Maid Matelot: a Shout for Freedom
This blog post was written as I was collecting my thoughts for a conversation with Paul Woodadge on WW2TV. Here’s the conversation as recorded on You Tube 6.12.22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucBO2Xpu9m0
INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK ;
Maid Matelot was Rozelle Raynes’ second book. Her cousin, Olympic rower Hugh Matheson, describes it as ‘a shout for freedom’ – which it is, on more than one level.
For a period of just over two years (August 1943-December 1945), Rozelle, born Lady Frederica Rozelle Ridgway Pierrepont, only surviving child of the 6th Earl Manvers and his wife Marie-Louise Roosevelt Butterfield, legitimately escaped the expectations of her parents and her class position when she became 65152 Wren Stocker Pierrepont. She discovered her love of hard manual work and cold sea air and experienced a truly a life-changing moment when she first had the opportunity to take the tiller and felt the ‘glorious harmony of a woman and her boat’. She also understood the difficulties involved. ‘I began to perceive that towing was a very skilful and specialised task and though the skin on my hands was torn to pieces with so much handling of wet ropes, I felt I was doing the most thrilling job in the whole of the British Navy.’
Socially, she discovered the freedom of working together with other young woman and men in a national endeavour. The Second World War was itself a ‘shout for freedom’ and being posted to Southampton Water in the months before D-Day, as the invasion fleet gathered, was a unique experience. Early in the morning of D-Day minus one Rozelle was on the deck of a tug, towing in three broken down landing craft, as she watched the fleet leave for France. ‘Sometimes they merged together into one gigantic grey dot or perhaps it just seemed that way because of the misty curtain that would persist in falling in front of our eyes’.
A few days later, however, when she observed several hundred German prisoners being landed from an Armed Merchant Cruiser, she suddenly realised ‘the indescribable tragedy and horror of war’. She was seeing ‘a pathetic collection of underfed, tired and ill-looking youths wearing the ragged remains of their uniforms with a forlorn and hopeless look in their eyes which made it impossible to view them objectively as the dreaded Huns.’
17-year-old Rozelle was unusual in that she had succeeded in gaining entry as a Boats Crew Wren (there were less than 600 of them). She wasn’t a coxswain or a deck hand but was a stoker. This didn’t involve shovelling coal into furnaces but keeping the Diesel and other internal combustion engines running reliably in all weathers and at all hours. In Maid Matelot she realises what a curious spectacle she and her six wren stoker companions must have made as they made their first entrance into the engine workshops at Flathouse (Portsmouth), clad in their brand-new boiler suits. ‘The noise of the engines running was a solid wall of sound and our nostrils were assailed by a strange mixture of petrol, Diesel oil, lubrication oil, melting grease and warm humanity.’
She’s a fine writer who takes the reader with her as she delivers a small party of liberty men back to their ship on a stormy night in May 1944: ‘It was a pitch-black night with the wind screaming in the rigging like a thousand demented demons. Enormous, white-crested waves reared up out of the blackness and crashed down on our open cutter with an alarming frequency. The five sailors were huddled together up forward, trying to gain a little shelter from the high bows of the boat. It was nearly midnight when we reached A-trot and started our search for the Empire Dockland. Suddenly she loomed above us, a great mountain of a ship, lying head on to the gale so there was no lee-side from which to approach her. We were about four feet away from the flimsy rope ladder on her starboard side when an enormous wave lifted us up and up into the tempestuous night sky, until wer were actually looking down on her deck for a few excruciating seconds […] the last thing we heard as we drew away from that monstrous hull was the voice of the Belgian skipper, shouting into the gale: “Nom d’une sacrée vache! Ce sont des femmes la bas, dans ce bateau!”’
I was talking about Maid Matelot this week in a series called ‘Women Fighters and Resisters’. Perhaps this wasn’t the right place; perhaps you can only be a wartime fighter or resister when in direct contact with a human enemy. Or can we be more nuanced in our thinking? In Requiem for a Wren (1955) Nevil Shute, describing pre-D-Day events in exactly the same area where Rozelle worked, depicts Ordnance Wren, Joan Prentice, breaking a massive taboo when she doesn’t just maintain and load her gun, she pulls its trigger and shoots down a possible enemy plane. During WW2 there were 129 roles available to Wrens. ON December 31st 1945 these reduced to 55. The category of Boat’s Crew Wren was one of those abolished. It was not until 2018 that all roles in UK armed forces were officially open to women.
I would say that there were many women during WW2 and after who were ‘fighters and resisters’ as they challenged their own limitations and the negative expectations of others. In the short term the hands-on work of the Wrens made an appreciable difference to the national war effort. In the longer term the choices and determination shown by women like 65152 Wren Stoker Pierrepont made a difference for themselves and also for other women born later. This was indeed ‘a shout for freedom’.
