by Siân Evans
Accommodation for female crew was still very cramped. Edith shared a tiny cabin with her old friend Ada Norfolk, another stewardess. On getting up at six thirty every morning, they had to take it in turns to dress, as there was limited floor-space. Edith would wait on the top bunk while Ada ritually donned her stockings and shoes. She would leave the stockings concertinaed around her ankles (‘Russian boots, dear,’ she remarked wryly) until she could get her suspender belt on and attach the stockings. Underwear came next, and eventually she clambered into her grey uniform dress and attached her white cap to her hair. Only once Ada was dressed and tucked up neatly on the lower bunk was there enough room for Edith to dress. They set out on a five-minute walk from their cabin to their stations at midships.
Ada Norfolk had previously worked as a senior stewardess on the Olympic, Majestic and Berengaria. Perhaps uniquely, she had run away from the circus, and ended up going to sea. She came from a long line of performers and showmen; her father was a clown and had his own circus, and her brother was a juggler. Many years before, the family were sailing to America to fulfil a circus booking, when the purser took a shine to young Ada. Despite their eighteen-year age difference, they married. When he died, Ada was left to bring up two young children. As a ‘company widow’, she was employed as a stewardess on United States Lines, where she had met her husband. Ada had survived the torpedoing and sinking of a ship off the coast of Ireland during the Great War, and described the experience in a very matter-of-fact manner: ‘It was a lovely day in June, dear. It was quite pleasant in the lifeboat for a while, and then we got picked up.’10 In idle moments, Ada fondly recalled that in the early years of her marriage, during a brief sojourn in California, she had met a pleasant and handsome young British chap, anxious to make his mark in Hollywood. This unknown was called Charlie Chaplin.
The chief stewardess of the Queen Mary was Mrs Nin Kilburn, who always looked after travelling royalty. Mrs Kilburn came from a Liverpool sea-going family – one of her sisters and an aunt were stewardesses on the Lusitania. When that ship was torpedoed in 1915, a deck steward tried to save the sister, but she insisted on staying on board until she found her aunt. In the confusion, the aunt was saved, but Mrs Kilburn’s sister drowned. Nin Kilburn was a former school teacher; in the 1930s, when unemployment was high, it was not unusual for well-educated and well-qualified women to pursue better-paid careers at sea. A talented linguist, she was paid an extra £1 a month for interpreting French or German.
While long-lasting and valuable relationships often developed between women seafarers who shared adversity, seasickness and tiny cabins, there were also friendships between them and some of their passengers. Some proved to be superficial and illusory: Violet Jessop recalled one well-heeled American socialite who was recovering from a personal calamity, and who relied on her emotionally throughout an entire transatlantic voyage. They spent many of Violet’s few and precious off-duty hours in ‘intimate and soul-revealing talks’. On arrival in New York, the grateful passenger insisted Violet must come and visit her any time she was in the city. A few months later, Violet dropped in at the plush hotel where her acquaintance lived. She quickly realised that the woman seemed puzzled as to how they knew each other. She was welcoming, but Violet recalled, ‘I knew she had not the faintest idea who I was.’11
Some wealthy travellers would book crossings on specific ships in order to be in the care of their favourite stewardesses; in fact Cunard would offer the services of a named ‘special’ stewardess at a supplementary charge for those passengers prepared to pay extra for a familiar face. Miss Paddock, who spent her working life as a stewardess with White Star Line, always looked after Harriet Cohen, the professional pianist, on her transatlantic trips. They became great friends, and Miss Paddock was one of the guests on This is Your Life, a popular British TV programme, when it featured the musician’s biography. Another famous pianist, Dame Myra Hess, was usually attended by Janet Austin on the Queen Mary. When Miss Austin reached the age of sixty-five and retired, Dame Myra provided her with a small flat at her home in St John’s Wood in London, to ensure their friendship continued. Many stewardesses would be sent money at Christmas by some of their former passengers, usually in the form of $20 bills, and some were even remembered generously in their wills. Ada Norfolk, Edith’s cabin mate, unexpectedly inherited a substantial legacy long after she retired, left to her by a former Tiller Girl with whom she had been friends when they were both young and had crossed the Atlantic together between the wars.
