Trains, Planes, Ships & Cars: The Golden Age 1900-1941
James Hamilton-Paterson
Head of Zeus £30
Ah, the Golden Age of Travel! This is not a book to be read while you are standing cooped-up on a crowded staircase for ten minutes as part of Ryanair’s ‘Priority Boarding’.
In James Hamilton-Paterson’s judgment, the Golden Age of Travel came to an end in 1941, when America entered the Second World War. Out went glamour, style and luxury, and in came the drab demands of getting from A to B in the cheapest way possible.
Passengers on a Sikorsky flying boat. One of James Hamilton-Paterson beefs against travel today is that there is little sense of adventure
An aerial photograph shows three ocean liners in a dock in New York – the Normandie, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth – all being gutted and fitted out as troop ships. Never such luxury again! The Normandie’s Grand Saloon restaurant, more than 300ft long, was modelled on the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and could seat 700 diners at the same time. Its major suites contained several bedrooms, a private dining room and a lounge with a grand piano. She is remembered, says Hamilton-Paterson, as ‘the most beautiful transatlantic passenger liner ever built’. But after the fall of France in May 1940, her interiors were stripped out, and the 12 Lalique glass pillars in the restaurant smashed to pieces. And all to no avail: in early 1942, a fire broke out, and the firemen pumped in so much water that the Normandie capsized, only to spend the rest of the war half-submerged in the Hudson River.
Trains, Planes, Ships & Cars is what used to be called a coffee-table book, lavishly illustrated with wonderful photographs of steam engines and Grecian swimming pools on cruise liners and motor cars like the Duesenberg SJ Arlington Torpedo Sedan, which could reach 140mph in 1933 and cost $20,000.
I particularly like the pictures of transport projects that, for one reason or another, failed to travel far from the drawing board, visions of the future that were immediately consigned to the past. Norman Bel Geddes designed an aircraft with the dimensions of an ocean-going liner, with nine decks, a wingspan of 160m and room for 451 passengers. ‘The main dining room was designed to seat 200 guests, and the crew of 155 included two head waiters, two wine stewards and nine bar stewards – not to mention seven musicians, a masseur, a masseuse, a gymnast and a librarian.’ Sadly, Bel Geddes never got round to explaining how he would make it fly.
Bel Geddes’s futuristic 1929 ‘flying wing’ design. Sadly, Bel Geddes never got round to explaining how he would make it fly
Needless to say, some of the most striking pictures are of disasters. A double-page spread shows the Hindenburg airship exploding above a naval air station in New Jersey in May 1937. Yet until that dreadful moment, it seemed to herald the dawn of a new golden age: the year before it had clocked up more than 3,000 hours flying 1,600 passengers across the Atlantic in great comfort.
Having always associated airships with wartime Zeppelins, I had no idea how grand they were, nor how they had once been associated with the future of travel.
The Hindenburg had a lounge, a dining room and a reading room, as well as a smoking room, ‘despite’, as Hamilton-Paterson observes, ‘the presence overhead of more than seven million cubic feet of hydrogen’.
In 1929, an earlier airship, the Graf, carried 27 VIPs 5,000 miles from Germany over the French Riviera and Rome, across Crete to Jerusalem, and then to Egypt. It was chilly on board, but sufficient alcohol was supplied to at least give the illusion of warmth. ‘Generous budgeting allowed the passengers six bottles of spirits apiece for a journey of less than four days,’ observes Hamilton-Paterson.
Buoyed up by the success of this trip, the Graf then successfully flew around the world, first of all from Europe to Japan, then from Japan to America, and then back across the Atlantic to Europe. There was danger involved, but as the French aviator Jean Conneau said: ‘Danger? But danger is one of the attractions of flight.’ Hamilton-Paterson seems to approve, though he drolly admits: ‘This is not a philosophy that would appeal in the timorous 21st century.’
One of his beefs against travel today is that there is little sense of adventure. Mobile phones have ensured that, no matter how far we travel, we are always tethered to home. The whole point of travel in the past, he says, ‘was the freedom: to go adventuring in a world where no one – often including you – knew where you were; when all communication was with strangers, face-to-face in motley languages, as it always was throughout human history until these last few lethal decades.’
Unusually for this type of picture book, it is elegantly written, by someone who has an easy command of his subject, and firm opinions. It is the opposite of bland. Hamilton-Paterson excoriates today’s lack of style, particularly among the very rich, who were once its pioneers. In an afterword, he rants against the type of flash car ordered by today’s billionaires, among them the six Bentley Dominators ordered by the Sultan of Brunei, which he calls ‘Dictator’s Utility Vehicles’, in which ‘all pretence of style and even of gracefulness has vanished’.
The same applies to Rolls-Royce’s ‘hideously ugly’ SUV Cullinan, its ‘once classically restrained and dignified Parthenon radiator grille’ now widened into ‘a greedy maw’. They all ‘look like vehicles whose passengers’ relative importance is measured by the thickness of bulletproof glass, the reinforcing of floors against possible landmines and the ability to speed away over any terrain with all four tyres cut to ribbons’.
Hamilton-Paterson has a keen eye for other areas in which the dream of progress has been reversed. His chapter on cars suggests that every advance occurred a few decades earlier than you might have guessed. The first official car race took place in Paris as early as 1864. The first Royal car – a Daimler 56C – was bought by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) in 1900. And, for the ecologically minded, the first car to exceed 100 kilometres per hour was electric, as were half of all cars on the road in 1900: New York alone had 16,000 charging stations. By 1910, one car – the Baker Electric – could go 100 miles before needing a recharge. It was only because petrol was a lot cheaper than electricity that it became the standard means of propulsion.
A poster for the maiden voyage of SS Normandie. The Normandie’s Grand Saloon restaurant, more than 300ft long, was modelled on the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles
On the other hand, some details in this tremendously enjoyable book suggest that beneath its sheen, the golden age of travel was more glamorous for some than for others. Planes and automobiles would regularly go up in smoke: as the author himself admits: ‘Drivers were impaled on their steering columns or thrown from their seats headfirst into trees, else they were trapped beneath their wrecked vehicle and burned alive when the petrol tank ruptured.’
And who would have wished to be one of the stokers on a luxury liner, shovelling coal in the filthy bowels of a ship while, as Hamilton-Paterson puts it, ‘50ft above them, passengers were served quails in aspic and champagne beneath a many-splendoured dome’?
When Hamilton-Paterson’s own mother travelled on the Orient Express in 1937, it proved a singularly dodgy affair. ‘Have just been through a fearful tunnel,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘What do they burn? It was like a gas attack, the fumes being sulphur dioxide. Soaked a hankie in water to make a gas mask as one simply couldn’t breathe… We all coughed a lot.’