Issue 1: Article 7: Life Aboard BRITANNIA, The First Cunard Liner

(This article first appeared on http://www.clydeshipping.co.uk)

Life Aboard The First Cunarder

Cunard nowadays is a byword for luxury and grandeur. No other company approaches its sense of style, magnificence and opulence. They may supercede each of those qualities (arguably) but it is unquestionable that taken as a sum total, no-one beats Cunard for the imagination and awe of the public.

It was not always thus.

To get a feeling for the early days of steam you have to put yourself in the position of someone wishing to cross the Atlantic. A roaring ocean at times that struck fear into many a seasoned sailor, never mind the landlubber wanting to emigrate or visit relatives or business associates. Your choice was not an easy one. Did you opt for sail, which was less than reliable in terms of timescale, but had been doing so for hundereds of years, or did you take the new fangled 'steam waggons' which although you could depend on the timing, they were hideously expensive and unproven. Steam may frighten you, the concept of this wild energy being locked up in a tub hundreds of miles away from the engineers who built the engines would not, I suspect, have been a comfortable thought for many.

Usually your choice was made by your pocket however, as the rates for sail were very much less than steam. In any case, steam was never going to take over sail, there were too many problems associated with breakdowns. In fact, steam vessels deployed sails anyway, it was hardly a convincing fact that they did not dispense with them altogether in favour of their shiny monsters.

Let us suppose though you had the money and were keen to embrace the new technology. Step aboard then Cunard's first ship, the paddle steamer BRITANNIA, built on the Clyde by Robert Duncan, engines by Napier.

You would be someone of some consequence. Your trunk would contain all the paraphenalia of a rich and important person. Your fellow passengers would be of similar background, breeding and fortune, or even the odd author, such as Charles Dickens.

That literary genius gives us an insight into the very ship we are concerned with, for on 3rd January 1842, he, along with his wife, took a voyage on the Cunard ship to Halifax, Nova Scotia from Liverpool

His first impressions of the ship did not match the imagined impressions he had laboured under at home. When shown to his 'state room' he suspected it was a joke and the 'real' stateroom would be presented to him.

"...that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box," he writes in American Notes, " had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agent’s counting-house in the city of London: that this room of state, in short, could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain’s, invented and put in practice for the better relish and enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed:- these were truths which I really could not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to bear upon or comprehend."

I referred to a trunk that would contain a rich person's personals and again, homespun thoughts of stowing your large trunk aboard in your state-room are as ficticious as the lithographic plan referred to by Dickens. His wife had conlcuded that not more than two portmanteaus could be safely hidden away in their imagined state-room in some corner. In reality, on seeing the actual dimensions, none of the trunks "could no more be got in at the door, not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower-pot"

It seems then that marketing over substance was very much a Victorian invention. Mr Dickens also refers to a depiction in that agent's office of the saloon. It was displayed as something of immense proportions and with much granduer, showing ladies and gentlemen enjoying themselves and their surroundings of Eastern Splendour. Before going down to view his poky 'state-room' he and his fellow passengers had walked through a long narrow apartment which contained along each side 'of its dreary length' long tables with racks above each from the low roof containing drinking glasses and cruet stands. Dickens had not seen the depiction of the saloon, that was something he was to be 'gratified by' later, but a feelow passenger had obviously pored over the fantastic piece of artistry and dreamed of entering the saloon many times before he eventually boarded the ship. Three stewards, chilled to the bone, huddled round a stove at the end of the room:

"...with a ghastly smile which is still before me, looking at the same time round the walls, ‘Ha! the breakfast-room, steward — eh?’ We all foresaw what the answer must be: we knew the agony he suffered. He had often spoken of the saloon; had taken in and lived upon the pictorial idea; had usually given us to understand, at home, that to form a just conception of it, it would be necessary to multiply the size and furniture of an ordinary drawing-room by seven, and then fall short of the reality. When the man in reply avowed the truth; the blunt, remorseless, naked truth; ‘This is the saloon, sir’ — he actually reeled beneath the blow.

Dickens, his wife and their companions made the best of it and agreed not to let little disappointments colour their trip. They expressed outright satisfaction after all, the stateroom they concluded would have been quite deplorale had it been one inch wider. Although "I do verily believe that ... nothing smaller for sleeping in was ever made except coffins, it was no bigger than one of those hackney cabriolets which have the door behind, and shoot their fares out, like sacks of coals, upon the pavement."

