In this blog post we hear from Dr Jo Stanley, one of our lovely researchers, who has kindly agreed to tell us about her research and experience of using Hull History Centre. She's been working with our Mission to Seafarers collection and has made some fascinating discoveries...
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| Dr Jo Stanley |
I’m used to using archives looking for the oddest things. And sometimes I find even odder surprises. They’re a joy. They put the colour and quirkiness into social history. Such successes make me wish every archive had a stash of champagne to help us researchers celebrate the weird needles in haystacks we find - thanks to archivists.
Interested in maritime mental wellbeing, in Spring 2024 I was questing for information relating to strangers’ kindness. Specifically I sought historic evidence about tender-heartedness in relation to an unusual gender situation. I was hoping that in the Missions to Seafarers’ records stored in the belly of Hull’s beautifully whale-like History Centre I’d find out about an un-named woman.
Who was she? A domestic, not spiritual, worker in London’s Queen Victoria Dock Road Mission in the 1950s.
And why did she matter? Because her kindness in a supportive letter to a trans ex-customer had heartened him in the depths of his despair the other side of the world. This Buddhist ship’s surgeon, Dr Michael Dillon, is thought to have been the first UK person to transition to male, in the 1940s.
All I knew about her was a line in Michael’s memoir. I’d read it when looking for seafarers who’d been brave enough to seek surgical help in becoming what they truly felt themselves to be, long before the NHS made it possible.
In Out of the Ordinary Dr Michael refers to the trauma of being outed by the Sunday Express, while he was working aboard Ellerman's City of Bath in Baltimore, May 1958. Then the relief:
Letters started coming now from my oldest friends, offering their sympathy and saying what they thought of the press. Sir Harold Gillies [his pioneering surgeon] also wrote, and the Lady Warden from the Mission to Seamen, and of course [his guru] Lobzang Rampa … One and all they all wrote encouragement. (p.217)
Surely it was going to be impossible to find out, 66 years later, who this broad-minded loyal woman was. But I could try. How?
By fluke I happened to know that the mission had made its records publicly available. They were in Hull, a city I love to visit. I wrote to the Hull History Centre. The diligent archivist, who’d been sorting the Missions to Seafarers’ documents for four years and thereby become an expert, replied welcomingly. She told me where I might start looking: in the Queen Victoria Dock Road Mission folders.
I went. And it turned out that the archivist was right about the trove that would be most fruitful. I had flipped through only a hundred or so flimsy and yellowed sheets before I found the Lady Warden in spring 1958. She was Mrs CE Harvey. Elizabeth. Bingo.
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| An earlier document showing the Lady Warden to be Mrs Elizabeth Harvey, Dec 1956 |
And in the ensuing pages I found that Mrs Harvey was a force to be reckoned with: ultra confident, competent, and working in the mission between 1951 and 1960 at least. All for £350 pa.
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| A report submitted by Harvey to headquarters documenting activities at the institute under her wardenship, Jul-Aug 1960 |
There was no carbon of her letter to Michael, of course. She must have written hundreds to her ex-residents. And it wasn’t that she was some sort of early trans ally. But there she was, looking after all the seafarers and benefactors who came through the doors. I even found where she’d lived on the premises: flat F, phone extension 99. Unfortunately there was no photo. (Nor could I later track her down using family history websites).
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| Extract from a fire regulations showing Mrs Harvey's address at the institute, 1960 |
What has this find given me? Fascinating gender-aware cultural knowledge about context. A mission could be so much more than beds and bibles. And I really see that a hospitality worker could be more than a sort of house-mistress: a true companion in adversity whose kindness could help stop someone from suiciding.
I’m going on to write articles and give conference papers, thanks to this important gift the archive has accidentally bestowed upon me.
If you are a newcomer who imagines archival exploring to be daunting, please rethink. You can ask your intended archivists for guidance. Their leads are always invaluable – and as kind to strangers as Elizabeth Harvey’s letter was to Michael.
Dr Jo Stanley
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