Stewardesses were careful not to leave valuables or money in their own cabins, especially when in port, in case of theft. By the end of a return voyage they had often accumulated a substantial sum in tips from grateful passengers. This could be stored in the purser’s safe, or they could deposit it with the branch of the Midland Bank on the Queen Mary. Traditionalists, however, preferred to conceal it on their persons, either in a special reinforced pocket sewn into an old-fashioned petticoat, or in a purse secured around the midriff, and some stewardesses developed mysterious lumps and bumps under their uniforms. As soon as they disembarked in Southampton and had been paid, they would visit the Post Office and bank their wages, before heading back to their families. Edith recalled: ‘It was comforting for all of us, we female sea-dogs, on arrival at home, to be able to meet all the bills and commitments and no longer have to stint ourselves personally. My own responsibilities had always halved my earnings. Alone I could keep myself quite well. Now in the Queen Mary the money I made was a veritable godsend.’12
The stewardesses often had to deal with elderly ladies losing their false teeth. Passengers were very partial to removing their uncomfortable dentures to consume soft fruit in the privacy of their cabins, and they often forgot to re-insert them after they had finished eating. If they were unlucky, a dish of discarded peel, pith and cores might be flung through the open porthole, without the stewardess spotting a set of dentures on the same plate. Passengers were also adept at purloining the silver cutlery, as well as the distinctive silver cruet sets, much valued as souvenirs. A stewardess’s ruse for retrieving them was to insist that she needed them ‘for cleaning’. Eventually the cutlery and cruet sets were stocked as merchandise for sale in the on-board ship, along with the attractive white cube-shaped teapots and milk jugs designed specifically for the Cunard Line. Passengers were encouraged to buy the tea sets as souvenirs, rather than pilfering them from their breakfast trays.
The single aspect of life on board the Queen Mary that Edith most feared was a storm at sea. Despite rarely suffering from seasickness herself, she would listen with apprehension to the warning signs as a storm approached. There might be a clatter of metal trays or crockery from the stewards’ pantries as the ship lurched or rolled. Baggage would start to slide across the floors of the cabins, and would have to be secured by the stewards. Carpet would be placed on top of polished floors to enhance grip, while stewards and waiters in the public rooms would secure all the chairs to pillars or walls, using lanyards so that they couldn’t slide about. However, so dramatic could the force of a storm be that occupied chairs had been known to break away in the dining saloon, careering from one side of the room to the other, taking their passengers with them.
The Queen Mary was notorious for its lively performance in heavy seas, a fact that Cunard was keen to conceal from the travelling public. Smaller ships would sail up a wave, crest it, and hurtle down the other side, bobbing on the water like a cork, and providing a sensation for the passengers like being on a roller-coaster ride. But the vast Queen Mary – nearly a quarter of a mile long – would labour up a wave and seesaw on its apex before plunging forward and downwards, a much more vertiginous drop for anyone travelling in its stern or bows. It was estimated that the difference between the crest and the trough of a wave during a severe storm could be the equivalent of eight storeys in height. The ship was also prone to rolling from side to side, and a list of more than 40 per cent was recorded on a number of occasions. During
one ferocious storm in the late 1930s that lasted for five days, one stewardess rolled right up the bulkhead of her cabin and back again. She remembered never having seen so much damaged crockery and china, the alleyways were running with seawater, and even some portholes had been smashed by the force of the waves. While beleaguered and frightened passengers were wedged into their bunks with pillows to keep them both prone and safe, the cabin crew – struggling to stay upright themselves as the ship pitched and lurched – attempted to minister to them, bringing dry biscuits and bottles of Canada Dry ginger ale in vain attempts to combat seasickness.
