and used to lay the first telegraph cable
across the Atlantic.
Then there was the Titanic. A deckchair
with a hole in its seat and a decorative wall
panel are displayed in the final, ship-shaped
spaces of the V&A exhibition as haunting
relics of the disaster. ‘We wanted to explore
the Titanic for its design history as well as
the legacy of it,’ explains curator GhislaineWood. ‘Why does the Titanic still hold such a
powerful place in the imagination? I think it
is to do with the fact that it represents a long-
lost past, something that can’t be recaptured,
this great age of floating palaces.’
It must have been the glamour that
tempted wealthy travellers back on to ocean
liners in the post-war years. Thousands lined
the decks of the enormous vessels that went
to sea in the mid-1930s in defiance of the
Wall Street Crash. As the French SS Nor-Where today could you gaze upon
can-can girls and poodles while
t ravelling f rom a to b?ple on naval menus until it became endan-
gered in the early 1970s — was followed by
decadent courses of sirloin, lamb, grouse and
Bavaroise Princesse.
The construction of both ships was subsi-
dised by Balfour’s government on the condi-
tion that they could be requisitioned in the
event of war. While the Mauretania was suc-
cessfully used as a troop and hospital ship
during the first world war, the Lusitania was
sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of
Ireland in 1915; 1,198 passengers and crew
lost their lives.
Even in peacetime the dangers to ocean
liners were rife. In the mid-19th centu-
ry, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s mighty,
twin-engined Great Eastern embarked on
its third voyage only to be caught up in a
gale and lose its rudder pin. Furniture was
upended, passengers thrown to the ground
with their trunks — and a cow plummeted
headfirst through the ship’s ceiling, at least
in an artist’s impression of the scene. Too
rough in its passage to serve as a passen-
ger liner, the Great Eastern was remodelled
mandie set out on its maiden voyage to
New York, some 40 per cent of the passen-
gers were in first class. On board the liner
in 1938 was Marlene Dietrich with enough
hat boxes to fill a cabin. Picture her in front
of Jean Dunand’s ‘Les Sports’, an art deco
vision of ancient Sparta done in gold leaf,
replete with javelin, discus and shotput-
throwing athletes. It’s the kind of art the fas-
cists would have loved — and the kind of
ideology Dietrich hated.
The British, meanwhile, were launching
a dazzling art deco liner of their own. The
Queen Mary was every bit as extravagant as
the Normandie. There was also a sense of fun
to it that’s quite absent from modern trans-
port. Where today could you gaze upon can-
can girls and poodles, hoop-twirling acrobats
and Venetian masks while travelling from a
to b? The murals of the famous Verandah
Grill were painted by stage designer Doris
Zinkeisen and her sister, and their theatri-
cality proved strangely prescient.
At the coming of the second world war,
the Queen Mary was stripped of its colourIMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS