Stars To Steer By by Julia Jones: Why every sailor needs a suspender belt

With Winkle gripping my ankles, I succeeded in marrying the new piece of wood to the jagged remnants of the rudder with my best suspender belt.’

That image of two female friends, Rozelle Pierrepont and Winkle, stranded mid-English Channel in their motor yacht with a broken rudder, circa 1947, encapsulates the ingenuity and gusto of the sailors whom Julia Jones celebrates in her lively book about 20th-century women who went to sea.

When Naomi Power’s boat started taking on water and capsizing during her circumnavigation in 1978, she plugged the hole with her T-shirt.

All these women tended to have strong rebellious streaks. Rozelle had been a Wren during the Second World War and was longing to get back to sea.

Her mother was desperate for her do the debutante Season and marry a ‘nice young man’. Like so many in this book, she was in love with the sea, and nothing could stop her. She spent her own modest legacy on a small yacht, Imp.

‘Ou est le capitaine?’ bewildered French fishermen asked, as she and her cheerful friends arrived in their harbours ‘pumping their small and leaky boat’, as Jones puts it. In 1959, Rozelle would sail as far as Finland, in freezing gales.

There were the intrepid explorers like her, and there were the racers, who combined a passion for sailing with an ultra-competitive urge to win. They were often brilliant at other sports too: in 1903, Dorothy Levitt was nicknamed ‘the fastest girl on Earth’ after competing in one of the first automobile races. Then she was the first to win the inaugural British International Harmsworth Trophy for Motorboats – sponsored by the Daily Mail.

‘To enjoy racing to the full,’ wrote Barbara Hughes, a late 19th-century Solent racer, ‘you should have it all in your own hands, with no one to say you “nay”, otherwise that spirit of independence – so rarely enjoyed by our sex – is lost.’

Her comment set the tone for the independence from bossy husbands for which so many women yearned. In those days when it was almost impossible for a high-born woman to get a job, sailing was an outlet for their frustrated energies. But all too often, they went to sea as ‘helpmeets’ to their husbands or brothers.

‘Well, I have a sister,’ said Ralph Stock, ‘and a sister is an uncommonly handy thing to have, provided she is of the right variety.’ In other words, uncomplaining and competent.

His sister Muriel had worked hard during the First World War, and was feeling rootless and dissatisfied after the war, when men took back their jobs. ‘I made a stipulation with the boys that they should treat me as a man while on board,’ she wrote in her book The Log Of A Woman Wanderer (1923).

Her on-board name was ‘Peter’. She sailed with her brother’s crew from Brixham, in Devon, to Tonga in 1920, taking eight pairs of pyjamas with her, to look as male as possible.

It’s the clothes that make this book such fun to read.

‘Brown in any form is to be avoided on the water,’ stipulated Barbara Hughes. ‘Blue gauze veils are useful but not ornamental.’ ‘We don’t want any petticoats here!’ was what the man at the Admiralty said to Vera Laughton when she offered her services as a clerical civil servant in 1914.

Nicolette Milnes-Walker, who sailed solo across the Atlantic in 1971, sailed naked whenever the weather allowed – that was one aspect of the extraordinary freedom that sailing brought.

But she put on a mini-dress for the triumphant arrival at Newport, Rhode Island.