Who was Daphne March?

Reader's Letters & Queries: NarrowBoat, Autumn 2012

As the reader may well imagine, Keith Hodgkins’ article ‘Heather Bell at Tipton’ (Summer 2012 NB), about my mother and grandmother, brought back a whole host of memories. I was brought up with those photographs, the albums, the logs and the stories. Indeed, I can just remember trips on the Heather Bell in the early 1950s. Some of Mum’s boating crews remained family friends for life. For someone who was quite possibly the catalyst for the women’s training scheme on the Grand Union, she seems to appear in a whole range of articles and books without there being a clear idea of how this powerhouse of energy became a focus for national attention and then more or less withdrew from the scene. The idea of a 25-year-old Oxford Modern Languages graduate advertising for crew in the personal columns of The Times as she did (there were about 70 replies) seems barely believable. How did she acquire the skills, contacts and persistence to be able to be a number one?…