Born: 1885, United Kingdom
Died: 5 June 1942
Country most active: International
Also known as: Mashie
The following is excerpted from a conversation with Dr Nina Baker about her book, Supposed Killed or Drowned by Enemy Action at Sea, about Scottish Merchant Navy women who died as a result of enemy action in the First and Second World Wars.
A completely different sort of story I want to tell you is about a woman who was Glaswegian to her absolute toenails. And this was a woman called Catherine McWatt Armstrong, an older woman born in Govan. And for those of you who don’t know Glasgow, Govan was and remains a very working class area with a lot of the people in the area linked to the shipyards on the Clyde building ships. And to this day, the only active major shipyard building ships on the Clyde is at Govan, where they build warships. And Govan remains a very working class area, lots of underprivileged households in the area. Her father worked in the shipyards, the house that she lived in, that area has now been rebuilt, but it would have been a tenement, probably a three or four storey block of flats, probably with shops on the ground floor. So she was born in 1885, but she started her sea going career in 1922. And she joined Anchor-Donaldson Line, a ship called the Royal Mail Ship Assyria. She sailed on older ships, she moved from ship to ship. And eventually, in 1927, she joined a ship called the Elysia, as in Elysian Fields. And that was the ship she eventually was on when it was sunk and she died. And she would have been going on multiple trips backwards and forwards through the interwar period until in June 1942, when the ship, also in the Indian Ocean, a few hundred miles to the northeast of Durban in South Africa. And they were attacked by two Japanese surface raiders while on passage from India to South Africa.
Now, I was just about to send this book to the printers, to the publishers, when my friend Jo Stanley, who is the expert on the history of women at sea, both in the Merchant and the Royal Navies, has written several books books about this. She discovered a wonderful newspaper clipping, which was actually published in Australia, which, of course, was where Gleeson had been living at the time we’ve just heard about. So for some reason, this wonderful story was never published in the British newspapers, even though Armstrong was a Scot. But it was just it was just such a fantastic story of a woman who, she was the only woman on board this ship at the time. And this article was written by the radio officer who survived. And she sadly didn’t.
So she was described, “the only stewardess, the only woman on board. She was middle aged and plump, dumpy with little fat legs. And she wore thick-lensed, steel-rimmed spectacles. Mashie,” as her Scottish nickname was, “was a Scotswoman, not dour by any means, but she was blunt of speech, and she saw no reason to smile if there was no purpose. But then, when there was a reason for her to smile, her smile was good to see.” And she was held in great affection by her shipmates. They thought her very courageous. “She was quietly scornful of all the preparations for any emergency. Foolish, you may well say. But that was Mashie. After all, she had been in some tough blitzes with us, and when Glasgow had its worst air raid. And she would then sit in her beloved little flat in Govan, high up in a tenement. And when everyone else in Glasgow who had any sense at all was at an air raid shelter, she was sitting there, knitting in the dark. She told us so without any suspicion of boastfulness. It wasn’t the sort of thing one boasts about anymore in Britain. It was just plain stupidity, really. But not in Mashie’s case. It was faith with Mashie, faith that she could not be harmed unless it was God’s will.”
So very sadly, and it was due to her sense of duty towards the people on the ship, she was one of the last to leave. Now, this was typical of stewardesses, and indeed stewards. They are disproportionately represented in the lists of Merchant Navy people who died, because stewards and stewardesses, their duty in an emergency – so that the alarms are sounding, everybody else has their emergency stations to go to, most people would have been heading to the lifeboats. The stewards and stewardesses, their duty was to go down rather than up, to go down into the ship, to the deck on which the passengers that they were responsible for, the group of cabins they were responsible for, to check that all those passengers were leaving their cabins, got their life jackets and their outdoor clothing, and were making their way to the lifeboats. So they put themselves in harm’s way when the ship was in the most dire straits.
So another newspaper article reported, “nurse vanished after tending wounded.” So this is Mashie again. She did nursing duties as well as stewardessing. She stayed behind in a sinking ship to help the surgeon tend to the wounded. They were the last to leave the torpedoed ship as it made its final plunge. The lifeboat into which they leaped was never seen again, and the nurse has now been posthumously commended for bravery. So she was awarded what is called the Merchant Navy Commendation for Bravery at Sea, which is the equivalent of mentioned in dispatches for the armed forces. But it was posthumous. And like so many of the women in this book, she has no grave but the sea. And the radio officer who wrote the article, “The Passing of Mashie, a tribute to a stewardess,” he said that “the last anybody saw of her was sitting up to her armpits in water, but still smiling.”