Diving into history, you might think we need to haul up figures like Eily Keary from the depths of obscurity because they were overlooked in their time. However, our friend and Eily Keary expert, Dr. Jo Stanley ARINA, has unearthed a treasure trove of old newspaper clippings proving that, back in her day, Eily was respected by her male contemporaries for her ability to “rough it at sea”.
We’re not just giving her the recognition she deserved in hindsight; she was making waves in her own era, as was the only other woman in marine technology: the celebrated seagoing engineer, Victoria Drummond.
“In March 1930, Eily Keary, a pioneering woman naval architect since 1915, was finally celebrated in a spate of syndicated newspaper articles about her talents,” Stanley explains. “Even the mighty Journal of Commerce devoted a paragraph to her. This is the first time that any such women’s seagoing experiences had been revealed.
“Men’s very positive responses to Eily are remarkable for that period. By contrast, one of Eily’s later successors had to sneak shipboard time in the dock on Saturdays, when the workforce wasn’t there to object to her presence.”
Stanley, currently a consultant for the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Heritage and Education Centre’s ‘Rewriting Women into Maritime History’ project, continues: “But Eily was special in being in naval architecture. Even better, she’d got there entirely under her own steam, not as the daughter of an industry giant.” Two months after this media acclaim, Eily married Frederick Smith-Keary, the Cunard-trained marine engineer she’d met on one of her voyages.
“Here at last was a naval architect being allowed to do what they do: get on the blue stuff and get her hands on the real McCoy, in her boiler suit,” says Stanley. “She wasn’t just playing with a model in a dry building.”
Reproduced here is one of the articles on Eily, published by The Leicester Mail on 13 March 1930, headlined Woman who ‘roughs it’ at sea:
Miss E. Keary, a naval architect, has just returned from a voyage in a collier from Newcastle to Amsterdam and back. During the trip the captain handed over the ship to her for some hours so that she could test the rudder, for she is working on a steering of ships.
Miss Keary does research for the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, and she had gone to sea, as she always does, to try out her experiments. One of her objects was to take observations for the propulsion of ships under different loadings.
Boiler suit
Miss Keary, might have had to sleep on deck, but she was “lucky,” for the hospital bunk was empty. She wears a boiler suit and is not affected by the coal dust of a collier which makes everything dusty.
Apart from her work, she is essentially feminine. She is small and slight with a short curly hair, and is very modest and shy. Recently she gave up her daily work at Teddington Laboratory in order to live at home at Selsey Bill with her mother. She continues her research, however.
She came to the laboratory, after having been trained as an engineer at Cambridge, to do war work in 1915. She was the first woman to be employed there and remained as an assistant.
“Miss Keary is one of our successes,” said Mr. J.L. Kent, the principal assistant. “After she had been on her first trip across to America in a cargo ship I saw the engineers and said that I supposed she had not been able to manage very well, being a woman.
Crew’s tribute
“They threatened to throw me overboard if I said any more!
“She had worked as fifth engineer during the voyage, and going up the Delaware River had carried out 40 orders in five minutes.
“Another time she steered the City of Lyons. She had been out with the Thames barges, too, testing their towing power. For three years she spent her holiday working in a shipyard. She passed the City and Guilds examination, the highest examination in naval architecture, and they gave her a silver medal because she had done better than all the men.
“Miss Keary has no fear; she rode a bucking Bronco in New Mexico. And they had difficulty in persuading her to come off!”
