What I Am Reading: "The Only Way to Cross" by John Maxtone-Graham

I picked up this book intending for a nice, relaxing digression into luxurious maritime history, though current events conspired to disturb my reverie. Nevertheless, this was a good book to orient myself on the subject of ocean liners, specifically transatlantic ocean liners in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. I have read about ocean liners many times, starting with the first, mandatory childhood fascination with the Titanic back in elementary school. However, most of my pursuit of the subject has been in the form of books like Dr. Robert Ballard's gorgeous coffee table book “Lost Liners,” juxtaposing the ships with their wrecks. In keeping with my newfound adult, whole-picture approach to maritime history and policy, this is a graduation to books about ships that didn't sink.

The book was written in the early '70s, by a man who himself is very transatlantic, the son of an American and Scottish marriage. As can be extrapolated by the hyphenated name and the fact that the book is about ocean liners, John Maxtone-Graham is a high-society fellow, a point confirmed when the first sentence of the introduction concerns, "an ancestor of mine, Thomas Graham, Lord Lynedoch..." However, the combination of the date and the author means that most of the story told within transpired within living memory, either his or that of his relatives or other connections who were passengers on the ships in question.

A bit of 19th-century groundwork is necessary for the background of the great Atlantic ocean liners: Samuel Cunard started the first regular steamship service in the 1840s, meaning ships that sailed on a fixed schedule, and not pending the fullness of the cargo hold. This was the heyday of the British empire and decades after maritime supremacy had been established, so naturally the UK was at the forefront of commercial development. By the early 20th century, however, they were facing newfound competition, in the east from the Kaiser and his Freudian ambitions and in the west from various American lines, consolidated by J.P. Morgan into the International Mercantile Marine Company, including the British White Star Line. The years after the turn of the century were an era that allowed for an uptick in the size and speed of liners. The book devotes considerable time to technical advancements and specifications, but this is not my wheelhouse, so I will note only this one: that the steam turbine allowed for a large increase in power output over the reciprocating engine. Beyond that, you can rest assured that new ships brought advancements in propeller screws and hull shapes and all kinds of things.

The book walks us through the shipbuilding process with the case study of the RMS Mauretania, a very famous ship launched by Cunard in 1906. Cunard had a fixation on speed and safety, often crossing a day faster than their rivals at White Star (in Germany there was a similar complementary pair of lines, in my analysis: the fast North German Lloyd and the luxurious Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft, a.k.a. HAPAG). The prize for the fastest Atlantic crossing was called the Blue Ribband (sic), and was taken back from the Germans in the first decade of the century by Cunard's new liners, Mauretania and her sister ship, the Lusitania.

These famous ships were two of only fourteen (by Wiki's count) four-funnel liners, or four-stackers. Despite this configuration seared into the popular consciousness by the Titanic and others, this small flotilla, spread across a half-dozen lines in three countries, were the only ships carrying this symbol of speed and power. By the '20s, when passenger makeup and therefore desires changed, funnels went down to three, then two after WW2 (to oversimplify), to the single funnel of modern cruise liners. Beyond the funnel count, the other number to know, and know the decrease of, is three: the number of ships necessary for a weekly transatlantic passenger service in the early 20th century, a decrease from the four needed in previous decades. After WW2, the improvement in technology meant that the final era of ocean liners could get by on a two-ship service. The lines owned many other ships on other routes, but their biggest ships for the golden Southampton to New York crossing were thus much smaller in number than one might assume.

