by Siân Evans
There is a certain level of hypocrisy evident in this cautionary tale. The Prince of Wales routinely targeted married women whenever he had the chance, cuckolding their husbands, whom he regarded as friends. Members of his social circle accepted the double standards of the day: men were expected to philander, but women were required to remain faithful to their lovers, if not their husbands. If her shipboard dalliance with Aly had never happened, or had remained a secret, Thelma and the prince might have continued their discreet relationship, at least until he assumed the throne on his father’s death less than eighteen months later, and possibly longer. If the prince had not sought solace with Wallis Simpson, following Thelma’s ocean romance with another man, there would have been no grounds for his abdication. The British royal family might now be completely different, if Thelma had not succumbed to Aly Khan’s charms.
There is rather a poignant postscript to Thelma’s story. When she collapsed suddenly and died in the street in New York in 1970, in her handbag was found a battered miniature teddy bear, a keepsake from the prince who never became king. Thelma had taken the love-token with her everywhere, for nearly four decades.
Thelma Furness, wealthy heiress and chic socialite, royal mistress and frequent ocean voyager, was not ruined financially by the Wall Street crash and its aftermath. But she was twice-divorced, and concerned about her long-term emotional wellbeing and marital status. The two return transatlantic journeys she made in 1934 were to have dramatic consequences for her own future happiness. Hardworking female artistes such as Adele Astaire performed in theatres in the States and London, and for her and her dance partner and brother Fred, frequent travel on the Ocean Greyhounds – a popular term for the latest, fastest commercial lines travelling on the highly competitive North Atlantic run – was a necessary aspect of their professional life. Creative and successful writers, such as E.M. Delafield, recognised that the cultural Zeitgeist of the early 1930s offered them the chance to cross the Atlantic and explore America through the means of a literary tour, while the realities of the Depression spurred them on to boost their sales figures on both continents. Canny economic migrant Mary Anne MacLeod seized the chance to exchange an impoverished Scottish island for the heady possibilities of New York. For the pragmatic women whose livelihood relied on the great ships of the inter-war era, the Depression was an ordeal to be survived. Violet Jessop adapted to the new realities, and worked as a stewardess on cruises for a minimal salary, serving genteel passengers who were often too cash-strapped to augment her pay with tips. Edith Sowerbutts’s services as a conductress, escorting would-be immigrants, had been dispensed with in 1931, and for a few years she was forced to find a less convivial occupation ashore. For each of these women, during the Depression years of the early 1930s, their lives and their futures were moulded by transatlantic travel on the great ships.
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By 1934 the world economy was starting to recover; transatlantic trade had begun to pick up, and women were increasingly employed once again on board ships, often in more diverse and responsible positions. In particular, trained nurses were engaged for the biggest and newest passenger liners. The invaluable services provided by VADs and Queen Alexandra’s nurses on hospital ships in the Great War had proved the worth of nurses in critical care, and the merchant navy recognised the value of employing them on passenger ships. Their role was to assist the ship’s doctor, and as well as general nursing skills they needed proficiency in assisting at surgical operations and providing post-operative care. Some ships seemed prone to having medical emergencies: the Georgic was known by Edith Sowerbutts as ‘the appendicitis ship’ because she was aware of at least three cases that had occurred on it, two of them fatal. Any operation carried a risk, especially in an era before antibiotics.
As the ships became more sophisticated, operating theatres were installed on board for emergency treatment, and a number of hospital beds for inpatients. By 1931 the Majestic’s medical quarters had sixty-two beds housed in eight hospital wards, and a large operating theatre. It was headed by Dr Beaumont, who had crossed the Atlantic more than a thousand times, and he had five male attendants and two female nurses.