A particularly memorable storm at sea occurred in April 1938. The Queen Mary finally reached Plymouth five hours later than expected, after experiencing a terrifying ordeal. An eighty-mile-an-hour gale had driven the ship eastwards, with waves more than a hundred feet high crashing over the decks. As the storm reached its crescendo Miss Lily Pons, a professional soprano singer, defied the howling winds and the suspension of the normal rules of gravity to star in a public concert for charity. The ‘pocket prima donna’, as she was known, was determined that the show should go on, though Miss Pons had had an inkling that she might be in for a salutary experience:
The night before, my bed crashed into the stateroom wall. My trunks and all the furniture in the room were piled up in a heap. Stewards came and clamped down my bed. But I was determined to keep my promise. The ship was rolling so badly when the concert began that safety ropes were placed in the room, so that the audience could hold onto them. When I started to sing, I was clutching a rope. I let go of the rope unconsciously – and the next thing I knew was that I was sliding along the stage. I could hardly keep my feet but I went on singing, and £300 was collected for seamen’s charities.13
The gale lasted twenty-four hours and was physically and mentally exhausting. Passengers and crew were repeatedly tipped off their feet, furniture was smashed, and the damage to crockery and glassware was unprecedented. A grand piano broke loose from its moorings in the salon, and swept across the room like a three-legged behemoth on castors – fortunately, people in the vicinity managed to leap out of the way. An American banker who was dozing in a reclining chair when the ship suddenly lurched sideways, woke up in the scuppers with a broken arm and a black eye. A theatrical producer, Marc Connelly, said: ‘It was the worst storm I have ever experienced, and I have crossed the Atlantic thirty times. Fortunately, the gale was behind us but the seas were like a mountain range of water. I have never seen anything so aweinspiring.’14 Mr Connelly said he saw a dozen people being carried away by the crew and brave passengers for medical attention. It took six stewards to lift one man, who was unconscious. Ray Noble, the Queen Mary’s dance band leader, said he was surprised there were so few casualties. When the Queen Mary put in at Plymouth, forty injured passengers were taken off to be treated for injuries in local hospitals, and the ship limped back to Southampton for substantial internal repairs and provisioning.
But 1938 was a memorable year for tumultuous events on land as well as at sea. Tensions in Europe had been building steadily as the true nature of Germany’s Third Reich became clearer, to its own nationals, its neighbours and perceptive international observers. In particular, for those who worked in transatlantic travel, or who travelled regularly, it was apparent that many more Europeans were on the move. They were not travelling abroad for leisure, pleasure, romance or business: they were running to escape from what appeared to be the growing menace of anti-Semitism. Discrimination against the Jews had occurred in cyclical waves throughout Europe since the Middle Ages, but during the 1930s the economic consequences of the Great Depression led to increasing animosity against them. Some politicians looked for scapegoats to account for their national malaise, and the Jews were convenient and easy to blame. France had a number of very active right-wing political factions, and in Britain Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists, ostensibly as a force against unemployment. Before long, his organisation was involved in street battles with recent Jewish immigrants living in the East End of London. However, it was Germany under the National Socialists – and, as the decade wore on, its annexed or overrun neighbours – whose Jewish communities were most desperate to escape by emigrating, ideally to North or South America.
As the conditions in Europe became more hostile to the Jews, the shipping companies responded. As early as November 1933, just ten months after Hitler came to power, the need to increase the capacity of the kosher kitchen on the Aquitania was discussed by the Cunard board. It was apparent that increasing numbers of Jewish emigrants were planning to leave Europe, especially those of German origin. Understandably, they preferred not to sail on German-owned ships, preferring French, American or British shipping lines where they were treated more respectfully. Kosher food was provided and listed on the menus of all Cunard passenger ships, and separate kitchens were maintained to comply with strict dietary rules. Provision had also long been made on the more enlightened ocean liners for religious observance for Jewish passengers. White Star Magazine noted that:
for Jewish ocean travellers crossing the Atlantic in the latter part of April [1927] special arrangements were made by the White Star line. During the voyage of the Olympic which began at Southampton on April 15th, Passover services were held, three rabbis who were travelling in the ship having charge of these. Special steps were taken to ensure the proper preparation of food in accordance with the Jewish ritual.15
The Queen Mary was the first ocean liner to be equipped with its own Jewish prayer room, and Cunard appointed a rabbi to ensure a kosher kitchen and catering department for observant Jewish passengers. The numbers of those planning to leave Europe grew rapidly in the 1930s, though total immigration numbers to the United States for each nationality were still limited by the 1924 quota laws. For many, the great ships provided a lifeline; if they could obtain a visa and raise the funds to buy the tickets, they could sail for the New World. By 1938 about 150,000 German Jews had already fled the country, and they were now spread across the globe; some had found sanctuary as far away as Shanghai. Following the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria in spring 1938, a further 185,000 Jews found themselves living under Nazi rule.
