Michael Chester
Tracy Edwards braved tempest, storm and sexism to prove that women could sail as well as men. Samantha Laurie meets the Putney ice floe maiden...
The most remarkable thing about the press photos on Tracy Edwards’s kitchen wall is how young she is in them. At 24, with just five years’ sailing experience – most of it as a charter boat cook and cleaner – Edwards hatched a plan to enter the first all-female team in the world’s longest and most challenging contest. Facing down an incredulous press, she assembled a crew, refurbished a beaten-up old boat and – in a truly astonishing feat of sailing ability – beat the men across the toughest and most dangerous stretch of ocean in the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race.
“The fearlessness of youth – you’ve nothing to lose when you’ve got nothing,” grins the petite 56-year-old at home in Putney, as we gaze at the images of her yacht, Maiden, returning to a rapturous welcome at Southampton after nine months at sea – second overall in its class, but a history-making first for sailing. Now the 1989/90 voyage has been turned into a documentary film, Maiden, using original footage and present-day interviews.
“It’s reminded me how hard it was,” says Tracy. “As women, we’re inclined to downplay it, but this has made me very proud of what we did. Particularly when all our kids are there going: ‘Wow mum, you were pretty cool!’”
For modern viewers, the film is a bitter reminder of the misogyny of the 1980s sporting world. A sneering sailing media dubbed Maiden “a tin full of tarts” and bet on whether it would get past the Isle of Wight. While others were questioned on tactics and winds, the 12-strong Maiden crew was asked about chapped lips and who’d fallen out with whom.
“It brought us together and made us tough. We took it and used it. When we got to New Zealand, having won that leg and the previous one, the headline was: ‘A tin full of smart, fast tarts!’ We loved that.”
It took those two comprehensive leg victories to make the racing world sit up and recognize the scale of the crew’s achievements – the most breathtaking being the victory in the Southern Ocean, where Edwards, a skillful navigator, took the boat on the riskiest and most direct route, close to dangerous ice floes, battling giant waves and storms to bring her into Freemantle 18 hours ahead of her competitors.
She’d put everything on the line to make it all happen: having mortgaged her home to buy a secondhand boat, she then mortgaged the boat to pay for its refit. For two years, the crew worked on her in the boatyard in Southampton.
“We were such a novelty. Women just didn’t do this kind of work. But by the time we set off we were probably the crew that knew the most about their boat.” Shunned by traditional sailing sponsors, they found support from an unlikely source. Working as a stewardess on a charter boat to raise money, Edwards was doing the dishes after lunch when one of the guests came below deck and began drying up.“I said: ‘Er, I don’t think you can do that.’ He said: ‘I can do as I like, I’m King!’”
It was King Hussein of Jordan, and an unlikely friendship promptly ensued. Both passionate about navigation and communications systems – he was a ham radio aficionado – they would frequently meet up for dinner and she flew to Jordan to meet his family. When it became clear that she couldn’t enter the race without a sponsor, he volunteered Royal Jordanian Airlines.
Warm, breezy and full of stories, Edwards is a gift of an interviewee, but there’s clearly a complex, darker side too. In the film, her crewmates – all of whom she’s still in contact with – describe her as someone who “isn’t always comfortable to be around”.
She concurs: “There’s an element of anger in me, a belligerence that makes it impossible for me to give up. It makes me hard to live with.”
Her teenage years shed further light. The young Edwards initially grew up in Pangbourne, near Reading, her can-do spirit inherited from her father, an electronics entrepreneur, and her mother, the first woman to ride a motorbike on the Isle of Man TT circuit. Her early life she describes as idyllic, but losing her dad when she was 10, moving to Wales and acquiring a violent alcoholic stepfather pitched her into a tumultuous adolescence.
“I was an upper-middle-class girl from Berkshire at a 1980s Welsh comp, with a stepfather I hated. I learnt to speak with a Welsh accent in about five minutes and went off the rails in spectacular fashion.”