In addition to caring for the convalescents, treating minor ailments in the clinic or attending to ill passengers in their cabins, nurses would also accompany the ship’s doctor on his daily rounds inspecting the third-class passengers. On the modern liners the boundary between first class and third was very apparent. After descending several levels, from first class through second class to the lower decks of the ship, the doctor and nurse would pass through a discreet connecting door on a corridor, which was normally kept firmly locked. On the second-class side, the door appeared to be of carved oak; on the third-class side, the same door was utilitarian metal, covered in white enamelled paint, and it led into a long corridor, a functional but cramped space where the third-class children often played.
In the inter-war years, many professional nurses preferred working at sea to staying on land, as they had more autonomy and lighter duties afloat, far from the overbearing surveillance of hospital matrons. Their shipboard careers could last well into their fifties and sixties, as the daily workload was much less demanding than the constant physical activity demanded of a nurse in a busy hospital ashore. In addition, they had respect, as well as better pay and the excitement of travel. Nurses enjoyed far higher social status than stewardesses within the ship’s hierarchy. The ‘sister’ had many of the privileges of the male officers, with her own cabin and the attendance of a stewardess, who would deal with her laundry and bring her early morning tea. She was able to dine in the first-class salon and was allowed to participate in all the ship’s many recreational activities. She was not allowed to accept tips, but she could be given presents, and was often popular as a dance partner at evening parties.
Nurses’ image as ‘ministering angels’ tended to made them very popular with men, both the passengers and crew, and it is telling that one stock heroine of the romantic literature of the 1930s is the ‘floating sister’. The highly successful novel Luxury Liner, by Gina Kaus, published in 1932, is set on a fictional transatlantic vessel, the Columbia, sailing from Bremerhaven to New York. The hero is a doctor, Thomas, whose wife has run off with her lover. Thomas has been engaged as the ship’s surgeon, and is travelling to America determined to win back his errant wife, who is also aboard the Columbia. However, Thomas falls in love with the ship’s nurse, the apparently saintly and beautiful Sister Martha. Her life has been blighted by a terrible tragedy, which has caused her to dedicate herself to caring for others on big ships. Like much romantic fiction, the central characters in this book incorporated popular role models of the time – a tale about a doctor and a nurse falling in love in the glamorous setting of an ocean liner would capture the reader’s imagination.
Romance aside, in reality medical emergencies often had to be dealt with while the ship was far from land, and sometimes passengers died on board, a fact that was tactfully kept from their fellow travellers. During the 1930s Violet Jessop worked as a stewardess on many White Star Line world cruises, which started in New York, crossed the Atlantic and toured the Mediterranean. She had one particularly objectionable regular client, an elderly, wealthy woman known as the Baroness because of her imperious manner. An eccentric, she always travelled with her collection of live canaries, which were kept in cages in her cabin. She wore fabulous jewellery, but her hands and nails were often filthy. She was obese and obsessed with food, and she frequently complained to the chief steward, who ordered the crew to give her anything to keep her happy. Although she was a fractious character, often suspicious of her fellow passengers, the Baroness could also be extremely generous. On an earlier voyage, she was so upset by the accidental death of one of the ship’s sailors, who was washed overboard off the coast of California, that she started a fund for his bereaved family and contributed to it generously.
On this particular cruise, when the ship docked at Cairo the Barones
s went ashore sightseeing, but she returned with a temperature of 103 degrees, and was nursed in the ship’s hospital. Three days later she died, and Violet and the nurse had to embalm her body and lay it out. Empty coffins were carried in the hold by all liners as a matter of course, but the Baroness was too fat to fit, so the ship’s carpenter was summoned and hastily began to construct an extra-large casket. Because of the delay while he tackled the task, the Baroness’s body developed partial rigor mortis, with one arm rising as if in protest. Having manoeuvred the body into the casket, and covered it with a white sheet, the crew left it in the alleyway of the hospital to await the captain’s formal inspection. The news of the Baroness’s death was still secret, so when a well-intentioned stewardess popped into the hospital with a treat for one of the patients, she had no idea what was in the large white-draped rectangle in the corridor on which she had stubbed her toe. She pulled aside the sheet, and was horrified as the corpse’s arm shot up like a fascist salute.
