A Century of Sea Travel: Personal accounts from the steamship era by Christopher Deakes and Tom Stanley
Seaforth Publishing, Barnsley, 2010, £30 (hb)
192 pages, with numerous colour and blackand-white illustrations
ISBN 978-1-84832-081-9
The publicity material distributed by steamship lines during the ‘golden age’ of liner travel remains aesthetically highly potent. Typical images of large white passenger ships majestically aloof at anchor in tropical settings, surrounded by palm fronds and fore-grounded by the local vernacular retain a mystique and a romantic allure, while also speaking of privilege and of a lost imperial world order, centred on Europe's ‘Great Powers.’ Deakes, a former shipping agent, and Stanley, an architect, are avid collectors of shipping postcards and ephemera and, as with this reviewer, they find fascination not only in the images on the faces of the postcards they have collected, but also the messages written on their reverse sides as well.
In my own considerably smaller and more contemporary shipping postcard collection, which consists mainly of images of modern short-sea ferries, rather than the grand ocean liners of yore, there are some intriguing and amusing messages scrawled on the back. Of one Belgian cross-Channel ferry, a child wrote home to their aunt that the soup served at luncheon ‘was like eating watery grass’, while a German exchange student detailed with punctilious precision to the British family who had housed him the number of times he had been seasick on a rough passage from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. Suffice to say, he was very glad to be on a train en route back to Koblenz. Focusing instead on the experience of travel on ‘deep sea’ liner passenger services and on wartime troop transports, Deakes and Stanley augment messages of this kind with accounts from letters, diaries and journals.
In the wake of the French semiologist Roland Barthes' influential essay advocating the metaphorical ‘Death of the Author’, this user-centred approach to history has been highly fashionable in literary scholarship and design historical writing since the latter 1960s. It is only in more recent time that it has been applied as a prime methodology for the study of the history of the merchant navy. Perhaps two central problems for Deakes and Stanley are that those who wrote postcards home probably represented mainly a middleand upper class clientele in liner travel's early era and that passengers perhaps tended to write messages home while enjoying themselves. It is therefore impressive that Deakes and Stanley have managed to uncover accounts of stormy passages and also fascinating diary texts written by troops going to war. A third drawback to a history using a significant number of quotations from postcards is that their messages tend to be quite short and superficial – although they can also be dramatically succinct and to-thepoint. The shortness of the quotations has the potential also to render the narrative irritatingly bitty and to make it a greater challenge to incorporate any of the deeper analysis found in, for example, David Kynaston's recent works on post-war Britain, which use a similar methodology, albeit centred on the use of much more structured evidence (for example, from the Mass Observation Archive). Within these limitations, Deakes and Stanley have nonetheless done a very good job to assemble a highly engaging, informative and occasionally witty account. The narrative is structured into a series of thematic chapters addressing the moment of departure, the external impressions of passenger ships, their accommodation, fellow passengers, cuisine, entertainment, romantic encounters, shore excursions while en route, storms and seasickness, troop transports, the crew and, finally, arrival.
Seaforth Publishing has made a typically impressive job on the book's design; it is a handsome volume, lavishly illustrated with a very wide selection of beautiful images, making it a delight for the aesthete. To be a miserable pedant, however, while admirable in so many ways, the book alas slightly fails to live up to its title. It claims to represent ‘A Century of Sea Travel’, but the content is overwhelmingly skewed to the fifty years from the 1890s until the 1940s with comparatively little material from the post-Second World War era. Although Deakes and Stanley, like most other lovers of liner travel, evidently favour La Belle Époque and the inter-war years, there remains the possibility of producing a second volume similarly to document the experience of passenger ship travel in more recent time.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00253359.2013.767568
© Bruce Peter