Women in Nelson's Navy

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• 1. Attitudes then and now
• 2. On-board wives
• 3. Women on the lower deck
• 4. Passengers and nurses
• 5. Burials on Nelson's Island
• 6. Find out more
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Attitudes then and now

The Royal Navy of Nelson's period has generally been painted in terms of men being pressed into service against their will, living in hellish conditions, and being tyrannised with the lash. As one historian has put it, the sailors toiled on a sort of 'floating concentration camp'.

It would seem unlikely, however, that men pressed and beaten into servitude would provide the manpower that delivered such crushing victories as the battles of the Nile (1798) and Trafalgar (1805), and current research is doing much to re-cast the lives of the men and women of the lower deck. This new perspective shows a much more complex, rounded picture of life in Nelson's Navy.

'In Nelson's time Admiralty Regulations stated that women were not allowed to be taken to sea ...'

In Nelson's time Admiralty Regulations stated that women were not allowed to be taken to sea and that '... no women be ever permitted to be on board but such as are really the wives of the men they come to, and the ship not too much pestered even with them'. Whatever the rulebook said, however, it is nevertheless clear that women did travel aboard Nelson's ships - and in large numbers, although senior officers were not necessarily in favour of this.

When a great personal friend of Nelson, Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, discovered that women had been brought onboard his flagship, he ordered the women ashore because of '... the mischief they never fail to create wherever they are'. He also wrote that 'I never knew a woman brought to sea in a ship that some mischief did not befall the vessel'. The Earl Saint Vincent, another friend of Nelson's, was also against women coming to sea, largely due to their washing their clothes in the ship's fresh water.

In our own day, following some passionate debate, official attitudes towards women serving onboard Royal Navy vessels have recently changed. In 1993 women were officially allowed to go to sea onboard Royal Navy vessels, and the current Equal Opportunities Policy of the Royal Navy states that:

'As a result of changes to employment practice from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the percentage of women entering the Armed Forces doubled, and today 20 per cent of officer entrants are female'.

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Published: 2004-02-15