by Siân Evans
The uppermost layer of each grand ocean liner comprised the gratin, those passengers who could afford the luxurious staterooms, the self-contained and opulent suites on the highest deck. Many had their own balconies, private bathrooms and adjacent rooms for their maids and valets. First-class travellers dined in exclusive restaurants, barred to socially inferior interlopers. Directly below them were horizontal bands of more modest second-class cabins, well-designed and comfortable, for the respectable international travellers of genteel habits, who knew their way around a decent menu, which was provided in their segregated ‘dining saloon’. Their cabins were more compact, with two bunk beds, but their aspirations for social advancement were high.
And then there were the hundreds of third-class passengers, located near the waterline, occupying the low-ceilinged, rather dimly lit decks above the cargo hold. So closely packed were the humble third-class customers that it was their numerous if modest one-way fares that made the whole voyage financially viable; despite appearances, the numerous poor supported the whole enterprise.
Before the Great War the vast majority of people travelling west from Europe to the North American continent were immigrants in search of a better life. They travelled in challenging and uncomfortable conditions, but they were only going to make this journey once, in one direction, and so were prepared for hardship. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, approximately 14.5 million immigrants arrived in the USA. It has been estimated that between 1830 and 1930 over 9 million emigrants sailed from Liverpool alone, heading for new lives in the US, Canada and Australia. For much of this period Liverpool was the most important port of departure for emigrants from Europe because, as well as its established transatlantic links, it could accommodate the many emigrants from the countries of north-western Europe, such as Scandinavians, Russians and Poles who crossed the North Sea to Hull by steamer, and then travelled west to Liverpool by train.
Edwardian third-class accommodation was basic though adequate, but its Victorian predecessor, known as steerage, had been much worse. The dormitory-style accommodation would start out in a reasonably hygienic state, but the dense occupancy, lack of ventilation and inevitable seasickness could make it hellish during the journey. Each occupant was allowed approximately 100 cubic feet of space. Each berth was six feet long and two feet wide, and comprised iron- or wooden-framed bunks. Thin mattresses were stuffed with straw or dried seaweed, and if a passenger hadn’t brought their own pillow, they improvised with their life jacket. Only a single blanket was allowed per person, so to keep warm and to preserve one’s modesty most people slept in all their clothes for the entire voyage. By the early twentieth century, third-class accommodation on the better lines generally provided a functional but adequate communal dining room, and passengers slept in four- or six-berth cabins.
For these third-class travellers, anxiety levels must have been high. Aside from the considerable physical discomforts, there were all the individual reasons people had left home in the first place: to avoid persecution, conscription, jail sentences, onerous obligations, creditors, betrayed lovers, abandoned spouses or old enemies. Hardened criminals rubbed shoulders with blameless farm labourers. Some passengers had previously travelled no more than ten miles from home, or as far as they could walk in a day. All those emigrating were aware they were taking a great gamble, investing their hopes in an unknown future in a totally alien country.
For European-born women who wished to emigrate to America, there were ample opportunities to find paid work, albeit mostly of a domestic nature. It was widely known in Europe that there was great demand in America at the time for servants, so many women arriving at New York stated their occupations to be ‘domestic service’. However, this was probably a strategy merely to gain admittance, because, as an influential female journalist called Frances A. Kellor observed, ‘opportunities are open to them to enter any trade, profession or home for which they fit themselves. The immigrant, then, is a transient, not a permanent, domestic worker.’5
Hordes of women made it across the ocean to the United States, and were subjected to the forensic scrutiny of the immigration officials at Ellis Island, whose job was to assess each applicant, to scrutinise their potential to be a useful and productive member of society, and to winnow out anyone deemed unworthy of becoming a new American. Immigrants who were unlucky enough to harbour identifiable diseases were refused entry; those who were too feeble in mind or in body would be sent back to their homelands on the ships that brought them.
Millions of women’s lives were transformed by their journeys between the Old and New Worlds in the first half of the twentieth century. From the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second, women of all cultures and backgrounds went to sea for an infinite variety of reasons. For some passengers a sea journey was a welcome and pleasant interlude in their well-padded lives, a week or so spent in a giant floating resort hotel, with all the genteel amusements and luxurious indulgences that money and deferential servants could provide. A new breed of independent women, those left single and self-supporting as a result of the appalling loss of men during the Great War, were also on the move between one continent and another, seeking careers in showbusiness, the arts and commerce. For them, the great ships were the Atlantic Ferry, linking their homelands with their career opportunities, and they were frequent travellers. Down near the waterline, there were women who staked their futures on a single voyage to the other side of the world – an experience that was daunting, both as an endurance test and as a brave leap of faith towards an unknown future.
And for a select band of adventurous working-class women the ship itself provided their living, often for decades; it was their workplace, their social life, their ‘home from home’. Taking a job as a stewardess, a nurse, conductress, hairdresser or hostess on one of the great ships of the 1920s and 1930s enabled them to gain a degree of financial autonomy and independence unparalleled on land. Though small in number compared to their male counterparts, women seafarers had opportunities for social advancement, for making friends, for travelling the world and being amply rewarded for their labours.