-As described in the Washington Post, two families’ tales illustrate the dilemma. Austrian-born businessman Mark Tennenbaum had anticipated the growing menace and had planned an escape route, sending money to a trusted friend who was living in neutral Switzerland. Through his contacts, the friend was able to arrange American visas for Mark and his wife, Earnestine, and their two-year-old son, Robert, and as instructed he also bought first-class tickets for the three of them to travel on the Queen Mary. Mark Tennenbaum had reasoned, ‘Give the money to the Brits, not the damn Nazis!’ because punitive measures imposed on emigrating Jews by the Nazi regime included confiscating all their money as they left the country, leaving them only the equivalent of $4 per person in ready cash. The Tennenbaums visited their friend, ostensibly for a holiday, then travelled from Switzerland to Cherbourg to board the Queen Mary, clutching their precious visas and tickets.
Mark was a keen amateur cameraman, and film survives of the small family exploring the deck of the Queen Mary as they sailed to America and a new life. The footage shows an excited small boy, Robert, in a double-breasted overcoat, short trousers and round sunglasses, holding the hand of his elegant mother, who is wrapped in a smart outfit with a fur collar and hat. She is pointing out the features of the ship, and encouraging him to make friends with another youngster. But in an unguarded moment, for a few seconds Earnestine gazes into the camera lens; her smile has been replaced by an expression of apprehension and regret. ‘She looks so sad, and it was for a good reason,’ Robert commented, viewing the film again, eighty years later. The Tennenbaums had experienced increasing anti-Semitism, and had been obliged to abandon two thriving businesses, their property and possessions in order to make their escape. Nevertheless, he recalled in old age, ‘The bottom line was that the Queen Mary
saved me and my mom and dad, saved our lives.’16
The noose tightened on later émigrés: three weeks before Kristallnacht on 9–10 November 1938, the night when thousands of Jewish businesses and properties were attacked and destroyed, Ludwig Katzenstein’s father resolved it was time for the family to escape their home near Berlin. He had secured emigration visas for the family, and using their dwindling fund of Reichsmarks he purchased four last-minute boat tickets on the Queen Mary, which was leaving from Cherbourg for New York. The family took the train through Germany, but at the border with Holland the train was stopped, and all the passengers’ papers were checked by the Gestapo. A new edict had been introduced just the day before their flight: all Jewish citizens were required by law to have a red letter ‘J’ stamped into their passports to make them valid. The Katzensteins’ documents were not in order because they lacked this new stamp. The family were detained and put into a holding cell, while the train left without them. Ludwig was only six years old; he remembered his father was allowed to go into town, probably to pawn something to get enough money to bribe the guards, and on his return the letter ‘J’ was added to their passports and the family were free to leave on the next train. However, it was now evening, they were now many hours behind schedule, and in danger of missing the ship. Ludwig’s resourceful father persuaded the train master to call the captain of the Queen Mary, to ask the ship to wait. He knew that if they missed this sailing, they would have lost their last chance to get to the USA, as they had no more funds. Commodore Robert Irving received the message and delayed the departure of the great ship and its thousands of passengers and crew by six hours, so that the Katzensteins could scramble up the gangplank and on to the safety of the Queen Mary. Ludwig recalled: ‘My father asked him to wait until four people got there. That captain waited for six hours. He saved our lives … it was a miracle. It shows, in my mind, considerable humanity.’