by Siân Evans
We were on the Saxonia when she took over the first detachment of American troops and we came back with her at Christmas time, just after the Armistice, when she brought back the first load of wounded Americans. We have travelled when we were the only women on a ship full of soldiers. We punched their meal tickets three times a day, we mended their stockings, we served in the canteen.
The stewardesses were keen to stress that they enjoyed their jobs. ‘There’s the air and there’s the water, and you don’t have to worry about the high cost of living as you’re afloat,’ said Agnes, though she admitted she still suffered occasionally from sea-sickness.1
Newly recruited stewardesses were needed to cater for the booming numbers of female travellers from all backgrounds. On many west-bound transatlantic crossings, women outnumbered men two to one in all three categories of accommodation. There were complex social and economic reasons why European women of all classes were now taking to the seas, but fundamentally it was due to their need for economic security, coupled with a biological imperative to strike out in a bigger gene pool.
During the Great War many women who would never previously have worked outside the home had joined the labour force for the first time, a course of action unimaginable to them and their families just a few years before. Their patriotism had been stirred by the war effort, but they also enjoyed earning an independent salary, and the sense of camaraderie and social status that came with having a shared sense of purpose. However, with the return of peace, some harsh economic realities were unavoidable. Women were pressured to retire from the workforce as tens of thousands of demobbed ex-servicemen returned to Civvy Street, expecting to pick up their old jobs. Cunard’s staff magazine revised its previous noble sentiments, and stepped up the pressure: ‘The end of the month is not the great joy to all, as some would have us believe. To a number of the ladies lately it has meant “the parting of the ways”. The ladies’ staff is gradually decreasing, owing to the return of the men from H M forces, and those who so gladly came forward to help “carry on” are now quietly slipping back into their old places.’2
Returning meekly to one’s ‘old place’ might suit conservative values, but it was incompatible with the practical problem of ‘surplus women’. A million men had been lost in the conflict, and a generation of young British women now faced a future that might not include marriage and the secure financial future a husband would have provided. Those whose boyfriends, brothers, fathers, fiancés or spouses had died in the great conflict needed to find a way to lead financially independent lives. There were also war widows, often left with children, who urgently had to find some sort of gainful employment to support their families. Women wanted dependable careers that brought in sufficient funds to keep a modest household solvent, not just a hobby that provided pin-money. Cunard cannily advised its own ‘bachelor girls’ to learn a marketable skill they could take overseas:
England will always be a country where there are more women than men, and the death toll taken of our men during the Great War will be felt for years to come. It is the duty at the present time of every English girl to give of her best talents and energies to her country, and not be content to work just from week to week for sufficient salary to pay for her keep, clothes and amusements.
… At the present moment, a capable woman, armed with shorthand, typewriting and a language, can travel the world, passage paid, and return to a comfortable post in England when advancing age and a wish for comfort and affection, rather than constant change and interesting work, make home life more attractive.
In 1912 it would have appeared a very strange happening for a girl to take a post as a stenographer in Germany, France, South America, or to travel as secretary to a novelist, shipping magnate or film producer. In doing any of those things, a girl laid herself open to be considered fast or queer and her people were often blamed for allowing it. Now it is taken as a matter of course, and the restless, roving spirit some women possess is finding a very happy outlet in seeing new countries and faces.3
‘New countries and faces’ certainly appealed to many British women, especially those from the working classes targeted by recruitment agencies overseas, such as the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women. SOSBW catered for many unattached women and girls interested in trying their luck elsewhere within the British Empire.
In the early 1920s, 24 per cent of the total land mass on earth was part of the British Empire, and swathes of the globe were coloured pink, indicating the dominions, colonies and overseas territories administered by the United Kingdom. British expatriate families working in far-flung places required staff, and British-born nannies, governesses, housekeepers, chambermaids and cooks could earn three times their previous salaries working in Australia, New Zealand or South Africa. In addition, single women ‘from home’ were scarce in these communities, so there was a decent chance of marrying a bachelor or widower. A respectable colonial marriage for a former domestic servant offered the gratifying prospect of a comfortable life in a household, complete with her own staff.
The Servants Crisis of the early 1920s arose because British women were reluctant to return to their pre-war roles, carrying out dull, poorly paid drudgery in richer people’s households. Domestic service could not compete with their more interesting and rewarding war work and any deference felt by the working classes for their social ‘betters’ was declining, as realisation grew that the upper classes’ pre-war lives of leisure and privilege had been enabled and facilitated by their staff. The government offered meagre incentives to tempt women back into domestic service, such as free uniforms, but most refused to sign up, calling instead for proper vocational training for women in alternative careers, such as nursing, midwifery, comptometer training, or shorthand and typing. Many women also yearned for travel and romance, and dreamed of being ‘spotted’ by a talent scout or a movie director. Seeing such fantasies in the cinema, popular newspapers and magazines sparked a certain amount of restlessness. Those young women who had the choice would much rather be secretaries or typists, hairdressers or factory hands than scullery maids.
