Victoria Alexandrina Drummond

Megginch

Victoria Drummond was born at Megginch Castle in the Carse of Gowrie, the second of the three daughters of Captain Malcolm Drummond of Megginch, an Equerry to Queen Victoria, and Geraldine Tyssen-Amherst. The Queen was her godmother and sent a jewelled pendant to the christening. Her Amherst grandmother, a member of the Worshipful Company of Turners, taught her to work a lathe, and at the sawmill of Didlington, the Amherst house in Norfolk, she learned how an engine worked. At about eleven she walked into Morton’s engineering works at Errol to ask how to become an engineer and go to sea.

Apprentice

On her twenty-first birthday, in 1915, her father agreed to let her train. She served as an apprentice at the Northern Garage in Perth for three shillings a week, then from 1918 at the Caledon Shipbuilding yard in Dundee, until the yard laid her off in the slump of 1922. That year the Blue Funnel Line took her as Tenth Engineer of the coal-burning steamer Anchises, and she made six voyages to Australia in her.

Certificated

In October 1926, the month she turned thirty-two, she passed for Second Engineer: the first woman in Britain to hold a Board of Trade certificate as a marine engineer. The British India Line took her as Fifth Engineer of the Mulbera, and she served in her until December 1928. From 1929 she sat the Board of Trade examination for Chief Engineer thirty-one times, and was failed every time because she was a woman; an examiner admitted as much privately in 1936. Through the 1930s she lived with her sisters in Kennington Road, Lambeth, and traded in goldfish with Frances.

War

No British company would take her in 1939, so she went to sea under the Panamanian flag. On 25 August 1940, in the Atlantic, the Bonita was attacked by a German bomber; she stayed below alone, nursed the engine past its rated speed while the near misses lifted the ship, and the captain used the speed to dodge until the aircraft ran out of bombs. She was appointed MBE in 1941 and awarded Lloyd’s War Medal for Bravery at Sea. Panama gave her a Chief Engineer’s certificate; Britain never did. She sailed through the rest of the war, and afterwards as Chief under foreign flags, supervising new ships on the stocks between voyages.

Full away

Between 1922 and 1962 she made forty-nine voyages as a ship’s engineer. In retirement she lived on with her sisters in Lambeth and went each year to the Institute of Marine Engineers’ annual meeting, where few knew who the old lady taking notes was. She died on Christmas Day 1978 and is buried at Megginch beside her parents and sisters. The Institute named a room for her; Abertay University has a blue plaque; she was inducted into the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame in 2018; and on Transport for London’s Engineering Icons Tube map of 2023 she is Hyde Park Corner.