Posted by admin | May 11, 2022
Sailors and homosexual men have a longstanding relationship, but international air travel and the containerisation of freight have changed it forever. Bryan Woodhead recalled the rules of engagement during the 1960s. ‘Straight sailors wouldn’t go to bed with a man, but they would have sex with a poof [so] the more effeminate you were, the easier it was to pick up trade’. The Navy was ‘as gay as’, Bryan added. He and his friends picked up sailors and took them to their flat in Auckland’s College Hill.
Another group of seamen fitted in seamlessly with the local queer culture: the cooks and stewards who worked on freight and passenger vessels. Cargo liners had small catering departments. Of the seventy-nine strong crew on the Port Auckland, four were cooks and twelve were stewards. But many large passenger liners had two hundred crew in the catering section alone. The Dominion Monarch (the ‘DM’), the Rangitane, Mataroa and Tamaroa – the ‘home boats’ – sailed between England and New Zealand, while the Wanganella and Monowai plied the Tasman. ‘It was well-known that the ships’ cooks and stewards were mainly gay’, one Aucklander told me. Some had nicknames: ‘Deborah’, ‘Dolly’, ‘Flo’, ‘Maureen’, ‘Rita’, ‘Polly Porthole’, ‘The Duchess’.
The Dominion Monarch.
Four stewards on a cargo ship.
The shipping lines liked homosexual men as stewards: they were neatly turned-out and ‘would not proposition female passengers and cause the company trouble’. Some stewards staged drag shows aboard the Mataroa and Tamaroa, to the delight of the passengers. A few married one another in the crew quarters, and their friends attended the ceremonies – sometimes, if the ship was in harbour, those ashore went along too.
Many landlubbers fondly remember the ‘shippies’, as they called the seamen. Once the Rangitane, Wanganella or Monowai tied up at the wharves in Auckland or Wellington, their stewards’ quarters became the venues for many parties during the 1950s. There were intimate opportunities too. In 1953, Jon Dumble picked up a steward from the Monowai in Auckland. ‘Twenty years older than me, old enough to be my dad. And he took me on board, and I could see by the look on all his mates’ faces what they thought. I was sixteen. And I thought he was heaven on earth’. Having undergone aversion therapy in a harrowing attempt to turn him straight, Ralph Knowles met a steward in Dunedin one evening in 1964. On board ship, bathed with golden light from a little radio in the cabin, he ‘felt the relief of being back to normal, my normal’.
Many remember the bars where seamen mingled with Aucklanders. The Great Northern (the ‘Lilypond’) in lower Queen Street, and Gleeson’s (the ‘House of Glee’), on the corner of Hobson and Fanshawe Streets, were both close to the wharves. A young Carmen Rupe held court in the Lilypond, ‘like a prettier version of Carmen Miranda’, and, if a local met someone nice from a visiting ship, they could rent a room upstairs at Gleeson’s. Stewards and Auckland men also picked up one another at the Orange dance hall in Newton Road. The newspapers grumbled about these cultural encounters. They disparaged the blond seafarer in shorts and gold earrings who strode off his ship to become the talk of Auckland in 1955, and the ‘effeminate’ local men who called ‘shrill farewells’ from the wharves as vessels departed the shore. The Observer tartly noted that the 'home boats' tied up at Queen's Wharf ‘had been berthed in the right place’.
The Great Northern is the building with the Dewars billboard, late 1960s.
Wellington’s Hotel Waterloo sits opposite Glasgow Wharf, and crew members poured across the road as soon as their ship berthed. Staff shepherded the queens to their own part of the bar with a cheerful call: ‘Hello girls, over here!’ The Royal Oak, in lower Cuba Street, was further from the waterfront, but locals remember it was ‘very shippy’. There was a gayer bar and a rougher one, with ‘lots of mixing’ between the two. Wellingtonians loved the ships’ balls, with lots of drag, in St Mary’s Hall on Hill Street. Truth told readers about a Dominion Monarch ball, ‘with a front-page photo of a Māori drag queen known as “Marilyn” in a great fishtail ball gown’.
At the British Hotel in Lyttelton, stewards and their friends occupied the downstairs bar, and straighter seamen went upstairs. Christchurch man Derrick (‘Hattie’) Hancock deduced that many of the pub’s ‘square’ (heterosexual) clientele were sightseers fascinated by the queer crowd – ‘beautiful belles’, the publican called them. ‘One outrageous queen' swooped in to play the piano while others sang.
Downstairs at the British Hotel.
Women who hung out with seafarers were sometimes called ‘ship girls’, ‘boaties’, or ‘shipboard Suzies’, but what about the homosexual men who did the same? Some locals borrowed the term ‘shipboard Suzy’ for their own, and one half-jokingly called his friends ‘wharf trollops’, but everyone spoke of seamen’s central role in the queer cultures of our port cities. ‘They were fun times’, one man remembered. The number of passenger liners that sailed into New Zealand ports sharply declined during the late 1960s. Then a great many ships’ stewards became cabin crew on the jet aircraft that carried people over our border.
Sources
Newspapers: Observer, 10 September 1947; 13 April 1949; NZ Truth, 8 June 1955.
Interviews with eight men conducted betwen 2005 and 2022.
Baker, P. and Stanley, J. (2003) Hello Sailor: The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea, p. 41.
King. R. (1955) No Paradise: A Chronicle of the Merchant Navy.
Young, H. ‘Enough To Make You Sick: Aversion Therapy’ [view]
‘Q.S.M.V. Dominion Monarch’, New Zealand Maritime Record [view]
Te Ara, ‘The Voyage Out’ [view]