MAIDEN ★★★★
(M) 93 minutes
The sailing correspondent for The Guardian called them "a tin full of tarts". The rest of the sailing press ran a book on how quickly they would fail. Of course, it was 1989 and sailing men were not used to the idea women could actually haul a rope, let alone compete in the Whitbread round-the-world race. Hopefully, some of these nautical blokes now remember the story of the Maiden with chagrin.
Tracy Edwards at the helm of the Maiden in the 1989-90 Whitbread round-the-world race.
Tracy Edwards did a remarkable thing 30 years ago: at 24 years of age, having crewed on boats around the Mediterranean and the West Indies, she decided to put together the first all-female crew for the Whitbread, a gruelling 50,000 kilometre race around the world, held every three or four years since 1972. Preparations would take three years, the race itself 10 months.
Edwards had gone as cook on a previous Whitbread boat full of men. That cured her of wanting to do it again. "I was treated like a servant," she says. Her duties were cooking and cleaning, but she also learnt how to navigate and skipper.
Edwards selected 12 women to go with her, but she had no money, no boat and no sponsors. Two years of knocking on doors had produced exactly no one who believed they could do it. Most entrants for the Whitbread would be in purpose-built new boats with professional crews, some of the world's most prominent sailors, in million-dollar boats emblazoned with huge sponsor names.
Edwards mortgaged her house in England and bought a second-hand boat that was barely seaworthy. The women were from all over: seven British, others from the US, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Holland and Finland. The most experienced sailor was probably Marie-Claude Heys, from France, but Edwards fired her three weeks before the race after repeated clashes over authority. Edwards' childhood friend Jo Gooding, her closest ally on board, broke her wrist in a training run and had to pull out. Maiden made it to the starting line only after an old friend agreed to help. Edwards had met King Hussein of Jordan when he was a guest on the luxury yacht she was crewing. His personal sponsorship made the difference.
The 1989 race was the first in which crews were encouraged to take cameras. After her hand recovered, Gooding rejoined the boat and took responsibility for filming, and her footage pretty much makes the film. Director Alex Holmes knows how to tell a story, but the sailing footage from the Southern Ocean, with sails full of ice and huge waves coming over the bow, puts us in the boat with them, feeling every crunch and groan. At this point, it becomes something more than an adventure: they are risking their lives to prove a point.
Edwards, interviewed 30 years later, is brutally honest about her flaws and insecurities at the time, but we can see it in her face in the old footage. Having to be navigator and skipper, she becomes withdrawn and isolated from the crew, perhaps in a state of depression. From Uruguay, she is determined to take the most southerly course to Western Australia, because it is the shortest and most direct route, but also the most dangerous, passing close to Antarctica. The story now becomes about whether Edwards' blind ambition might be endangering the whole expedition.
Maiden is simply riveting, a story of grandeur and sweep that's also moving and intimate because there are so many naked emotions in play. The young Tracy tells a reporter she hates that word "feminist", but there's something beautiful and energising about the way these women came together, with gritted teeth, to do something that had never been done by women before. And things just keep getting harder as they go, making the story richer.
After the race, Edwards wrote a best-selling book about her experiences. It's hard then to understand why it has taken 30 years to bring the story to the screen, given its supremely attractive elements: the sea, the drama, the "journey". Even so, Holmes has said it took four years to get it made and funding was a struggle. Whatever it took, it was well worth it. Mothers, take your daughters. Better still, take your sons as well.
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