Their individual stories, of camaraderie and calamities, provide fascinating and informative narratives about the changing nature and experience of transcontinental sea voyages, in an era of unprecedented, immense social and cultural change. Maiden Voyages is a celebration of the diverse journeys made by a number of intrepid heroines, drawn from many countries and different classes. This is a collection of selected biographical tales, both cautionary and life-affirming, about dynamic women on the move, set primarily between the two World Wars, during the golden age of transatlantic travel.
1
Floating Palaces and the ‘Unsinkable’ Violet Jessop
In 1908, at the age of twenty-one, Violet Jessop embarked upon her maiden voyage as a stewardess on the Orinoco, a steamer sailing to and from the West Indies carrying mail, cargo and passengers. It was her personal circumstances – a combination of family connections and financial desperation – that drove Violet to seek a job on board ships and it set her on a maritime career that spanned forty-two years and incorporated more than 200 ocean voyages.
It required a leap of faith to emigrate to an unknown land in South America in the Victorian era, but William Jessop was an incurable optimist. Born in Ireland, he sailed to Argentina in the mid-1880s, and his fiancée Katherine Kelly, from Dublin, joined him in 1886. They married and set up a sheep farm on the pampas; they were very much in love and prepared to endure their spartan living conditions in the hope of a better life. Their daughter Violet, the first of six children, was born in 1887. With a rapidly growing family and a dwindling future as a rancher, William Jessop gratefully accepted a better-paid post in Buenos Aires. Violet’s childhood years in Argentina were largely happy, though she contracted tuberculosis and after a spell in hospital was sent to recuperate in the clear mountain air of the high Andes. She was an intelligent child, a keen reader with a
natural talent for languages, and she helped to nurse two of her younger brothers through diphtheria. Then tragedy struck the Jessop family: Violet’s beloved father William died during an operation, leaving Katherine and the children bereaved, and bereft of funds.
Mrs Jessop was advised that if they remained in Argentina her sons would be called up for military service, so she took all six children to England. The voyage across the South Atlantic was Violet’s first experience of ocean travel. Once in England, Mrs Jessop managed to get work as a stewardess on a Royal Mail packet line, while Violet cared for her brothers and sisters at home. But in 1908 Katherine Jessop was forced to retire from the sea due to ill health, and so Violet abandoned her plans to become a governess and applied to be a stewardess with the same company, to provide a modest income for a large and otherwise unsupported family.
Vivacious and slim, with good clothes sense, dark hair, grey eyes and long eyelashes, Violet had a lilting, slightly Americanised Irish brogue. The victualling superintendent who interviewed Violet was initially inclined to turn her down on the grounds that she was too young and attractive – most shipping companies tended to recruit only respectable widows of mature years, favouring those whose husbands had died while working for the company. But Violet promised to be ‘most circumspect and careful if he gave me a post as a stewardess’,1 and so he relented, and she became a stewardess on board the Orinoco.
Despite her grey, dowdy and old-fashioned uniform, evidently designed to make its wearer as unattractive as possible, Violet attracted a great deal of male attention in her new role. But her transparent naivety and innocence were strangely protective as she did not initially recognise the motive. ‘Though aware of the many efforts being made to help me, I did not realise at the time that youth, feminine youth, is almost a fetish to seafaring men and has a tremendous power over them, exacting willing service from uncouth and often uncivil men. I was not to know till years later that the adulation I had accepted as chivalry was largely a demonstration of sexual attraction.’2 Most of her fellow seawomen were middle-aged or even elderly – less likely to inflame the ardour of the male crew, and more adept at sidestepping any unwanted attentions from on-board Lotharios. Double standards applied too: because Violet had spurned his advances, one captain dismissed her for ‘flirting with the officers’. For women seafarers there was always a fine line between general conviviality and appearing to invite intimacy. It was extremely difficult to keep any romantic spark secret anyway; passengers and crew were trapped in close proximity, and as one day merged into another, any meaningful glance in a galley or shared moment on the crew deck, no matter how innocent, inevitably sparked speculation and gossip among one’s fellow shipmates.
There was a hierarchy among the stewards and stewardesses; everyone wanted to work in the first- or second-class sections of the ship, since ‘perks’ from the better-off clientele were a vital part of the job, but in third class tips would be almost non-existent. Violet observed that the stewards often sniped at each other, unable to express their frustration at the passengers who harried them every hour of the day. Tips were handed over at the end of the voyage, rather than for individual services as and when they were provided – the normal practice in hotels – so the stewards and stewardesses had to maintain high standards of service throughout the voyage. With each day that passed, the pressure on them to keep their charges happy increased.
Violet shared a tiny cabin on the Orinoco with another stewardess, who was a vinegary and forbidding character, and she battled seasickness and exhaustion in equal measure until she acquired her ‘sea legs’. The basic pay and conditions were poor: she earned £2 10 shillings a month, two-thirds of her male colleagues’ pay of £3 15 shillings. Stewardesses worked sixteen hours a day for seven days a week while afloat, as did the stewards, and the workload was immense – a constant round of answering cabin bells, washing floors, making beds, emptying slops and providing meals and drinks to female passengers. Violet was constantly either nauseous or ravenously hungry, sometimes simultaneously, and lived off tepid snacks consumed while standing in her steamy pantry, surrounded by the detritus of other people’s leftovers.
