Victoria Drummond Engineering trailblazer

A century ago, the barriers facing any woman longing for a career in marine engineering seemed almost insurmountable - but not quite. JO STANLEY introduces a woman who had the talent, bravery and determination to make her mark in the male-dominated maritime world

- JO STANLEY

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 recognized the purple-and-gold epaulets - 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 Markab 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 overcome seemingly impossible odds to reach this position. And she did it all calmly, determinedly, and by dint of her ability, not patronage. Throughout her 30-year fight for the chance to work on ships' engines, she'd been confident in her competence. She took it for granted that gender shouldn't determine what people were allowed to do. She felt normal.

Born in 1894 at Megginch Castle, her ancestral home near Perth, by her teens, Drummond had already developed a fancy for an oily career in the bowels of ships. Her determination was buoyed by both history and family, preceded as she was by many formidable and talented female forebears who had followed "outlandish” paths. As her woodworker grandmother contentedly observed: “That child... might even make an engineer.”