Preliminary Programme

Royal Navy sailors’ women have long been portrayed as hard-drinking and debauched ‘Pompey brutes’ who ruthlessly exploited sailors via port-town theft, specious marriage and/or prostitution. The trope has rarely been challenged, and is little explored in naval, social and gender history, yet still the image lingers. What lay behind it?
This paper looks at the reality of life for sailors’ women in mid-nineteenth-century Portsmouth. Drawing on recent doctoral research, it focuses on a cohort of over 1500 individuals, all of them dependants of lower-deck men, and identified via Royal Navy allotment registers. The allotment system was intended to enable sailors at sea to support their families at home by paying a monthly cash allowance to men’s approved nominees while ships were at sea. The system’s structure and regulation meant it was no guarantee against hardship, however, and there is evidence of poverty among the naval community. But agency born of exigency is identifiable in allottees’ strategies for survival and making ends meet, as evidenced in patterns of nuptial age, post-nuptial migration, and conception of children – patterns which differ from those of the women’s civilian peers. There is evidence too of the women’s adopting unorthodox household structures and patterns of co-residence, and operating with a self-determination, independence and domestic responsibility unusual for females in Victorian society. These findings may be interpreted as evidence of mutual understanding and self-help between women facing the shared challenge of breadwinner absence; within the context of the period, however, all this may have contributed to the abiding image of Jack Tar’s woman as the ‘Pompey brute’ of ill repute. In adopting pragmatic survival tactics eschewed by the respectable sort, the naval wife reinforced popular prejudices, and reinforced perceptions of the naval community as ‘other’, a near-tribal and alien community-within-a-community in naval port towns. (Show less)

The landlady is a general neglected actor in historical research. She is ever present in fiction though – Mrs Hudson of Baker Street 221B is one of many examples. Historians have studied the housing market but not paid any attention to the women that let out rooms even though lodging was a very common way of living during the period 1850-1950. The landlady had the double function of being businesswoman and servant at the same time. And her work is both related to class and gender relations.
I propose a study of this occupation within sailortown. Sailors on leave or those that had left their ships often lived with boarding masters. There are quite a lot written about this institution, and social reformers, unions and seaman chaplans of the day often complained about the ruthless exploitation of seamen. But very little has been written about the large number of landladies in sailortown.
In Gothenburgh I have come across landladies through Census records and the daily minutes of the Police. Of the seafarers arrested in 1920, a large proportion of them stayed with landladies. From the Census records (1880 and 1910), many of the seafarers also were registered as lodgers. But who are those women that made a living from letting out rooms to sailors?
From the records it is possible to pinpoint addresses for landladies – Mrs Nilsson at Second Longstreet nr 37 is a woman that occurs again and again. And there are many more like her.
All people that had a business had to register with the municipality, also the landladies. By comparing those with Census records and Police records, it is possible to create a (social) network of landladies in sailortown. This kind of network might have been a parallel, and a better option, than to stay with a Boarding master? (Show less)

Naval port towns were regarded as potent symbols of the strength of empire. Yet beneath this image of imperial power, contemporaries were concerned about the vice associated with the infamous ‘sailortown’ areas which often could be found close to the waterfront. Sailortown’s association with heavy drinking, prostitution, and raucous behaviour seemed to flout conventional moral and civic norms. Social reformers as well as civic and naval authorities therefore regarded these areas of maritime-urban culture as netherworlds, as spaces characterised by a sense of Otherness, which needed to be closely policed. At the heart of this perception of Otherness was a shared culture between the naval sailors and the civilians who lived and worked in these sailortowns.
By examining imperial Germany’s two main naval ports, Kiel on the Baltic Sea and Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea coast, this paper will explore how authorities tried to contain sailortown and its culture. It will argue that these efforts, however, were not always successful as naval sailors and civilians challenged the enforced social, moral, and spatial boundaries of sailortown. While the raucous behaviour of naval sailors could spill out into respectable areas of the towns, some women who were accused of being prostitutes sought to evade the authorities or tried to contest allegations of immorality. This paper will thus highlight the agency of ordinary people in their interactions with local and military authorities. (Show less)