Smart and snug in heather-toned tweeds, a British-born lady passenger of middle years and independent means is settled in a teak steamer-chair on the promenade deck of an ocean liner heading west across the Atlantic. There is a whiff of healthy ozone from the sea, and fellow travellers taking the air variously saunter or speed past, competing for laps, heading to the gym or to the swimming pool. The attentive deck steward proffers a steaming mug of bouillon. So effective against seasickness, but, in order to be sure, she’ll take another Mothersill’s tablet. Just as that kind stewardess had predicted, the heaving swell of the Atlantic Ocean once they passed Ireland had proved to be a little too lively for comfort. Yesterday had crawled by in a disorientating, low-lit blur; she had spent hours wedged into her bunk, lying prone, wishing for death, while keeping an eye on the discreetly positioned vase de nuit, just in case. But this morning she had woken with the appetite of a Bootle-born coal stoker.
She had rung the bell (twice for the stewardess; a single ring would summon the steward, which would breach etiquette), and requested a fully-laden breakfast tray of kippers, tea and toast. Her equilibrium has now been restored in every sense; standing with her feet at the ‘ten to two’ ballet position for maximum stability, her knees slightly bent, as the stewardess tactfully suggested, also seems to help.
Bathed, dressed and ready to face the world, our heroine has ventured out onto the covered deck and secured a reclining chair. Her thoughts turn to her fellow passengers: she must trawl through the alphabetically arranged list of first-class passengers’ names left prominently in her cabin to see if she knows anyone else on board, or can spot anyone she might like to meet. ‘Society’ is superior to ‘variety’, and she is hoping to make the acquaintance of the elite also travelling in first class. In particular, she is looking out for a pleasant, well-heeled bachelor, as there is rather a dearth of those at home, just a few years after the end of the Great War. Perhaps she’ll do better in America, Land of Opportunity.
Opportunities abound for sociable, single, wealthy, transatlantic female passengers; according to the daily newspaper printed every night on board, there is a tea dance this afternoon, with music provided by the pianist, and, after dinner, a concert, followed by dancing to the ship’s orchestra. Daytime visits to the swimming pool with tutoring from the female coach, the Turkish baths where she is pampered by the masseuse, and restorative sessions with the lady hairdresser promote a sense of wellbeing. In fact, the whole vessel seems to have been deliberately designed to appeal to lady travellers of all stripes. Reassuringly, the grand public rooms recall the better sort of country house. Every room is decked out in a different historical style, as though it had grown gradually, over the centuries, with each generation adding another wing according to the fashion of the day. Odd when you think about it, because this enormous ship was constructed by swarms of men in cloth caps, riveting together great steel plates in somewhere ‘industrial’, like Clydebank. With its Palladian-style lounge and Carolean smoking room, the ship’s interior recalls the smart new hotels now springing up in European and American capitals. No wonder some wag referred to this ship as ‘the Ritzonia’.
Meanwhile the stewardess makes final checks of the staterooms of ‘her’ ladies before the captain’s daily inspection at 11 a.m. Scrupulously clean and neat in her grey uniform, white cap and apron, she is a ‘company widow’, whose husband died when the Lusitania was torpedoed in 1915. To provide for her two small children following the Armistice she went to sea as a ‘floating chambermaid’, leaving the boys to be brought up by their maternal grandmother. Every fortnight they have a scant forty-eight hours together, when her ship docks in Southampton, her home port. She brings them American cigarette cards for their collection, and picture postcards of the Statue of Liberty. Her wages are supplemented by the tips she often receives from grateful passengers. She has been on duty since 6.30 a.m., and will fall into her bunk in the tiny windowless cabin she shares with another stewardess around 10 p.m., with throbbing feet
In the second-class smoking room, concentration is fierce as four American buyers play bridge. Three of them are middle-aged women; it is a career that suits entrepreneurial types with a head for commerce. Each has commissions from competing Stateside department stores or specialist boutiques, selecting European garments and accessories for the American market. They are returning from the summer shows at the Paris fashion houses with their precious purchases, samples and order books safely stowed in their cabins. Buying is a competitive business, and economic espionage is rife, so each of them will type up their orders themselves, rather than booking the ship’s stenographer to do the work for them. One of the unspoken reasons for these bridge marathons is so that they all know where their rivals are during waking hours.
The ship’s stenographer is busy anyway, having been engaged by an eminent lady writer to take dictation in her cabin. For any young woman with an outgoing personality, shorthand and a portable typewriter provide a ticket to travel the world in these boom years just after the Great War. Today’s client is a well-known British authority on theosophy, and has been invited on a lecture tour of America; while her writings may be spiritual in tone, she is a canny businesswoman with an eye to the benefits of meeting her public and, as one of her contemporaries, P.G. Wodehouse observed, ‘She was half way across the Atlantic with a complete itinerary booked, before ninety per cent of the poets and philosophers had finished sorting out their clean collars and getting their photographs taken for the passport.’1
In another cabin further along the second-class corridor, an apparently respectable husband and wife are discussing their tactics for compromising a wealthy Frenchman, who is travelling alone. The couple are frequent transatlantic travellers, because they are professional blackmailers. On this voyage the wife has piqued their target’s interest by convincingly playing the role of a bored and neglected beauty. She has hinted that her complaisant and lacklustre husband prefers to spend his nights afloat playing cards in the bar, and that she is lonely and available for a nocturnal dalliance. Tonight will provide an opportunity to reel him in, but first they need to divine his home address and the name of his wife. When, inevitably, the apparently outraged husband catches them in flagrante delicto, he will threaten to inform the Frenchman’s wife unless the would-be philanderer agrees to pay ‘compensation’.
Down near the waterline, in third class, professional chaperones provide support and protection for unaccompanied women and children from far-flung parts of Europe. This morning the chaperone is organising hot seawater baths for some of her reluctant charges, a welcome opportunity for them to bathe in privacy and to wash their clothes. All the women travelling in third class are economic migrants, and the luckier ones are making the voyage with their families, neighbours or friends. Some already have a ‘stepping stone’, relatives who can help them get established on the new continent. The teenage daughter of a crofter from the Scottish island of Lewis, with older sisters already settled in New York, is eminently eligible for a visa to work as a domestic servant. Two brothers and a sister have secured employment on a farm in rural Michigan; their wages will eventually enable their hard-pressed family back home to escape the economic ruin of 1920s Germany.
On this summer morning the oil-fired ocean liner is heading west at an impressive rate, covering 500 miles a day, steaming from the Old World to the New. These 2,500 souls from all over Europe – passengers of many classes, creeds and countries, and the ‘ship’s company’: all the crew and staff, male and female – are under the omnipotent command of the captain while they are under way. Though it is one of the largest man-made moving objects on the planet, the liner is dwarfed by the ocean, and is totally alone on a vast and open sea. Anyone standing high enough on the very top deck, and rotating 360 degrees, would see nothing more than a slightly curving panorama of completely empty horizon, a daunting prospect for the agoraphobic.
But for the women on board the ocean liner, the great ship offers hope, opportunity, romance. Whether they are travelling for leisure or pleasure, by virtue of their celebrity or to preserve their anonymity, as matrons, migrants or millionairesses, as passengers or staff, the journey they undertake will change their lives for ever.