Nursery staff were a welcome and necessary addition to the ship’s roster of female employees in the early to mid-1930s. Shipping companies needed to make their vessels more appealing to the female passenger by providing dedicated facilities for children and staff to look after them. Nursery stewardesses were in charge of the facilities in purpose-built playrooms; they wore distinctive grey dresses with white collars and cuffs and white caps. Qualified nursery nurses, who had a higher status, were also now employed to provide daytime respite to families travelling with young children. On the North Atlantic run, where a journey could easily take a week, and the family cabins were often compact to the point of claustrophobia, harried parents were glad to deposit their energetic offspring for a few hours in the playrooms, which operated as a combined crèche and kindergarten. The children would have the company of other minors, and could amuse themselves safely under the watchful eyes of the nursery nurses. On the White Star liner Regina, the playroom was adjacent to the lounge, the reading room and writing room, in the centre of the ship. This facility allowed mothers and fathers to use the public rooms to chat, read, play cards, write letters or have a cocktail, yet still be within call of their youngsters. Babies and toddlers were cared for, changed, entertained and fed at regular intervals by the nursery nurses. For older children there were toys on offer – jigsaws, doll’s houses, play houses, swings and rocking horses. The playroom was a godsend for women travelling with children, though canny fellow passengers knew to book cabins as far away from it as possible.
Having consigned her precious offspring to the care of a professional nursery nurse, the female passenger with a few precious hours to herself might well seek out the expertise of other women working on board the ship. Shopping might appeal; the Aquitania’s row of fashionable bijou shops was known as the Atlantic Rue de la Paix, and there attentive female shop assistants would dance attendance on lady customers. Clothes were much on the mind of the well-off transatlantic passenger; there were skilled seamstresses and fine laundresses on board who could work wonders with one’s wardrobe, making repairs and alterations, or tackling stubborn stains. Turkish bath attendants and masseuses were available for body maintenance; in an era where it was fashionable to be slim and to look athletic, an hour in a steam room followed by a therapeutic pummelling from a woman who had seen every possible body shape and was sworn to discretion was an appealing prospect. And then of course there was the essential ‘lady hairdresser’, the Mistress of the Marcel Wave. Female hairdressers were sometimes called ‘barbereens’ in this era, and they gradually expanded into offering their clients beauty treatments too, such as manicures, pedicures and the application of make-up. It was a rewarding and interesting career for an enterprising and energetic young woman.
Kathleen Glendinning from Wallasey was featured in an article in the White Star Magazine of March 1934. She had worked as a hairdresser for seven years, travelling between Liverpool and the American ports, and had covered more than half a million miles in liners. In February 1934 she sailed to Boston in order to marry Ronald Crawford, who was employed by the White Star office there. The couple had met five years before, on his outward journey, and the romance had presumably been conducted at long distance. Kathleen Glendinning was photographed for the article, shaking hands on deck with the Adriatic’s Captain Freeman. She is wearing a smart fur coat with a shawl collar and a chic little hat; she looks glossy, smart and competent, heading west across the Atlantic yet again, this time into a new life.
That same year also brought a substantial improvement to Edith Sowerbutts’s career. Three years after being laid off from her job as a conductress, she was working in the typing pool at the Daily Express in London, hammering out marketing letters, but her luck was about to change. The maverick proprietor of the newspaper, Lord Beaverbrook, appeared in the women’s office on a surprise tour of inspection, and promptly sacked them all. Edith recalled: ‘I thought His Lordship a typical tycoon, frog-faced in appearance, peremptory in manner. But he did me a good turn that day.’5 She left the office elated, clutching her salary to date as well as two weeks’ wages in lieu of notice. This modest windfall was enough to allow her to change her career, because now she could afford to equip herself with a new uniform. Her previous experience as a conductress was a considerable advantage, and this time she was lucky, there was a vacancy. Within a week she was engaged to work on the Olympic, the sister ship of the Titanic, on the transatlantic run.
