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Sea fever
You won’t catch her on a cruise, but an exhibition at the V&A
makes Daisy Dunn wistful for the golden age of travelL
ooking at the sketchbook of Wil-
liam Whitelock Lloyd, a soldier-art-
ist who joined a P&O liner after sur-
viving the Anglo-Zulu War, I’m reminded
why I avoid cruises. On board this India-
bound ship were: a ‘man who talks a great
deal of yachting shop and collapses at the
first breeze of wind’, ‘a successful Colonist’,
and ‘the victim of mal de mer who lives on
smelling salts’. It would be just my luck to
be stuck in the cabin between ‘One of our
Flirts’, the busty lady with pretty eyes, and
what Lloyd affectionately called ‘Our Fog-horns (automatic)’ — two bawling babies.
By the late 19th century, ocean liners
attracted all sorts, from emigrants seek-
ing a new life in the US to curious poseurs.
Ever since Samuel Cunard launched his first
scheduled passenger steamer from Liver-
pool to Boston in 1840, the race had been
on to provide the most efficient liner service.
From the cramped and disease-ridden early
vessels to the smart QE2, the history of the
ocean liner, explored in a new exhibition at
the V&A, is fraught with rivalry.
The Blue Riband — the prize for thequickest transatlantic crossing — was held
almost exclusively by the British until 1898,
when the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse raced
over the Atlantic at an average speed of 22.3
knots. Exulting in their glory, the Germans
commissioned a disgustingly faux Ruben-
esque canvas, ‘Our Future Lies Upon the
Water’, for the smoking room of the Kai-
ser’s sister ship.
The brochures produced for the Ham-
burg-American Line a decade later were
far more enticing. Colour lithographs,
used extensively in ship and railway post-
ers, depicted cosy saloons with fireplaces
and Persian carpets, as shipping companies
turned increasingly to architects to design
their ship interiors. Liners were marketed as
what they now were: majestic floating hotels.
When Britain reclaimed the Blue Riband
it also established a new standard for mari-
time comfort. The passengers ferried across
the water by the Lusitania and the Maure-
tania dozed in wicker beds and dined on tur-
tle soup. Pity the seasick of the Lusitania on
Sunday 16 August 1908 when turtle — a sta-Detail of ‘Riveters’ from the series ‘Shipbuilding on the Clyde’, 1941, by Stanley Spencer