Being invited to join the Betsy Miller Project as an honoured guest was a delightful surprise for me, as I have no connections with the Miller family who are famous on account of Captain Betsy and her sister Hannah. My invitation came as a result of my being a Scottish author and historian, resident in Ardrossan, a port with which Betsy was familiar.

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Even as a toddler I caused some amusement by the way I always went around with a book in my hand, rather than a doll or teddy bear (much as I love teddies) or a magazine tucked under my arm. The subjects at which I shone in school were English and History (hopeless at maths) and later I worked hard at my shorthand and typing too, gaining very high speeds. This was all in preparation to becoming an author or a journalist, but instead I found myself in steady employment of the ‘job for life’ kind such as the local Income Tax Office.

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The fact that Robert Burns had been a tax man was no comfort to me, and nor were the usual warnings about not giving up the day job when, to my surprise, my very first submission to a National newspaper was accepted for a column entitled ‘A Little Bulletin’.

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This was very encouraging and I went on to write many wee features, for the Bulletin and the Glasgow Herald, and various magazines, but my breakthrough to becoming an author came in 1963 when I wrote my first book ‘Dating Without Tears’.

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Again it was the case of first time lucky, as the first publisher whom I offered it, Mills and Boon, snapped it up for their non fiction list.  Writers are often advised to ‘write about what you know’ and I certainly knew about dating, with its pleasures and pitfalls. Oddly enough there had never been a book on the subject published in Britain! It was described as ‘racily written in a conversational way’ by reviewers, but was in no way a forerunner of the sex revolution said to take place in the 1960’s, as you must believe when I tell you that it got good reviews in publications including  ‘Teacher’ and ‘Housecraft’. Whilst the hardback was still on sale, the paperback rights were auctioned by Mills and Boon, and the winners were Hodder and Soughton. Serial rights were also auctioned, and the winning bid was the Scottish Daily Express.

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The book was also produced in Braille by the National Institute for the Blind.

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A spin off to the book occurred when I was approached by D.C. Thomson to write some articles for ‘Jackie’ which was newly launched, and short stories for their weekly papers such as Red Letter, Family Star, Secrets and so on. These were cheaply produced and the disappointing thing about them was that their fiction writers weren’t given by-lines, and how we love to see our names in print!  But they provided great training as the stories were carefully studied and sometime alterations suggested. 

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I was also invited to appear on both B.B.C. and S.T.V. television early evening programmes, and to give first talk which was to the wives and daughters of American servicemen who were still stationed at Prestwick. At this point I could have become self-employed, but determined not to act too hastily. I was enjoying writing a very varied selection of features and stories and, of course, much of this featured local heroes and heroines, including Betsy Miller. I did not realise that Betsy’s youngest sister had sailed with her on the Clytus, so Betsy was never the only woman aboard, with a crew of fourteen men. More facts came to light over the years, and I feel that Hannah, the young sister, is not given enough appreciation, as she took over when Betsy retired at the age of 70. Hannah did not have Betsy’s love of the sea, but she acted out of a duty to her siblings, and a letter she wrote whilst taking shelter in Carlingford Lough shows her wretched state. Hannah had to go it alone with no female company; yet she did not appear on the British Registry of Tonnage as captain of a vessel!

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The first time I wrote about Betsy it was for a competition run by the Ayr Writers Club, and I won first prize, or rather Betsy did, and over the years I have featured her many times, including in the many D.C. Thomson publications such as Debbie, Spellbound, Emma, Diana – the list is endless – and accounted for a large part of my income when I became self employed. Of course I didn’t mention Betsy in all these magazines, and each time I turned to her I wrote in a different style to suit the magazine which was sometimes ‘Scottish Memories’, headed as ‘The Captain In Crinoline’ and, my favourite, ‘Two Fearless Lady Mariners’ in Ireland’s Own, where I gave Hannah too the credit she deserved, as I did again in ‘Seafaring Sisters’.  There have been, and still are, so many heroes and heroines who have lived, or still do, in the small area of North Ayrshire that I would never have lacked for inspiration quite literally five minutes or so from home but I was also given commissions further afield.  The choice of the subjects and interesting characters I wrote about was largely left to me, and often involved series with an article appearing each week, or month, under headings such as ‘Pleased To Met You’ and ‘These Remarkable Scotswomen’.  I met some wonderful characters and each day was different.

