Maiden Voyages:

Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the Women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them

by

Siân Evans

 

 

 You can almost hear those mighty steam whistles blow as this book sets sail into a lively recounting of the ships that changed history and the women who broke the sea's age-old bad luck superstition by working and/or sailing on them. It's part shipbuilding history, with digressions into major social and political upheavals of the era, but the true heart lies in the women's lives. These women are dynamic, making and breaking and remaking their careers upon the waves or while crossing them, their histories sometimes cautionary and often life-affirming.

The glamorous female passengers--famed for celebrity or notoriety--were deliberately courted by the liners' home offices, and by the author, to attract the eye. They range from the rich and scandalous Thelma Furness, twice divorced mistress of the Prince of Wales, to entertainer Josephine Baker, whose first transatlantic crossing brought her to Paris where she later made her name, and her longtime home. There was even an Olympic swimming champion who talked and taught her way into becoming the world's first ocean liner social activities director.

 

The women who waited upon them I found equally fascinating: crofters' daughters or German frauleins leaving their villages for domestic service afloat, and widows offered jobs by the company their husbands had worked for, who left their children in the care of relatives on shore for the demanding and sometimes dangerous jobs as stewardesses or chaperones on the sea. Those women, especially the stewardesses, were expected to  charm the passengers, be friendly with the officers, keep the lower decks in their place, and be on their feet and on call sixteen or more hours out of the twenty-four. They walked a narrow line between discouraging male advances to keep their reputations and maintaining an approachable air to keep the passengers and their shipmates happy with them.

 

One name you'll become very familiar with is that of Violet Jessop, later known as the Unsinkable. She was 24 years old and had been at sea several years before her first liner hit an iceberg and sunk out from under her feet (yes, that liner!). Surviving in a lifeboat with some women passengers and unaccompanied children, she was taken ashore and, along with the other surviving crew, soon shipped back to England where they all discovered their pay had been stopped the day the Titanic went down. By then they'd already been a few weeks without income, and since there were no unemployment or sick leave benefits available as well as no understanding at all of post-traumatic stress, Violet was back working on another ship within a very few weeks of her first--yes, first--sinking. 

 

The Titanic's iceberg encounter led to a dramatic shift in liner design and safety features, as well as crew training. Stewardesses like Violet had, for the first time, safety duties as well. Those stood her in good stead during WW1, when liner travel became a casualty of the U-boat threat and the demands of the military for shipping capacity, for she retrained as a nurse and was assigned to a hospital ship in the Mediterranean. Again her ship was sunk--fortunately before being loaded up with wounded soldiers. Nor was that the only converted liner to sink. Before the Armistice, more than 50% of the Cunard line's total tonnage of ships was lost. 

 

Post-war building booms brought the liners back into service for another grand period of service to the rich and the immigrant alike, and many's the former nurse who traded uniforms to stay at sea for a long and fulfilling career. This time more jobs were open to them. Not only as domestic staff and passenger attendants, they were hired as stenographers, hair stylists, masseuses, and anything else the competitive liner companies could dream up for the ease and comfort of their richest clientele. One holdout was the radio room. Even women who had been fully trained and certified as telegraphers were considered not responsible enough to man the telegraph rooms for many years longer.

All in all, this book is a fascinating look at the age of ocean liners through the eyes of women, all the way from the luxurious upper decks to the cramped crew quarters at the waterline. The author gives much credit to her great-uncle, a lifelong Cunard employee whose connections to old shipmates gave her an inexhaustible source of anecdotes, memories, and explanations for the ways of the great liners at sea.

Hardcover, 368 pages

Published August 10th 2021 by St. Martin's Press

ISBN

1250246466 (ISBN13: 9781250246462)

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