Victoria Drummond Engineering trailblazer
One day in October 1952, an old seafarer watched warily as a uniformed woman approached his ship at Avonmouth docks, on the Somerset coast near Bristol. “Odd – must be a district nurse,” he mused, observing the older woman preparing to board. Or maybe she was collecting alms for a seafarers’ charity?
As she drew closer, he recognised the purple-and-gold epaulettes – could that middle-aged lady really be their new second engineer? The ship had been waiting for this crucial team member – but a senior marine engineer who was also a woman: how could that be?
The men serving on the obscure little tramp steamer SS were about to encounter a 58-year-old living legend: Victoria Drummond – Queen Victoria’s goddaughter, a war hero with an MBE, and one of the most path-breaking women in seafaring and engineering history. The world’s first female seagoing ship’s engineer had felt normal.
