Celebrating Victoria Drummond: A Pioneer in Marine Engineering and Resilience.

I’m writing this column on the birthday of one of the most unusual and inspiring characters in engineering history. She was born in a Scottish castle near Perth into a family of the landed gentry and was named after her godmother who was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Despite her noble beginnings Victoria Drummond clearly had an aptitude for hands-on engineering. As a young girl she enjoyed making wooden toys and models and is said to have won prizes for them. Aged 21 she started an apprenticeship in a garage in Perth and two years later transferred her training to the Caledon Shipbuilding yard in Dundee, where she served her time in the pattern shop for the foundry and in the finishing shop. After two more years she completed her apprenticeship and spent further time as a journeyman engine builder and then in the drawing office at Caledon. When the yard hit hard times a couple of years later she was laid off, but managed to get a place with the Blue Funnel line in Liverpool and after a short trial voyage she was signed on as tenth engineer (the bottom rung of the ladder) on a passenger liner sailing between England and Australia.

After completing two years’ service with Blue Funnel she passed her second engineer’s ticket, but could only find work as a fifth engineer sailing on a cargo ship between England, East Africa and India. She sat the Chief Engineer’s examination in England 37 times over a 10-year period—eventually the Board of Trade representatives admitted that they always failed her because she was a woman, but in order to avoid accusations of bias they failed all the other candidates who sat the exam at the same time as her.

One month before her 45th birthday war was declared. Despite her excellent qualifications, experience and record, Victoria could not get a berth in the British Merchant Navy, so she signed on with a Palestinian cargo and passenger ship and then with a Panamanian freighter. While sailing to the United States the freighter was attacked by enemy aircraft. Despite some damage to the boiler feed water pipes due to several near misses she managed to raise the output of the engines, enabling the ship to reach 12.5 knots, nearly 40% faster than it had ever gone before. This was done single-handed, as she had ordered the engine-room crew to go up on deck in case they had to abandon ship. The ship survived the half hour bombardment and docked in Norfolk, Va. on Sept. 8, For her part in this remarkable escape, Victoria Drummond was awarded the MBE and the Lloyd’s War Medal for Bravery at Sea, although her diary for the day of the attack simply says “Three great explosions on the port side when bombs fell….made temporary repairs.”

For the rest of the war Victoria continued to sail with a variety of cargo ships, including as refrigeration engineer on a voyage from Liverpool to New York, Panama, Australia South Africa, Sierra Leone and Gibraltar, returning to Liverpool eight months after setting off. She also sailed on the brutal Arctic convoys to Northern Russia and after D-Day she spent several months on supply ships in the English Channel. After the war she worked for Blue Funnel and Cunard-White Star, supervising construction of new ships back at the Caledon yard in Dundee and sailing as Chief Engineer for a variety of companies. She celebrated her fifty-ninth birthday as Chief Engineer on a freighter sailing from England to Belgium (via Suez, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Black Sea, the USA, the Caribbean, Argentina and Brazil). She continued to sail the world for a further eight years and finally signed off in Hong Kong on March 30, 1962—at the age of 67 and a half.

Throughout her long career as a marine engineer Victoria Drummond battled and overcame bias, prejudice and red-tape; principally by being exceptionally good at what she did. She was not afraid to stand up for herself and spoke out against low standards wherever she found them. She won the respect of the majority of the crews who served with her and she was said to have an “uncanny power over engines.” She died on Christmas Day 40 years ago. Remember her example and pass on her legacy this Christmas.