THE FIRST GREEK WOMAN SHIP RADIO OPERATOR
THE FIRST GREEK WOMAN SHIP RADIO OPERATOR
Description
In 1974, Evgenia Rakitzi joins her fiancé working on tankers. She discovered a new profession along with storms, exotic ports, challenges, dangers, and a wedding on board.
Part of Collections
11 Podcasts
DOWN BY THE SEASIDE
Tags
Credits
Field Reporter
- Antwnia Markobith
Interviewee
- Eugenia Rakitzh
Podcast Producer
- Magia Filippopoulou
Sound Designer
- Alex Retsis
Sound Editor
- Dhmhtrhs Papadakhs
Video Director
- Stefanos Mpertakhs
Voiceover
- Eva Kesserling
I was born in 1951. December of 51. At the age of seven, we went to Germany with my parents. I went to school and grew up there. At seventeen, I came back to Greece to learn Greek, planning on going back to Germany, because I wanted to study medicine there.
Along the way, I met my future husband, who was an engineer in the merchant navy and was about to start his career on ships. My future mother-in-law thought about it a little and realised that if Eugenia left for Germany, her son wouldn’t be coming to Greece to see her, which was only natural. She had heard that there were female lieutenants, who had begun to sail, as wireless operators. I liked the idea. And so, instead of medicine in Germany, I went to the school for wireless operators in Thessaloniki, the Euclid Technical School.
Before the end of my first year, I was going to go to Marseilles for two weeks at Easter, as his ship was in dry dock. The Courageous Kolokotronis. Thomas called me and said: ‘Why don’t you bring the marriage licence with you?’ So, I did.
We got married on the Courageous Kolokotronis, on the boat. The priest was Greek, from the Greek parish of Marseilles. The whole crew was there. Then I saw the bridesmaids: there was one of mixed race and another one. I thought it really strange. Of course, later it was cleared up: another engineer had gone to a cabaret the night before and said: ‘You two are coming to the ship!’ They were holding the candles.
It was a beautiful service. There were supposed to be sugared almonds and rice, those things they throw. I trod on something and it felt strange. I looked... ‘Broad beans!’ I was shocked. Then the other engineer, the one who had brought the two girls from the cabaret, stood up and said: ‘Mrs Eugenia, I didn’t want to waste the almonds by throwing them. We can eat them on the voyage.’ So, he had swapped them with the cook and shared out broad beans to throw at us. Of course, we hadn’t noticed: broad beans and rice.
I came back to Greece afterwards and finished my second year. Among the six other women, none sailed. The only one to sail was me.
My first trip was to Jebel Dhanna, in the Arab countries. I was a cadet wireless operator, on the same ship as my husband, of course. I arrived at the ship with five cadet engineers. As soon as they saw a woman, they thought: ‘Oh dear...’ The ship was not loaded as it was an oil tanker, a hundred-ton deadweight ship. They said: ‘How is she going to get on board?’ There was a rope ladder at the stern. This meant that almost half the ladder was just hanging in the air. They threw me down a rope to tie myself to. Of course, I didn’t accept it. And I just climbed up, because, if you want to stand your ground as a woman, and then you accept help, well, that just wouldn’t do. But I had no problem.
At the time—because they don’t have them now—the wireless operator was the mouth and the ears of the ship. Our Marconi was a Filipino. Really polite. He made it clear to Thomas that: ‘Master Thomas, it’s like my sister.’ And that’s how it truly was. We even got to the point of applying one another’s nail polish, so he wasn't far wrong on that! In the morning, I went to the wireless room, helping as much as I could, basically learning, especially at first. I gradually got into the swing of things.
I sent telegraphs. My land colleague from ‘Athens Radio’ transmitted—this is in Morse Code, OK—he transmitted: ‘Arab women, black women, lascivious!’ the lyrics of a popular song. So I jumped in him, and signaled: ‘woman here’, so that he wouldn’t say anything and feel bad later when he learned there was a woman on board. All he could utter was ‘bon voyage’, etc. Poor man froze. He hadn’t expected that; how could he know?
On the wireless, we always talked among ourselves using initials. I was ‘Echo Romeo’, ‘ER’, Eugenia Rakitzi. The other guy was ‘OLY’, from Olympiakos. At some point, I heard him say: ‘Tune in a little better’, he said, ‘your voice, tune in a little, it’s not coming through. I can’t hear your voice clearly.’ I said: ‘You can hear it fine. You’re hearing a woman’s voice.’ ‘Say what? A woman is going to do my QSP?’ ‘Fine’, I said, ‘go do it yourself then.’