He was however, grateful to a female steward, a Scots lass, who drew such a delightful (and tactful) picture of the crossing ahead of them, saying it was nothing, a mere frolic and that at no time had she ever seen a passenger ill. Indeed she painted such a merry picture of on-board life that Dickens fancied the stateroom became suddenly quite bloated and almost boasted a bay window to view the sea from!

Their first couple of days passage went amazingly well, and dampening down prospects of being ill himself, he surveyed a few people who had already succumbed to the gentle rolling and pitching and was probably quite pleased with himself. However, that was to change.

"It is the third morning. I am awakened out of my sleep by a dismal shriek from my wife, who demands to know whether there’s any danger. I rouse myself, and look out of bed. The water-jug is plunging and leaping like a lively dolphin; all the smaller articles are afloat, except my shoes, which are stranded on a carpet-bag, high and dry, like a couple of coal-barges. Suddenly I see them spring into the air, and behold the looking-glass, which is nailed to the wall, sticking fast upon the ceiling. At the same time the door entirely disappears, and a new one is opened in the floor. Then I begin to comprehend that the state-room is standing on its head.

"Before it is possible to make any arrangement at all compatible with this novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can say ‘Thank Heaven!’ she wrongs again. Before one can cry she IS wrong, she seems to have started forward, and to be a creature actually running of its own accord, with broken knees and failing legs, through every variety of hole and pitfall, and stumbling constantly. Before one can so much as wonder, she takes a high leap into the air. Before she has well done that, she takes a deep dive into the water. Before she has gained the surface, she throws a summerset. The instant she is on her legs, she rushes backward. And so she goes on staggering, heaving, wrestling, leaping, diving, jumping, pitching, throbbing, rolling, and rocking: and going through all these movements, sometimes by turns, and sometimes altogether: until one feels disposed to roar for mercy."

The shock of this first real encounter with a storm and a head wind left our author speechless. He entered a state that believed anything was now possible, as he listened to glasses smashing, furniture tearing, watched stewards falling all over the place and all the time the world turning upside down. "If, in the momentary illumination of any ray of intelligence that may have come upon me in the way of thoughts of Home, a goblin postman, with a scarlet coat and bell, had come into that little kennel before me, broad awake in broad day, and, apologising for being damp through walking in the sea, had handed me a letter directed to myself, in familiar characters, I am certain I should not have felt one atom of astonishment: I should have been perfectly satisfied. If Neptune himself had walked in, with a toasted shark on his trident, I should have looked upon the event as one of the very commonest everyday occurrences."

Dickens describes the appearance of the deck after one particularly bad night of gales

"In the gale of last night the life-boat had been crushed by one blow of the sea like a walnut-shell; and there it hung dangling in the air: a mere faggot of crazy boards. The planking of the paddle-boxes had been torn sheer away. The wheels were exposed and bare; and they whirled and dashed their spray about the decks at random. Chimney, white with crusted salt; topmasts struck; storm-sails set; rigging all knotted, tangled, wet, and drooping: a gloomier picture it would be hard to look upon."

And so the journey proceeds, each day more appalling than the last, despite the Captain's claim that each day will see better weather tomorrow. The trials and tribulations of the passenger are naught compared to the crew, andt a resume of daily life includes this wonderful snippet when Dickens presents us with daily news on the BRITANNIA:

"As to daily news, there is no dearth of that commodity. This passenger is reported to have lost fourteen pounds at Vingt-et-un in the saloon yesterday; and that passenger drinks his bottle of champagne every day, and how he does it (being only a clerk), nobody knows. The head engineer has distinctly said that there never was such times — meaning weather — and four good hands are ill, and have given in, dead beat. Several berths are full of water, and all the cabins are leaky. The ship’s cook, secretly swigging damaged whiskey, has been found drunk; and has been played upon by the fire-engine until quite sober. All the stewards have fallen down-stairs at various dinner-times, and go about with plasters in various places. The baker is ill, and so is the pastry-cook. A new man, horribly indisposed, has been required to fill the place of the latter officer; and has been propped and jammed up with empty casks in a little house upon deck, and commanded to roll out pie-crust, which he protests (being highly bilious) it is death to him to look at. News! A dozen murders on shore would lack the interest of these slight incidents at sea."

And so this article shows us that life on board a Cunarder was nothing like what modern passengers would ever expect. However, times moved on, ships evolved and with each passing generation, new Cunarders replaced the old, culminating in the biggest of them all as she goes on her trials off Brittany.

One wonders if any of the passengers who sail on board Cunard's latest QUEEN MARY 2 ever think about the perils of their ancestor travellers.

Somehow, I very much doubt it!