This paper explores naval widows’ pension petitions to the British Admiralty in the nineteenth century. Access to a pension, whilst being a popularly advertised benefit to naval families, was in practice discretionary and subject to shifting eligibility rules. Petitionary evidence highlights the agency that lone women required to secure such relief.

This paper will examine a case study of a serial petitioner, alongside comparative examples of other naval widows, to analyse the ways they articulated their right to welfare. It will focus on how petitioners’ strategies and arguments evolved, identify who they networked with, and consider how their efforts were received and treated by the Admiralty.

Speaker:

Dr Carrie Long is currently a Caird Research Fellow at Royal Museum Greenwich (2026), working on a project on Greenwich Hospital School and state-led childcare in the nineteenth century. She is also a Postdoctoral Research Associate on ‘The Inclusive Histories’ project at Royal Holloway, University of London (2025-2026). She previously held the Institute of Historical Research’s Alan Pearsall Fellowship in Naval and Maritime History (2023-2024). Carrie completed her PhD on lone women petitioners in maritime communities at Durham University in 2023.   

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