Most of the time, a woman on her own on a ship has to prove herself, because you can’t demand respect, you have to earn it. There was once some bad weather that stopped the radar when we were near land. It was night, and I climbed up the radar mast. Now, a 100-ton deadweight tanker is about two football pitches long. So, that antenna mast is correspondingly tall. And I climbed up the antenna. Someone obviously saw me from the engine room and ran down to my husband and said: ‘Master Thomas! Miss Eugenia has climbed up the radar antenna!’ Thomas was nonplussed: ‘Well, she must have had something she needed to do.’ Remember, it was night... I fixed it and we were a little safer.
Bad weather was tough, because you kept going one step forward and two steps backwards. We sailed the Persian Gulf, Cochin, South India. The ship would become a submarine, literally. We were hit by six-storey-high waves, I mean, really high. They covered the gangway, everything. The ship looked like the Niagara falls. Talk about seasickness... I remember that I dislocated my jaw from the amount I vomited. My jaw just popped out. Afterwards, my husband put it back, as an engineer, he put it back in place. Because, if you know the anatomy, what the jaw is like, you can put it back easily.
In other respects, time on the ship passed a little strangely. It was difficult. Officially, there was supposed to be a film shown twice a week. And, of course, we played chess, and read; there was a lot of reading. After about three weeks, all the fresh food ran out, and whatever was left from then on was tinned. I grew various things on top of the wireless. I loved that. To be in the middle of the Pacific, to go down to the mess and to have a plate of small cucumbers and tiny tomatoes, it was...
From the Pacific, we made contact during the early hours: 3, 4, 5 o’clock in the morning. Which meant that I didn’t get to sleep anymore. Meanwhile, I put them all through by phone. I stayed up all night to connect them by phone so they could talk with their families. Twelve hours difference, so 4 o’clock there, 5 o’clock, 5 in the afternoon here. You saw the others, when they were in port, fooling around all over the place... but when they were talking with their family, they were in tears. Talking with their kids, etc.: flooded in tears!
Of course, when we were in Cochin, boats would come up to us, and we would see them around the hull. They would perform various acts so that we would throw rupees or whatever else we had. There were four people in one boat: two children, the wife, and the husband. They had something like a hula-hoop, but it wasn’t that big. It was small. He put one child in and he put the other child in and he put his wife in. How many, man? Because we couldn’t see any room for him to fit. But he did! How did he fit in? I saw how… he squeezed into the bodies of his children and his wife so that he could get in. I mean, what else will people do for you to throw money? What poverty there was then!... In another boat, there was a man on his own. He had some frogs in a bucket. In another bucket he must have had a water snake. He grabbed the bucket of water, he drank the water and swallowed one frog, then a second frog, and then a third frog. I have no idea how many frogs he swallowed. Finally, he took the snake and swallowed that too! It really wiped the smile off my face. And in Bangkok, there were different girls coming on board... for a plate of rice... They allowed them to come onto the ship. It was hard to understand, at least for me.
And then there was the voyage to Lagos. Lagos is another story. We were in the harbour, in front of us was a smaller German tanker. I got to know the wireless operator there, her name was Sofia. She was barely a meter and a half tall, if that, but she was great. A captain wanted to thank us and told us that there was going to be a dinner in our honour. On ships, a dinner means a spit roast and food, I mean, what else can you do? He sent a speed boat to pick us up. Sofia was up front; we were at the back. We got there fine. We sat, we ate, we drank. Around 11-12 o’clock we said: ‘OK, we should be getting back.’ Someone came over. But the captain saw a look in his eyes, didn’t like it and said: ‘I’ll take them; I’ll come with you.’ We hadn’t noticed a thing.
In the harbour there at Lagos, there are a lot of reeds. At some point, while I was talking with Sofia, we saw the captain draw his pistol and say: ‘Get back on course now, or I will kill you.’ We just froze. He had been taking us somewhere else. He had been planning something. He was high, we understood that much. Anyway, we got back with the pistol still in the captain’s hand.
When we reached Fiji, the men there wore skirts, wing tip shoes, three-quarter length socks and James Bond briefcases. Completely unbelievable. The sunsets there were incredible. Unbelievably beautiful. And palm trees...
We decided it was time to have children. On ships, every port does not ‘bring a longing’ as the song says, but every port does bring a vaccination. Whether it’s Lagos with malaria, cholera every six months, rain or shine, smallpox, yellow fever, anything you can think of, we had it. And we decided to come back and start a family, and children, etc. In fact, I waited two years. I decided I needed to detox from the last vaccinations I had had; I didn’t dare get pregnant. Later, I felt it was OK, well, the rest is history. Today I have four children, and everything is fine.