The Mauretania and Lusitania were joined by the Aquitania in 1914, a forgotten workhorse without the romance of the Mauretania or the tragedy of the Lusitania and the only four-stacker to live to see WW2. In response to these new ships, the White Star Line planned its own trio: the Olympic, Titanic, and Britannic. Each line had its own naming conventions, as seen in their respective suffix. In the mean time, the Kaiser promoted his own merchant fleet to compete, with the luxury of the HAPAG ships overseen by designer Albert Ballin. I had previously read of these ships as grandiose to the point of ridiculousness, but Maxtone-Graham counters this view and describes tastefulness and harmony (he also dislikes Art Deco, though, so I'm not sure if I can trust him). Both the British and Germans viewed their liner fleets as training grounds for sailors and eventual wartime auxiliaries, so their competition was more than just dick-measuring. HAPAG built the Imperator, Vaterland, and Bismarck as their own new trio, though the lattermost never saw service. They, in fact, were three-stackers. North German Lloyd, those who had held the Blue Ribband through the 1890s and lost it to Cunard, got by with their fleet of the previous decade, ships named after German monarchs and noblemen with their funnels grouped in two places with a gap between. All German ships, it seemed, had a reputation for rolling in high seas, and received nicknames such as the "Limperator" and "Rolling Billy" (one of the Wilhelms).

World War 1, of course, put paid to all that. The liners did not live up to naval dreams of combat or commerce raiding; the only fight between liners, converted into auxiliary cruisers, was between the battle between the Cunard Line's small Carmania and the German South American Line's Cap Trafalgar, which was sunk in the South Atlantic, almost sinking British ship first. Ocean liners made for better troop-transports and hospital ships, a purpose to which they were put by the British and by the Americans, who seized the German liners that had sought refuge in their ports and been impounded for years. Germany lost everything in the eventual peace, including their liners, the Americans took the Vaterland (and some North German Lloyd ships they had impounded), converting her into the SS Leviathan; Cunard Line received the Imperator, renamed the Berengaria, and White Star took the Bismarck, renamed the Majestic. These compensated for the Lusitania, lost to a torpedo in 1915 (got to recommend Erik Larson again with “Dead Wake”), and the Britannic, lost to a mine in the Mediterranean in 1916, having been requisitioned as a hospital ship and never seen service as a passenger liner.

In the 1920s, new immigration restrictions in the United States changed the character of the transatlantic passenger trade. Steerage, the cheapest communal space occupied often by emigrants, was walled off and converted to "tourist third cabin," taking Americans who wanted to spend newfound money (and drink illegal drinks) in Europe. These were converted to access more portholes, and other popular features. The practice was discontinued in the lean years of the Great Depression. Technologically, ships also converted to diesel after the war.

Despite continued British dominance, other players entered the trade in the interwar years, including the French Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. Unlike all competition, who commissioned British shipyards, the French line built their own ships. They also built each ship as unique, using no templates for sister ships; in a third apostacy, the French also are the only ones to characterize their ships as masculine. The only four-stacker they ever built was the SS France, before the war, eventually joined and replaced by the SS Île de France, the big new ship of the '20s. French ships were smaller, but they were fast and opulent; their embrace of Art Deco interior design in the Île and eventually, famously, in the SS Normandie swept away the trends of assorted and often eclectic revivalist interior design and oriented ship interiors toward modernism forevermore.

The Germans also rebuilt, and North German Lloyd launched the Bremen and the Europa in 1929 and 1930. These were lower, leaner liners with rounder, fatter, and lower funnels, a hungry and dangerous aesthetic. Indeed, Europa was the impressive one, but a fire during its outfitting phase let the Bremen launch first, and capture the glory of winning back the Blue Ribband from the Mauretania in 1929, after 22 years in Cunard hands. The Mauretania, now outdated, fell four-hours short in a doomed sally to recapture the record. The Bremen soon took over the record; but the industry was shaken again by the Great Depression. North German Lloyd and HAPAG merged (or cooperated), and Mussolini merged his various Italian lines. In Britain, Cunard and White Star merged. Maxtone-Graham describes the former as dictated by government ideology and the British merger at least being business-centered; but I suspect that Ramsey MacDonald might have told a different story. The aforementioned Italian lines sailed under the fascists to attempt to bring travelers to Southern Europe, and did take the Blue Ribband from the Europa; the Italian ships, the SS Rex and the SS Conte di Savoia, were opulent and coherent in style but had a habit of electrical failure.