Genuinely wealthy employers, of course, could still attract servants by paying excellent wages, typically four times what they had paid in 1914, and also guaranteeing better conditions for their employees. But well-heeled households in America and Canada were also crying out for English-speaking staff, and there was considerable cachet in those societies in employing a British-born butler or a Scottish nanny. Recruitment agencies and resettlement organisations with a welfare agenda helped women relocate overseas, by finding them posts in foreign cities and assisting their ticket purchases. Thousands of British and Irish economic migrants, former shop assistants, typists, factory hands and domestic workers of all types, embarked on transatlantic liners, knowing that this really would be ‘the trip of a lifetime’.
In the early 1920s the more fortunate women passengers heading west on the ocean liners had resolved to emigrate to North America, and they had some reasonable expectations that their life chances would improve by relocating, because they had been actively recruited by agencies and governments, and reassured by shipping companies and stories in the media. However, there were also tens of thousands of people from all over Europe and beyond who were heading for America under duress. Whole populations had been displaced by the First World War, communities had been uprooted by the conflicts that had swept across their nations, and families sundered by world events beyond their control. Great numbers of the determined and the desperate, filling the lowest berths in the ships, travelling frugally in third class, were all heading for new lives. Some were buoyed by optimism, while others were running away.
For many German women, travelling to America was a way to escape dire poverty. In the wake of the Great War, hyperinflation decimated the country’s economy; the mark had stabilised at about 320 to the US dollar in the first half of 1922, but by the end of the same year it had sunk to 8,000 to the dollar. On 13 December 192
2 the New York Times published a remarkable story about an intrepid German stowaway. Christiana Wilhelmina Ida Klingemann was a forty-one-year-old former stewardess who had spent eight years working on the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Unemployed since the Armistice, she had found it difficult to earn enough to survive, and she could not afford to feed herself, her invalid widowed mother and her brother. She feared they would all starve. A glimmer of hope was offered by one of her three cousins who were already settled in California; he was a teacher, living on a modest wage, and he promised that if she could get to New York, he could send her the train fare to the west coast. But it was a desperate gamble; unable to afford the price of even the cheapest third-class ticket to cross the Atlantic, Christiana felt she had no choice but to risk her life and stow away on a passenger ship bound for America. Her first attempt was on the Wuerttemberg, a ship run by the Hamburg-Amerika Line, her former employer. Although she knew the layout of the ship well, she was discovered by the crew and ignominiously returned to shore. On her second attempt, she took no chances: in order to evade discovery, she was prepared to conceal herself in the bowels of the ship, beneath the ballast in the hold.
Familiar as she was with the customary procedures and practices before embarkation, Christiana managed to slip aboard the Pittsburgh, a White Star Line steamship, and secrete herself in its hold, way below the waterline in the lowest level of the vessel. Two hundred tons of gravel had been shovelled into the hold to act as ballast to stabilise the ship, and Christiana lay down in it, covering her body with a layer of the small stones to avoid detection before the ship sailed. Following a cursory inspection, the hatches to the hold were sealed, and the ship left Bremen for New York. Christiana, in total darkness and completely alone, survived for days on black bread and sausages, hoping that the hold was free of rats. It was a dangerous gamble, and one that could have been fatal, as no one knew she was there. In addition, if there had been a winter storm – a real danger in December – she could have been badly injured by the turbulence of the waves, thrown against the bulkheads and pounded by the ballast. She had brought along a large bottle of water, but once that was gone and she felt sure the ship was more than halfway to its destination, she hammered on the inside of the hatch cover. Fortunately, a steerage passenger heard her above the noise of the engines, and he raised the alarm. The chief officer was summoned, and Christiana was retrieved from the hold after nearly a week, hungry and filthy, but able to tell her story coherently.
Christiana had brought a man’s suit in which she had hoped to make her escape once the ship docked in New York. Although she had no passport when discovered, she had identification documents, including her service book showing her former employment as a stewardess. Her rescuers this time were more sympathetic, and she was supported in petitioning the Commissioner of Immigration, Robert E. Tod, to permit her to land at Ellis Island so that she could find work and send money to her desperate family.
The emigration experiences of Marie Riffelmacher from Altenburg in Germany were more orthodox, but similarly life-changing. Marie was fifteen in the summer of 1923 when she set out with her two older brothers, Matthias and Friedrich, to emigrate to the United States. They were sent to stay with cousins already living in Michigan, to try to earn enough money to enable their parents and three younger siblings to emigrate from Germany later. The tough decision to send them abroad was made because food was very scarce; their father, Leonard, brought home less than 2 million marks a week, and in 1923 a pound of meat cost 180,000 marks, a loaf of bread was 90,000 marks, a litre of beer was 30,000 marks and a single egg cost 15,000 marks. Various photographs of the Riffelmachers at home reveal how their fortunes had visibly declined because of the war: from a comfortable, bourgeois existence, they were now lean and hungry. Marie’s mother in particular looked gaunt and emaciated, with hollow cheeks; she had probably denied herself food to keep the children from hunger. Desperate measures were called for, and the Riffelmachers managed to raise sufficient money to buy three one-way tickets on the Cunard ship Tyrrhenia, which offered basic but congenial third-class accommodation, to send three of their children to the New World.