Lord Beaverbrook’s whim enabled Edith to buy the new uniforms she needed: striped blue and white morning dresses, dark blue afternoon frocks and large white aprons. Stewardesses also wore belts, cuffs, collars and the hated Sister Dora caps. Edith and her sister Dorothy, a stewardess with the same firm, came under the control of the chief lady superintendent, Miss Somerville, a former Cunard conductress. Miss Somerville had considerable authority within the company, as she and her two able assistants, Miss Moseley and Miss Prescott, selected and managed all seagoing women for Cunard and White Star, following the merger in 1934. The superintendents operated from Southampton and Liverpool, and one of them always came aboard whenever a ship docked or sailed, to meet the female crew and address any concerns. Edith was now in her late thirties, and she felt it was only a matter of time before she was deemed to be too old for junior office jobs on land, and was left without the prospect of any casual work. However, for stewardesses, a few extra years conferred the welcome advantage of added gravitas, and her previous experience as a conductress was valued by her female bosses. Edith also appreciated the collaborative nature and managerial skills of Miss Somerville and her deputies, feeling she could confide in them with any problems. They were to be immensely supportive of Edith and her sister Dorothy when they had family problems in later years. Meanwhile, Edith was happy to find herself back on the Atlantic Ferry, in a new role. As a stewardess, rather than a conductress, she had far fewer weighty responsibilities, and the prospect of earning decent money at last.
The year 1934 proved to be a watershed for the future of British-owned passenger shipping, because it was when work resumed on a vital project, the construction of the Queen Mary. Drastic action had long been required. In the mighty shipyards of Britain, the Great Depression had led to the lay-off of thousands of shipbuilders. Cunard’s latest flagship, known at this point only as Hull 534, had been under construction at John Brown’s in Clydebank since 1930. But by Christmas 1931 the outlook for the company’s North Atlantic trade revenues was so grave that work was stopped, 2,000 ship workers were laid off from Hull 534, and for the next two years the project languished.
The inert hulk of the ship, which was to have been longer, bigger and faster than any other in the world, towered over the boatyard and adjacent workers’ houses like a gigantic, rusty rebuke. The collapse of traditional industries that had made Britain the workshop of the world – iron, steel, coal, textiles, shipbuilding – came as a profound shock to the national psyche. Public interest was intense, with letters pouring in to Cunard’s Liverpoo
l offices, some even enclosing donations. British morale and international prestige were so bound up in Hull 534 that questions were asked in Parliament. An urgent confidential enquiry into the trading and financial position of British shipping companies involved in the North Atlantic recommended a merger of the two main firms competing for transatlantic passenger trade. In 1933 a new company, Cunard White Star Limited, was formed. The merger led to a review of the combined fleet and the subsequent sale overseas of surplus vessels. The rationalisation was long overdue, and in return the Treasury effectively underwrote the completion of Hull 534, to ensure that the new shipping company remained in British ownership. The new ship eventually cost £3.5 million to construct, approximately £225 million today. It had proved to be too big to be allowed to fail; the government agreed to support the completion of the project in order to alleviate the crushing unemployment in the area, and work resumed in April 1934.
Hull 534 was inadvertently named in honour of the consort of King George V, Queen Mary, and broke Cunard’s ninety-year tradition of giving each vessel a resonant name ending in ‘ia’, after ancient Roman provinces. The company had planned to call this ship Victoria after the nineteenth-century British monarch and Empress of India, while still maintaining their brand identity. When a personal delegation from Cunard’s board tactfully requested the king’s permission to name the liner after ‘Britain’s greatest queen’, he broke in immediately to say that his wife, Queen Mary, would be delighted to accept the honour. No one present had the nerve to correct the peppery though dim monarch. Subsequently, Cunard stoutly claimed publicly that it had always been their intention to name the ship after the current queen. However, Felix Morley, editor of the Washington Post, who sailed on the ship’s maiden voyage in 1936, was told about the misunderstanding by Sir Percy Bates, chairman of Cunard, on condition that the truth wasn’t published during Sir Percy’s lifetime.