by Siân Evans
In addition, there was the lure of the progressive music scene: African-American musicians were welcomed for their abilities, and jazz, that heady blend of focused discipline and inspired serendipity, was all the rage. It was not surprising that the American composer George Gershwin created ‘An American in Paris’, a jazz-influenced orchestral piece of great verve, whose inaugural performance in 1928 included four Parisian taxi horns. Paris was the magnet for the international wealthy and fashionable elite too in the 1920s and 1930s. During the war years they had been cut off from their beloved Paris. With the return of peace they flocked to the city to buy clothes and accessories, indulging themselves in the fashion houses of Worth, Lanvin and Poiret, their natural habitat. But clothes were also an important aspect of the culture on board the ocean-going ships, as Emilie Grigsby, a Kentucky-born heiress, fashion maven and active international socialite, firmly believed. Emilie frequently sailed on the Olympic and the Aquitania in the 1920s, between her home in New York and Cherbourg, the disembarkation port for Paris, in order to visit the greatest French couturiers such as Jeanne Lanvin and Madeleine Vionnet. Her taste in clothes was daringly advanced for the time. Emilie was petite, and very elegant; she favoured full-length evening gowns in iridescent colours, which gave her a regal appearance. Renowned for her pale-skinned beauty and reddish-golden hair, she instigated the trend for making spectacular entrances on board ship, using the sumptuous surroundings almost as a stage setting to show off her wonderful clothes and jewellery.
Essential to the fashionable woman on board an ocean liner was the opportunity to make a stylish, almost dramatic entrance, and ships’ architects created set-piece staircases and mirrored lobbies where exquisitely dressed passengers could pose in their finery. The grande descente was the dramatic staircase leading down to the public first-class spaces of large liners, particularly the saloon, restaurant or ballroom. It acted like a catwalk, enabling the well-dressed to make a glamorous entrance every evening. Cutting a fashionable figure in front of one’s fellow passengers became part of the experience of high-end transatlantic travel, and so synonymous were fashion and liners that by the 1930s some couturiers chose to stage runway shows with models on board the big ships.
By the mid-1920s many independent professional women crossed the Atlantic in order to enhance their careers, particularly in the fields of the fashion and textiles industries. British and American businesswomen especially benefited from the frequency, ease and convenience of the Atlantic Ferry, and the common language was an advantage for those seeking new areas of commerce and trade. Frequent transatlantic travellers to Europe included American buyers, the merchandise selectors engaged by the large department stores in major cities in the USA. They were employed to source and negotiate to buy luxury European goods, principally high-end fashions for men and women, and their buying power was considerable. These overseas buyers descended on London and Paris in their hundreds several times a year, often travelling together to attend trade fairs and fashion shows. There was a huge market for French fashions and English tailoring among the American elite: both France and Britain were seen as chic in the US, and the strength of the dollar made luxury goods saleable in the American market, even after the imposition of import taxes. France was considered the best source of clothes for women and children, and related products such as millinery, accessories, lingerie, shoes, jewellery, tableware, upholstery fabrics, household linens and indeed textiles of all sorts were in high demand. Men’s wear for the fashionable American tended to be a combination of French and English styles, tailoring fabrics, tweeds, flannels, neckties.
About one-third of fashion and textiles buyers making these regular transatlantic trips were women, travelling on behalf of American department stores, or for their own retail businesses. They tended to be well-paid, resourceful and hardworking. As it was a competitive business, each buyer jealously guarded her industry contacts. Fashion cycles meant that buyers picked the styles they wanted for future seasons, three, six, nine or twelve months ahead of delivery. They would view a designer’s collection, select those items ideal for their clients, and place their orders accordingly. Buyers could request particular modifications to suit American tastes, and they needed confidence and a thorough knowledge of their own market before committing thousands of dollars to buying future stock. Making the wrong choice about colours, silhouettes or fabrics could be financially disastrous, but getting the right collection was immensely profitable. The buyer’s role in acquiring French and English fashions was highly influential on the development of the American fashion and textiles market, as the cut-price garment industry was quick to copy and mass-produce more affordable versions of ‘Paris modes’.
American fashion and textiles buyers would descend on London and Paris in two particular seasons, usually January, and late July to early August. Making at least two buying trips a year made certain transatlantic ships a sort of floating business hotel – a place to sleep, eat, read, gossip, play cards and plan one’s buying strategy. Card games included pinochle and poker, and buyers often liked taking part in the pool, the betting game based on guessing the distance covered by the ship every day. They tended to be sociable and liked congregating in the smoking rooms. Buyers were popular with the crew – they were realistic in their expectations, often coming themselves from more humble backgrounds, but appreciative of good service and consequently good tippers.
Interestingly, many of the women crossing the Atlantic on buying trips were not in the first flush of youth: experience and commercial ability counted for far more than youthful charm. One veteran American traveller was Mrs Mary Jane McShane, who was lauded in White Star Magazine in October 1928. She was seventy-four years old, and had crossed from New York to Southampton on the Olympic the previous month. Described as an ‘energetic old lady’, this was Mrs McShane’s fiftieth voyage on White Star, and she was on the perennial hunt for British stock for her antiques shop, which she had been running for fifty-four years.