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When writing a feature on ‘Ardrossan, the BunkerPort’, (the town has always had worldwide fame for bunkering) I heard many true stories which were indeed stranger than fiction, and involved ships launched there and local men who sailed in them. One such vessel was the Hudson Bay ship Baychimo, which in 1931 became locked fast in ice off remote Seahorse Reef, near Point Barrow, a lonely outpost near the Arctic Circle. Here the crew made their way to the shore, and made a hut there from ships hatches, and any wood available, covering their arctic home with tarpaulins and then banked up snow. Here they settled down to wait for the arctic spring but were kept busy hauling ice from an inland lake three miles away in howling blizzards, and on makeshift sledges, to provide drinking water, and making daily trips over the frozen sea to check on their ship and chip ice from her broken propeller blades. But this chore was ended for them when one morning they came out of their shelter and found their ship had disappeared completely! 

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The Polar pack had cracked and drifted carrying the Baychimo towards the North Pole, but seeing icebergs seventy feet high, the crew had to conclude the ship had rolled under. By this time they had no means of communication, so someone had to make the journey to Wainwright, twenty two miles in a blinding blizzard, and an Ardrossan man, Finlay Murchie was the volunteer.

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The journey took three days, and although Finlay was accompanied by a young trapper who was an employee of the Hudson Baycompany and had been a passenger on the Baychimo, the lad collapsed due to frostbite and had to be carried and dragged by Finlay.  Fortunately he had a rifle with him, and only two miles from Wainwright, a last, desperate shot alerted Eskimo hunters, who had the pair well cared for in Wainwright and send back to base in a dog sled. Including Finlay, there were five Ardrossan men spending that Christmas of 1931 in the Arctic and they had all been neighbours at home so the atmosphere was merry, especially as they had a banjo and a mandolin.

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But they never saw their ship, the Baychimo, again.

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In February 1932, they were rescued by plane, flown across Alaska to Vancouver and then to Scotland.  The Baychimo had not been lost as was supposed. It surfaced, and between 1932 and 1969 was sighted many times, cruising up and down Arctic waters, with not a soul to guide her for an amazing thirty seven years. 

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She became famous as the ‘Phantom of the Arctic’ but was in reality an amazingly sturdy ship. She even beat the Clytus hollow in that respect!

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Amazing though the stories I heard were, the best from my point of view concerned the ‘Lady Egidia’ launched at Ardrossan in 1860. She made her maiden voyage from Greenock that year to New Zealandas she was an emigrant ship taking passengers – some of them assisted by a Government grant – to the colony which was generally thought, quite rightly, to be a land of opportunity. 

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A very active committee had been set up in their adopted land by the Scots and details of the Lady Egidia Centenery Committee sent to the editor of the Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald, including some fascinating snippets from the log book of the ship and the diaries of some passengers.

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When I wrote to the chairman of the committee, he was delighted to furnish me with full details of the voyage and I used it as the background for my novel 'Maiden Voyage'. The details of shipboard life and dangers encountered were all true to life, but the characters on my ship, which I renamed ‘Lady Edwina Douglas’ entirely ficticious.

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The first time I sent this book out to make its fortune it came back with a complimentary letter which also said the book was not romantic enough. So I laid it aside for a while and worked on another book which I entitled ‘The Lassies’ about what happened to the many women celebrated in the poems of Robert Burns after their (usually brief) association with him. 

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I hoped to interest Simon Berry, of Glasgow’s Molindinar Press in this, but he thought there were already too many books centred on Burns and was really hoping to get one on immigration. Just what I had!

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We were both delighted at the coincidence and ‘Maiden Voyage’ was published by Molindinar Press in conjunction with Reed, a New Zealand Publisher in 1977 and a year later by Pan as a paperback. I was pleased to have two descendents from the settlers who had gone to New Zealand on the Lady Egidia at my launching party for the hardback of the novel. Pan books had commissioned me to write a sequel to ‘Maiden Voyage’ and this was ‘Edwina Alone’ centred round the very melodramatic life of the daughter of the main character, Hannah, in ‘Maiden Voyage’.As for ‘The Lassies’, I converted it into separate short stories, ideal for magazines.  So nothing was wasted.

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Of course, long before the novels were written, and also some magazine serials, I had left the tax office but before becoming self-employed I could not resist taking a job as personal secretary to and academic of Glasgow University who was writing a book (on Social Institutions). One of the perks of the job, besides my having a beautiful little office all to myself, was getting unrestricted use of the university library. Great for research on absolutely everything and I was allowed to borrow a dozen books at a time.

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After four happy years at the Uni, I left to become solely, and very busily, self-employed and was allowed to continue my library membership in the category of ‘Special Reader’.

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Computers are all very well I suppose, but there’s nothing to beat a good book. Unfortunately, all of mine are out of print now but you may occasionally see one in a charity shop and if you do, please buy it, read it, and then allow me to buy it back!

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Joan Biggar,

Author and Historian, Ardrossan, 2008.

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