In an account written up by her granddaughter and deposited in the Cunard Archives in Liverpool, Marie recalled that the villagers of Altenburg gave them a resounding send-off, playing music and hymns. The teenagers travelled across country, then caught a train at Nuremberg to Hamburg, where they boarded the ship. It was a ten-day voyage to America, and they slept in bunk beds, with men segregated from women and children. There was ample food, which the Riffelmacher siblings enjoyed. Many fellow travellers suffered from seasickness, but Marie and her brothers had received a small jar of honey from a neighbour, who assured them it would cure seasickness, and perhaps it acted as a placebo, because they were completely untroubled by nausea.
On arrival at Ellis Island in June, fifteen-year-old Marie was intrigued by the ‘nice lady’, the colossal bronze figure of the Statue of Liberty, unaware of its significance. In her account she describes being examined and passed for health problems. She added that the Riffelmacher teenagers had no difficulties over money or luggage, as they didn’t have any. Two things struck Marie as strange as she and her siblings waited to be processed by the immigration authorities: bananas, which she was given on arrival and which were for her a novelty; and people of different racial backgrounds, who she was seeing for the first time in America. The formalities completed, the family were allowed to travel to Grand Central Station where they boarded a train bound for Bay City, Michigan. They arrived there at 4 a.m. on a Sunday, were reunited with their cousins, and by nine thirty that same morning they were in church.
Marie initially worked on her cousins’ farm, then as a nanny for another relation. Despite the kindness of her relatives and her much improved circumstances, she was homesick and remembered receiving a letter from an aunt in Germany describing how much Marie’s mother had cried after the siblings had left. However, the Riffelmacher family were not separated for long – in October 1923 Marie’s parents followed her to the States, sailing on the Cunard ship Laconia II. A surviving photograph shows a merry-looking group of fifteen adults, some clutching musical instruments, and a number of children, posing for an unknown photographer on the small open-air third-class deck. Marie’s youngest brother, Georg (aged three), is a small blond boy with a serious expression, posed in front of the ship’s lifebelt. Unknown to the adults, little Georg was already gravely ill; he had been bitten by a dog in the street just before they boarded the ship, and he died of rabies just three weeks after the family arrived in the United States.
Despite the cruel loss of their youngest child, the Riffelmacher family settled in the States and began to prosper in a manner that would have been impossible in Germany. Marie worked as a maid for a family in Bay City. Conditions were good; she was paid $10 a week, and allowed two half-days’ holiday a week. Occasionally she was able to send dollars back to her pastor in Altenburg; foreign currency was a great help to Germans still suffering hyperinflation. By the end of 1923, a single American dollar could be exchanged for 4.2 trillion marks. Marie married Harold Stroemer, and they had three children, nine grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren. She lived in Bay City, Michigan, all her life.4
In the years just after the war America offered a lifeline for hard-pressed economic migrants like Christiana Klingemann and Marie Riffelmacher. However, American attitudes were hardening against the previous liberal policy of allowing in people from the more remote and hard-pressed parts of the world. In the first years of the century, between 750,000 and 1 million Europeans a year arrived in America seeking citizenship. By the early 1920s many Americans were clamouring for restrictions on immigration because of rising unemployment; by 1921 there were more than 5 million Americans out of work. In response, Congress passed two immigration restriction acts, drastically cutting the numbers allowed into the country.
The US Immigration Act of 1924 was even more restrictive than that o
f 1921. The total number of European immigrants now allowed in annually was slashed to 161,500 in any one year. By comparison, in 1913, 1.141 million European immigrants had been admitted to the US. In addition, visas were now required, and these were issued by US Consular offices in the countries of origin. Any shipping line bringing in an immigrant without a visa, or surplus to the annual quota allowed to that country, could face a punitive $1,000 penalty. Immigration figures plummeted, though some nations were still favoured over others: British- and Irish-born immigrants were allowed a generous proportion of the annual European allocation, and anglophones with valuable skills, such as British-born servants or nurses, were actively encouraged to emigrate to the North American continent.
While restrictions were enforced to reduce immigrants’ numbers, paradoxically the authorities dealing with the thousands of people passing through their hands daily were treating them in a more sympathetic way. Frederick A. Wallis, the Commissioner of Immigration for the State of New York, introduced a more enlightened and humane regime on Ellis Island. Mandatory health tests were conducted on all incomers, and up to 85 per cent of them required detailed medical assessments before being allowed to enter the USA. Wallis was struck by many migrants’ profound poverty; one woman, travelling with five barely clothed children, was planning to take them to Chicago. She had a dollar and eight cents, but no railroad tickets. Some steamships were notoriously filthy, so their passengers arrived soiled. Other lines were so rapacious that steerage passengers were only supplied with drinking water during the voyage if they paid extra for it. Wallis felt there was no excuse for the insanitary conditions, especially considering the exorbitant prices some companies were charging these desperate people. He also wrote movingly about the process of winnowing out those arrivals deemed too ill, old or feeble to be admitted under the tough new immigration criteria: