Fifty years ago this year, three women met for drinks in a London pub to finally put faces to the voices they had only previously heard on the other end of a phone.
The founders of the Women in Shipping & Trading Association (Wista) could never have guessed women would still be meeting over drinks at Wista meetings all these years later — not only in London but worldwide.
Co-founder Margaret Llewellyn is credited with naming the organisation and was present at Wista UK’s conference and summer party in London last week.
She told TradeWinds she never thought Wista would still be going strong 50 years later, but said she always had hoped it would.
It all started during her second job as a tanker chartering manager at Ocean Transport & Trading, then the biggest shipping company in the world.
“We talked to quite a lot of women that were involved in this [chartering] — maybe as the traders, maybe as the shipbrokers — so we developed a relationship just on the telephone,” she explained.
“Anyway, when it got to Christmas they said, ‘Oh, well, we usually have a Christmas lunch face to face, so would you like to come?’ So I said, ‘Oh, I’d love that’,” she said.
“There must have been about five of us at that stage.
“So the girls that we used to talk to who were fixing the ships in Rotterdam and Hamburg, they phoned up and said, ‘We’ve heard that you have this lunch and we think that maybe we should broaden it — why don’t you come to Hamburg?’
“So they invited us across to Hamburg. Then we went to Rotterdam, and then some of the Scandinavians found it, so we went to Stockholm in the winter.”
Within 10 years, Llewellyn and other founding members of Wista found themselves at the World Trade Center in New York and the maritime training academy on Long Island, doing a presentation on maritime careers for women.
Initially, Wista was to encourage women to go into the shipping industry and “to broaden their horizons”, she said.
Llewellyn later branched out into the world of ports and is credited with being the person who brought Maersk to the UK during the 1980s when she headed up a network of container terminals.
She believes strongly that maritime offers “fabulous” careers for women — but attitude is everything.
“It isn’t about whether women are treated differently. Women have got to be strong,” Llewellyn said.
“They’ve got to get on and do the job and prove to people they’re capable of doing it. And a lot of them are better.”
In 2004, Margaret Llewellyn was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) honour for services to the economic development of Wales, where she was born, which was bestowed by the then Queen.
Her attitude is simply just do it.
“You show substance by doing that, people are not questioning you. They just see that you’re just somebody in the organisation that’s driving it.”
“Yes, probably sometimes we get a bit on the nerves of some men because they probably don’t like to think that we’re telling them what to do, but that’s their problem, isn’t it? That’s their problem. That’s not our problem.”
