Teddington RNLI View From the Thames: Water power women

They were considered ‘bad luck’ on a boat; a distraction for the male crew, incurring the wrath of the fickle waves. As International Women’s Day 2021 approaches on 8 March, this seafaring soul is celebrating the eroding of this barrier to entering the water. I’m also grateful for access to education. And the vote.

Since the early days of the RNLI - back in a different century, when it had a different name (National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck) - women have played crucial roles. They helped to launch the boats from the beaches. They raised funds. They supported their village while the crews went afloat.

What brings a community together? Often water: we depend on it to live, we build around it, turning trading posts into capital cities. Sometimes it is women. I think of the thousands of women supported by the RNLI to run creches in Bangladesh; bringing together their communities’ children to keep them safe in a region where drowning is the leading killer of 1 to 4 year olds. Women and water. Both can be the lifeblood of a community.

The first woman to join a lifeboat crew was eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Hostvedt in 1969. She had something of a trailblazing spirit, being among the first girls to be accepted at Atlantic College, an international boarding school in the Vale of Glamorgan. Once again community was key: the students were required to get involved in local activities. So Elizabeth applied to join the lifeboat crew. She was told that she could join - if she passed the medical test and proved she was strong enough to do the job. In other words, she could do it if she was competent.

Teddington Lock Crew - Kathryn Renshaw, Gemma Riley and Georgia Wilson (picture by Brian Cook)

Which, as you’ll have figured out by now, she was. As have been the hundreds of women who have followed in her footsteps to join lifeboat crews on rivers and around the coast of the UK and Ireland. It is not always straight forward to dismantle the barriers that exclude people. But it is vital for people and our communities to thrive.

Walk along the river from Twickenham to Kingston on any given day and you might see one of the three female lock keepers working at Teddington Lock. Gemma Riley, Kathryn Renshaw or Georgia Wilson might be out helping houseboat owners or pleasure cruisers to pass through the lock on their journey. Our lock keepers maintain the water levels of this river that brings our community together.

As Gemma Riley, the Environment Agency’s Lead Lock and Weir Keeper at Teddington Lock, explains: ‘The role of the lock-keeper is lock keeping, looking after the weir, maintaining site and working on our 24-hour duty desk which covers the whole of the non-tidal Thames. We all agree we love the role, working outside, meeting people and helping look after the environment. While there are physical aspects to the role which may historically have been associated with men there is nothing that we can’t do just as well. The environment agency supports women in all roles and actually a lot of our bosses are female, including one of our harbour masters and the deputy director of waterways!’

Teddington RNLI

Continue on your walk, and you might spot the Teddington RNLI crew out training or responding to a call for help. With their helmets on and their masks safely in place, it could be hard to tell who is on the boat. It might be one of the five women who have been on the crew for a while, or Elizabeth who has recently started training. In a way, all you need to know is this: like the RNLI's first Elizabeth, every person wearing the RNLI yellow is up to the job.

We’ve come a long way since the days when women’s lives were so landlocked. International Women’s Day is a moment to celebrate this. And it reminds us that there is still work to be done. The gender pay gap is still reported every year. Women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack (male participants are generally used for trials) or to be seriously hurt in a car crash (cars are designed for the body of ‘Reference Man’). I am five foot two in stature. The world often tries to tell me I am too short for it - for shelves, for shop counters, for train handles. But the RNLI knows that I and others have what it takes to save lives.