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’.