. Drummond recovered physically but had deteriorated mentally and died in St George’s Retreat nursing home in Burgess Hill on Christmas Day 1978. She is buried at Megginch Castle beside her sisters.