What is it about?
This work uses a rare original account book kept in the 1740s by a landlady who supplied sailors of the Royal Navy with board and lodgings. It highlights how entrepreneurial activity by working women was essential to the supply of life's 'necessaries' to ordinary seamen, including vital credit - the repeated small loans which supported sailors and their families at a time when the Admiralty did not have effective ways of distributing sailors' pay.
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Why is it important?
It's extremely difficult to find first-hand records kept by women at the lowest levels of eighteenth-century British society which provide details about their everyday working lives. As such, this case study casts light upon the 'nuts and bolts' of how women worked as entrepreneurs and businesswomen, and 'creditors to the poor'. This article is part of a growing trend towards examining women's labour in new ways, particularly in relation to the new approaches to maritime social history which are only just beginning to be published.
Perspectives
I found repeated references to 'bum boat women' in the diary of George King, a foundling who remarkably fought at the Battle of Trafalgar, whose life story is at the centre of my book 'Orphans of Empire: the Fate of London's Foundlings' (OUP, 2019). George's recollections as a former ordinary seaman of how these women supplied Royal Naval ships with goods and services intrigued me, although many existing history books focused almost exclusively on female prostitution and little else. I looked for archival evidence of different forms of women's economic activity which, as for so many kinds of female labour, are otherwise 'hidden from history'. Discovering the account books of Betty Wright thanks to the advice of my colleague Prof Beverly Lemire (University of Alberta) provided just the evidence I was seeking about the entrepreneurial women who were so vital to the maritime communities they served.
Helen Berry
University of Exeter
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Amphibious Economies: “Bum Boat” Women and the Supply of Goods and Services to Ordinary Seamen of the British Royal Navy, 1770–1830, December 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004744141_004.
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