Transatlantic travel also enabled British businesswomen to expand their professional horizons. London society hostess Sibyl Colefax first sailed to America in November 1926 at the age of fifty-two. Her primary aim was to visit her son, Peter, who was working in New York. However, she was also nurturing ambitions to set up an interior design business that she could run profitably, as her husband Arthur, a London barrister, was growing deaf and struggling to earn enough to fund her ambitious programme of entertaining. Months earlier, while visiting Paris, Sibyl had met Elsie de Wolfe, a highly successful decorator and interior designer in her sixties. Elsie had ‘a shop full of beautiful things’, and an exclusive and impressive client list, many of whom were already part of Sibyl’s social circle. Sibyl also had excellent taste, and had created an exquisite family home out of a miniature eighteenth-century manor house on the King’s Road, in Chelsea. It was full of antiques, subtle textiles, venerable ceramics, lacquered Oriental furniture, reclaimed panelling and a historic staircase, with subtle but effective modern lighting, all achieved on a restricted budget. Following her renewed acquaintance with Elsie in New York, Sibyl planned her own future as an interior designer.
Sibyl lunched with her friend Noël Coward, visited the opera and theatre, and spent Thanksgiving with the Cole Porters. Taking the train to the west coast, she made influential new friends in the Hollywood film industry, including Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr and British-born Charlie Chaplin. Her return to the east coast brought her into contact with some extremely wealthy American owners of Old Master paintings (those executed before 1800), through the auspices of the London-based art dealer Joseph Duveen. Sibyl had an excellent visual memory, and on her next trip to New York, in 1928, she was asked by the Royal Academy in London if she would act as their go-between, approaching American collectors to persuade them to lend their precious paintings. She had met a number of influential museum curators and private collectors on her previous visit, and her knowledge of their holdings was in
valuable to the curators of the exhibition on great Italian masters, which was held at the Royal Academy in 1929. As a result of her two successful transatlantic trips, Sibyl gained confidence in her commercial knowledge and aesthetic judgement. She resolved to forge a new career in the American manner, preparing the ground and using her newly-acquired contacts in the antiques and fine arts trade. She opened her London business, Sibyl Colefax Ltd, and quickly established herself as a professional interior decorator, catering for the wealthiest clients in her social milieu.
Women’s experience of transatlantic travel in the mid-1920s is often depicted as fun and frivolity, an impression often reinforced by popular writers of the time, such as Anita Loos and P.G. Wodehouse. Certainly, the publicity images commissioned by many of the major shipping companies at this time depict the pleasure and enjoyment to be had from the experience. Simultaneously, the growth of photography and the new media invested the business of transatlantic travel with a scintillating element of glamour, thanks to the co-operation and collusion of international stars from stage and screen, who travelled on the great ships as a necessary element of their careers. Celebrities and the achingly fashionable naturally saw their shipboard appearances as just another aspect of their lives lived partly in the admiring gaze of the public. But the ships also provided the means by which ambitious, restless women could slip the bonds of their old lives and strike out towards an independent future. Tallulah Bankhead and Josephine Baker crossed the ocean in order to reinvent themselves professionally and personally in other countries, using their talents and their unique abilities to achieve public acclaim. Elsa Maxwell closely observed and exploited the restless, migratory habits of the international wealthy elite, and established herself as their quintessential social fixer on two continents. Sibyl Colefax learned by example from encountering dynamic, pioneering businesswomen in America, and returned to Britain to launch an interior design company in her late fifties. As the 1920s drew to a close, the booming business of frequent, fast and reliable ocean travel between Europe and North America, and the many businesswomen who benefited from the phenomenon culturally, financially and personally, changed the life chances of subsequent generations of women.
7
Depression and Determination
The Great Depression coloured every aspect of the early 1930s, spreading rapidly through the industrialised nations of the west like a darkening stain. Throughout the North American continent and Europe, banks failed, companies folded, factories laid off staff overnight and great shipping companies mothballed half-built vessels. As unemployment soared, the financial crisis brought massive disruption to international trade and commerce.
The Depression had serious repercussions for transatlantic travel. Experienced working women who relied on the great ships for their livelihoods, such as stewardesses, were made redundant by the recession, or had to accept less favourable posts at sea in order to maintain their households. Female passengers in third class – particularly the young and adaptable who had grown up in poor communities but already had a foothold in America through a relative already established there – had been propelled to emigrate by the worsening prospects in their own countries, in the hope of improving their life chances. The financial situation galvanised the professional decisions of women with broader career aspirations, such as writers, performers and entrepreneurs, who needed to travel the world for literary tours, personal appearances and other engagements. For them, the Atlantic Ferry was the means to establish useful contacts, to reach and influence new audiences, and to broaden their own horizons.
Of course, travelling in first class there were still a number of privileged women, those who were wealthy and managed to remain largely unaffected by the economic downturn. They were the leaders of fashion, the international socialites at ease in the company of millionaires and royalty, whose names appeared in gossip columns and court circulars, and whose photos graced the newspapers and celebrity magazines so popular in this era. For them an ocean voyage in conditions of great luxury and opulence remained a necessary and welcome pause in their hectic social round. For the sophisticated woman of society, a transatlantic trip was still an opportunity for fine living, bringing perhaps a discreet romantic dalliance, conducted in what was effectively a giant floating hotel.