Despite the drawbacks, the long hours, physical discomforts and frequent challenges, Violet endured the sea-going life for the sake of her earnings, which supported her mother and younger siblings back in Britain. While her salary was basic, she gleaned many tips, especially once she began working on the more lucrative transatlantic passenger routes run by White Star Line between Britain and America. It was her eventful career with this company, owned by J. Pierpoint Morgan’s IMM, that earned her the soubriquet of ‘The Unsinkable Stewardess’.
In 1911 Violet joined RMS Olympic, the largest civilian ship afloat at the time, and the flagship of White Star Line. It had been built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast, the first of three colossal ‘sister’ vessels to be completed. Violet was aboard on 20 September 1911, when the Olympic left Southampton and accidentally collided in the Solent with a British warship, HMS Hawke. There was significant damage to both vessels, including two large holes torn in the Olympic’s hull, but no fatalities, though it took eight weeks to repair the damage.
Violet’s familiarity with the Olympic suited her for the maiden voyage of the liner’s prestigious sister ship the following year. Aged twenty-four, she was engaged as one of the twenty-three stewardesses working with 322 male stewards on board RMS Titanic, which was to set out from Southampton to New York in April 1912. The Titanic boasted the ultimate in new technology, as well as unparalleled levels of luxury; Bruce Ismay, the chairman of White Star Line, described it as ‘the latest thing in the art of shipbuilding; absolutely no money was spared in her construction’.3
But this impression of ease and confidence was to be shattered on the fourth evening of the Titanic’s maiden voyage, when the ship took evasive action too late to avoid hitting a massive iceberg. In the hours that followed, 1,517 people died. The disaster was due to a variety of factors, some of them quite mundane. The key to the locker containing binoculars, essential for those watching for hazards at sea, had been lost, so the lookout didn’t spot the vast iceberg till it was too late. The two wireless operators on board had received at least six messages from other ships in the area, warning of ice ahead. However, they were employed by the Marconi Company, not by White Star, and therefore they were not seen as part of the ship’s crew. Their incoming messages were relayed to the bridge, but appear to have been ignored by Captain Smith, who ordered the ship to proceed westwards at full speed, so great was the pressure from Bruce Ismay, who was on board, to get to America in a record-beating time. As a result, the great ship collided with a huge iceberg, lit only by starlight. Once the collision had gouged a 300-foot-long underwater gash along the side of the hull, a fundamental design flaw allowed seawater to pour from one unsealed compartment into another, causing the ship to list and precipitating its demise.
At first the passengers were reassured by the ship’s company that the ship was unsinkable, and encouraged to return to their cabins. That misconception caused a fatal delay for many, exacerbated by ill-discipline and incompetence in filling and launching the lifeboats. As the ship listed it became increasingly difficult to assist passengers into the boats, and to launch them successfully. So confident had the designers been that this magnificent vessel could not sink that the Titanic’s lifeboats could only carry about 52 per cent of the 2,207 people on board, and most of them were launched only half-full. The people who perished in the greatest numbers were those lower down in the ship, the steerage passengers who were denied access to the upper decks even as the ship’s fate became evident. And, of course, the crew, many of whom stayed behind to keep the ship’s engines, lighting and communications systems going as long as possible. Most men on board insisted ‘women and children first’, from a sense of gallantry, but often wives refused to leave without their husbands. However, not all the men on board were so noble: Bruce Ismay escaped in a lifeboat and sur
vived, though he was subsequently to live the life of a recluse after a nervous breakdown.
Violet Jessop and her friend, another stewardess called Ann Turnbull, had retired to their shared cabin below Titanic’s waterline. They were woken at 11.40 p.m. by a ‘rending, crunching, ripping sound’, which lasted about eight seconds. The stewardesses dressed quickly and went to their respective cabin sections to wake up women and children, and to make sure they had life jackets. They climbed to the boat deck, and Violet went to her assigned lifeboat, number 16, where she was handed an abandoned baby, which she wrapped in a quilt. Her survival was due to a young officer urging her to clamber into Lifeboat 16, to demonstrate to reluctant passengers who didn’t speak English how it was done. Her example was followed, and the boat was quickly lowered towards the water with its thirty occupants: twenty-three women, five crewmen, Violet’s infant charge and a small Lebanese boy. The oarsmen quickly struck out across the cold, still waters to get some distance from the sinking ship, as they were afraid of being dragged underwater if the sea rushed in to fill the huge voids of the ship’s funnels. Over the coming hours they watched in horror as the disaster unfolded and the sea filled with a litter of desperate, drowning people, life jackets, overturned and damaged boats, rafts, deckchairs and all the floating impedimenta associated with a luxury liner. After the Titanic slipped below the surface, its rows of lights extinguished as they were swamped by water, those in the bobbing lifeboats were left floating in the cold and dark, listening to the diminishing cries of others pleading for help as they succumbed to hypothermia.