Winifred Brown (1899–1984)

Winifred Brown ("Britain's No.1 adventure girl") was one of the more unlikely minor celebrities of the 1920s and 30s. Daughter of a wealthy Manchester butcher, she originally came to prominence as a player of tennis, golf and (field-) hockey, took up amateur flying and became the first and only female winner of the King's Cup air race (1930), then got newspapers to sponsor her and her friend Ron Adams to go on canoe expeditions to the Amazon and to the Canadian far North.

In the late 1930s she turned to yachting, buying a converted fishing boat and causing a sensation by announcing that she was going to sail it herself, without a professional crew. In this book, she describes her experience of getting the boat ready, learning to sail in the Irish Sea, and then sailing (accompanied again by Ron Adams) from North Wales to Norway in the summers of 1937 and 1938. As the title implies, she goes out of her way to make the two of them look like bumbling amateurs constantly on the verge of disaster, but I think we're meant to see that this is British understatement, and that they were rather more professional about it than she makes out. Especially on the second trip, where they got as far as Svalbard, visiting the Norwegian mining base there, and sailing close to the edge of the pack-ice. (According to Geoff Meggitt's 2013 biography of Brown, the friendship she struck up with the Norwegian mine manager during this visit later developed into a torrid love affair that took her back to Svalbard in 1939, but of course that's not mentioned in this book.)… (altro)