By relating the diverse experiences of a number of women, both seafarers and passengers of all classes, it is possible to illuminate the effect of the Depression on transatlantic travel in general, and to illustrate how individual women’s lives were radically transformed by a mixture of necessity, aspiration and optimism.
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In the early 1930s the number of women who worked on board transatlantic liners in any capacity consistently remained below 4 per cent of the total ship’s company. These enterprising ‘new women’ of the modern age had defied social conventions of the era by electing to live independently. Though they might have a husband and children at home, as did Ann Runcie, or provide for a parent and siblings, like Violet Jessop, their motivation for seeking employment at sea was not solely a matter of financial pragmatism. There were compensations for the long hours, the discomfort, the ‘Cunard feet’, and those were to be found in the sense of adventure, of personal enterprise and the strong camaraderie often to be found below decks. They crossed the Atlantic every ten days primarily to make a living, but many of them regarded the grand ocean liner not merely as a workplace. It was a vast and complex entity, sophisticated, modern and progressive, and populated by a hierarchy of hundreds of skilled professionals. The ship’s company were all united in a common purpose, to convey passengers around the globe, in safety and comfort, transporting them from one metropolis to another.
Before the Depression the transatlantic liners had been plying their trade across the ocean with nearly full capacity in both directions. It was a boom time for the travel industry, and women passengers of all classes benefited from the more comfortable conditions on board and the comparatively cheap fares for long-distance ocean voyages, while their seafaring sisters enjoyed ample employment in physically demanding but remunerative jobs afloat. But as the crisis deepened, wealthier passengers cancelled their plans for leisure and pleasure trips, and business travellers curbed their overseas visits, communicating with their commercial contacts overseas by letter or telegram rather than in person. Cut-throat competition drove ticket prices down by 20 per cent as companies struggled to fill their ships. Cunard cut its third-class transatlantic return ticket price from £20 to £16 per person, which meant that a 6,400-mile round trip from Britain to America now cost approximately one and a half pennies per mile.
With a surplus of tonnage, shipping companies were determined to create new markets. Some firms offered hastily organised pleasure cruises at unprecedentedly low prices, so that their ships could still generate some revenue, even if the profits were minimal. Leisure cruises offered economical trips on ocean-going vessels as holidays in themselves. ‘Getting there is half the fun’, Cunard’s colourful posters trumpeted. ‘Lust and sight-seeing’ was the frank verdict of one observer. Whatever the personal motivation, sea travel was now promoted as an affordable, enjoyable experience, and the voyage as a welcome escape from the humdrum, workaday world.
There were important ramifications for female seafarers as the Depression intensified. Some women were able to cling to their jobs, grateful for a basic salary, even if the tips had dried up. There was now a different type of female passenger afloat, one who was more cautious and penny-pinching, often driven by economic necessity. Violet Jessop, a stewardess on the Red Star Line in the early 1930s, recalled that some of her more frugal female charges embarked on a succession of world cruises because it was cheaper than remaining at home. One character, whom she described as ‘a fragile little old lady, a charming piece of Dresden’, with carefully darned gloves – was waved off by her friends on a five-month round-the-world winter cruise. It was a lengthy, bargain holiday to avoid the worst of a British winter, having rea
lised that by occupying a cheap, stuffy, inside cabin, she could live more comfortably and to a higher standard than would be possible ashore.
Violet counted herself lucky to retain her job as a stewardess. Many shipping companies were forced to economise on their staff costs, so they laid off their employees at short notice. There were 20,000 unemployed seafarers of both sexes in Britain in 1930, and by 1932 that figure had doubled. In each major British port there was usually a place where male seafarers would congregate between ships, in the hope of being recruited by the shipping companies for their next voyage. In Liverpool that place was a public house, the Dock Tavern, but female seafarers could not hang around in drinking dens looking for employment without causing a scandal and so they were obliged to apply in writing to the victualling department or lady superintendent of individual shipping lines, supplying references and evidence of their previous experience, in the hope of a hotly contested vacancy.
Those seafaring women whose jobs were dependent on the ships that conveyed migrants to the New World were the hardest hit. The economic downturn had caused unprecedentedly high levels of unemployment in the United States, and American immigration quotas were further squeezed. Edith Sowerbutts, veteran conductress of the North Atlantic run, found her maritime career brought to a juddering halt in the summer of 1931. Canada had finally halted assisted immigration, and so conductresses were no longer needed. There was no severance pay, only the wages she had earned on her last voyage, and of course she did not normally receive gratuities as her third-class clients were impoverished. Edith considered herself lucky to get a free trip back to Southampton from Antwerp, where she had been abruptly given her notice. Writing some fifty years later, she called her treatment ‘shabby’, and observed that conductresses and stewardesses always had inferior accommodation, few salary increases and little chance of promotion compared with their male counterparts. Nevertheless, she returned to terra firma with genuine regret: