FIFTY YEARS AT SEA

Evening Star, Issue 20987, 29 December 1931, Page 7

FIFTY YEARS AT SEA

WELL-KNOWN- STEWARDESS WAR-TIME ADVENTURES. LONDON, December 14. Nick-named “Ma ” on the waterfronts from Rio to Hongkong, Mrs M. A. Phillips, aged seventy-five, has resigned after fifty years] employment as a stewardess, mostly with the Inchcape group. “She has travelled 3,000,000 miles, and is the only Inchcape employee who mutinied and got away with it,” says her old shipmate, Captain J. H. Hamilton, who was on the Kyarra when she was commandeered as a troopship in Melbourne. Mrs Phillips, on that occasion, refused to sign off like the other stewardesses, saying the officers would still want their socks darned. Eventually she was retained. When a German submarine shelled the Kyarra in the Mediterranean, and Australian navy gunners on board sank the submarine, Captain Hamilton went down to comfort “ Ma,” fearing that she would be nervous at the firing. Ho was astonished to learn it was not her baptism of fire, as she had been the wife of a settler in Western Queensland, and defended the homestead with a revolver when aborigines stabbed her husband with a poisoned spear, crippling him, and forcing her to seek employment. When the Kyarra was torpedoed in the Channel, “Ma ” kept the survivors amused with tales of women crooks and sharpers, when the Kyarra was carrying people to the Coolgardio gold rush, Mrs Phillips received recognition from the Royal Humane Society for bravery when the Kanowna was wrecked at Wilson’s Promontory, and also when the Arafura broke her propeller shaft in a typhoon, and drifted helplessly. The Arafura was carrying a big crowd of tourists at the time.