Everyone limped along through the '30s, and even launched new ships. The French launched the SS Normandie, also canonized in the ocean liner pantheon; a very modern ship with a "rakish bow," ultramodern and famously Art Deco in interior and exterior design and all the more romantic for dying young. Cunard-White Star launched the Queen Mary around the same time, also a modern ship but one more conventional and stolid; this ship still survives today as a museum / hotel in California. These ships were funded based on large grants from the government.

This time period also lends itself to the book's saddest chapter, as, to the lament of the general public (and the prescient troopship plans of Winston Churchill), many old liners were retired in the mid- to late-'30s. The merged Cunard-White Star played executioner to its old greats, including the star Mauretania and the problem child Olympic, with its history of collisions, as well as the German prize Berengaria. Many of the ships' fittings were auctioned off, but as Maxtone-Graham says, "authenticity is no substitute for ambience." (p. 346). The RMS Majestic, formerly the HAPAG's Bismarck, was converted into a training ship; the only four-stacker to live to see the war, as mentioned, was the Aquitania, a quiet workhorse of the transatlantic, which was spared decommissioning to serve as a troopship, and even served passengers again after the war before scrapping in 1950.

Auxiliary cruisers saw even less service in WW2, while of course the Queen Mary and its sister the Queen Elizabeth served as troopships, painted grey. Most of the wartime chapter is given over to the Normandie, which burned at the dock in New York in 1942 while being converted to a troopship, due to the US Navy's carelessness according to Maxtone-Graham. The ship was the subject of a massive and partially PR-inspired salvage effort, to drain the ship of ungodly amounts of mud, melted lead, and debris, and roll it back upright. This herculean effort eventually resulted in a refloated hull, though one that never saw action as a troopship and eventually went to be scrapped shortly after the war.

The war's other advance was of course in airplane technology, and ocean liners enjoyed one last hurrah before they were displaced forever by this growing technology. The Cunard’s Queens finally established the two-ship service. The Blue Ribband was last captured by the SS United States, a ship purposefully designed by architect William Francis Gibbs to take glory from the Europeans (and be fanatically fireproofed). This holder, which took the prize in 1952, still survives today, in limbo at a dock in Philadelphia, where I intend to visit it before I depart New Jersey. Other than that, liners gradually transitioned to cruising in warmer seas before being decommissioned. At the time of the book's writing, a few ships still plied the Atlantic; and a different few ply it today, a few times a year and at high cost.

I have given an overview of the history and mentioned my exclusion of the technology, but the book also brings a wealth of ocean liner culture to the table, with overviews and anecdotes of captains and businessmen and tourists and steerage and stokers and stewards and con artists and stowaways. I am leaving that information by the wayside, but it helps to flesh out a very good history book that really filled me in on the topic. Ocean liners are a romantic subject, relic of a bygone era; a symbol of upper-class opulence that nevertheless brought the ancestors of many to the United States in their lower decks. The book wasn't comprehensive even on the Atlantic (no Andrea Doria, for example); but it filled in a lot of the gaps for me, as I had only seen the Bremen and the Europa and the Mauretania and the Imperator through the lens of their doomed sisters that ended up on the ocean floor.

In a review of this or one of the other ocean liner books that I looked at and might eventually read, I read the ships that went to the scrapyard as "the lucky ones," compared to those few that sank. I disagree. Obviously the passengers on the ships that didn't sink were indeed the lucky ones, but this is different for the ships themselves. This book isn't about shipwrecks, and indeed, the only one discussed in much depth is the Titanic (prior to the wreck's discovery, Maxtone-Graham discounts the idea of suction dragging lifeboats down or that the ship broke in half). It is about the ships, however, and from the perspective of a ship, I can't help but think that it is better to survive in hidden glory on the ocean floor, subject of romance and mystery, than it is to be recycled as scrap iron, existing only in diminishing memory and the decor of dockside pubs. The liners under water are the ones that are still with us, and they point the way to the liners that have faded into thin air.