In fact, she was suspended from school 26 times for smoking, drinking and various other infractions. When her mother begged the school to allow her to sit O levels, she responded by failing to show up for them. Instead, she ran away to Greece at 16 and was working in a bar in Piraeus when a motor boat skipper came in looking for a stewardess. She loved it from the start.
“For the first time, I belonged. I had felt such a failure, but here I was getting on with people, doing a good job. I felt like someone had slid me into my life.”
Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for women – the only way onto a racing yacht was as a cook – she came up with the idea of a women-only boat.
“The concept was never supposed to be permanent,” she reflects. “I just wanted to prove that women could sail as well as men. Ideally you’d have a mixed boat in which the women would complement the men, but you’ve got to get them onto it first.”
One of her biggest regrets, she says, is not keeping the battle for equality rolling.
“We sort of felt we’d done that, but you’ve got to keep on fighting to make a difference.”
Edwards herself was in no state to continue the struggle. Back at Southampton after nine months at sea, she was pitched onto the talking circuit. “I was running on fumes,” she admits. “I just wasn’t prepared for it all to finish and for the boat and the girls to go.” Her short-lived marriage collapsed, as did her mental health.
“I wasn’t looking after myself and had a complete meltdown. I phoned my good friends, who drove down from Wales to put me in the car and take me home. I was in a bad way. They only found me by following the telephone wire – I’d locked myself in a cupboard.”
Recuperation came from a five-year break from the sea, running a smallholding in Wales and breeding Welsh Cob ponies. Eventually she returned to sailing and managing sailing projects, the most successful of which was Maiden II: the first truly mixed gender crew, which broke four major world records.
Life continued to be eventful: her second marriage also ended in divorce; she had a daughter, Mack, now 19; and then, in 2005, a Qatar sponsor defaulted on a race she was organizing, making her bankrupt.
“I had no money and a five-year-old daughter, and I had to put my mum into a home, in which she later died. That was just about the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
“Talking to young people, I say success isn’t A to B. Life is messy. The key thing is to surround yourself with the right people and be awake to opportunities.” Losing everything, in fact, turned out to be liberating in many respects. “I stuck a pin in a map and it landed on the Duke’s Head in Putney.”
Renting nearby, Edwards worked for the agency Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command (CEOP) – advising parents and children on internet safety – and studied for a psychology degree at the University of Roehampton. She graduated aged 50. Today, she and Mack are happily settled in the area, where she goes litter picking and dog walking beside the Thames, stopping for coffee at her favourite café, Hudsons.
“I love it here,” she says. “There’s a real sense of community; people who care enough to get off their backsides and do something.” She no longer sails much, due to back pain from a kick by a horse. But four years ago, as she began working with director Alex Holmes on the film – they met when she gave a speech at his daughter’s school – she received an email informing her that Maiden, sold after the 1990 race, had been abandoned and left to rot in the Seychelles and was in such poor condition that she was soon to be towed out to sea and sunk. With help from the late King Hussein’s family, she raised the money to bring the boat back and restore her for a second time. Seeing her after 25 years was an emotional moment.
“It was like the Mary Celeste. Our names were still on the lockers.” Now, Maiden sails the world with a female crew, promoting education for girls through the charity Maiden Factor. Guest skippers include modern day sailing heroes Wendy Tuck, Dee Caffari and Nikki Henderson.
Does the success of such women point to a change in attitudes? “I wish,” sighs Tracy. “There are some fantastic female sailors and genius ideas like the Volvo rule change [today’s version of the Whitbread allows boats to take extra crew, providing they’re female], but it’s still hard for women to get onto the boats. There’s definitely an element that doesn’t want that to change. The sexism is still there – it’s just more insidious.”
Some things, however, have improved. In the film, the young challenger is asked if she’s a feminist. “No!” she cries. “I’m so glad we’ve reclaimed that word,” says Tracy now, cringing.
There is no finer example of it than her.
Maiden was released in cinemas in March; maiden.film