THE INDOMITABLE BEATIE
A WOMAN IN COMMAND
Beatie not only took charge of the school when the former Illovo was anchored off Binstead House, she set about turning herself into a competent sailor, sparing herself none of the hardships involved. The house overlooked a hard, a stone causeway built by the Normans, that reached far into the Solent. The ship was anchored off the end where she would be afloat all stages of the tide. Beatie took to going on board every day, launching a dinghy from the hard. She dressed in male attire so that she could lead the boys in the first exercise of the day, up the rigging, over the tops and down the other side. She swam with them in the Solent, beginning at Easter regardless of when it fell in the calendar, right through to the end of October. As the cycle of training was repeated she became in time to be a better sailor than some of the instructors she employed, lacking only their experience of long voyages. She could command a ship under sail and just as willingly take a handful of boys out in a 30-foot cutter and teach them the niceties of tacking and gybing. She was, in fact, setting the pattern for herself and all who passed through the Mercury right up to the time of her death in 1946
IThe hardship was leavened by the
introduction of music, with every pupil given the chance to learn an instrument. Her passion for the music of Wagner,
whose operas she heard in visits to Bayreuth during school holidays, led her to pay for the construction of a 300-seat
on the Hamble site, modelled internally on the Festspielhaus. .
Between 1884 and 1910 she had five children.
H.M.S. Gannet, dormitory
ship of the T.S. Mercury, 1916 to 1968.
Fully restored at Chatham Historic Dockyard, she is a memorial to the people who built her, to
the men who sailed in her, to the thousands of boys whose dormitory ship she
was, and to the woman who was her effective commander for 32 of her 54 years
on the Hamble.
Read more in:
The Indomitable Beatie by Ronald Morris
(Sutton Publishing 2004, ISBN 0750937106)
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