This is the long-awaited Part II of my look into the Golden Age of Travel.
You can find Part I here!
In this posting, we’ll be looking at what travel was actually like during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and see just what the pre-war travel experience was actually like. What could you expect? What happened? And how did it perhaps differ from what we might have today? On top of that, we’ll see what changes occurred that meant that the pre-war experience could not be recreated in the decades after the Second World War.
A guard waves his flag. A whistle-chirrup echoes down the platform; a foghorn sounds and the roar of four diesel engines powering a magnificent airship through the air calls us to attention. All aboard for another trip back into the past…
Travel during the Golden Age of Travel
These days, the journey itself is the least luxurious and exciting part of travelling. You get on a bus or train or plane and you just…sit there. For hours at a time, with almost nothing to do. You have a boarding-pass and your passport and nothing else. If you’re lucky, you’ve got the in-flight movie, or you brought a book or your laptop or iPad, with which to while away the time. Or maybe, just maybe, you might actually fall asleep. Only to be woken up an hour later by flight attendants shunting past you with trolleys loaded to the brim with food of questionable quality at best.
And before all this, you had to go through check-in, immigration, luggage-weights, and security checks for you and your luggage, and now, you’ve got a flight in front of you that’ll eat up all of the first day of your holiday and you’re starting to wonder why the hell you ever decided to go to Barcelona. You could’ve stayed home and gone to the beach instead! But what was the travel experience like before all this rigmarole got started? Let’s find out.
Back in the early 20th century, when life on a whole moved at a slower pace, a steamship journey took several days at least. Because of this, the journey itself had to be comfortable, memorable and relaxing – and steamship companies and railroad companies constantly strove to improve their service and amenities in order to lure in as many customers as possible by advertising speed, comfort, luxury, great food, electric lighting, running hot water…anything that would put their service above that of a rival company.
Before you even reached your destination, what was the ‘travel’ part of the ‘Golden Age of Travel’ really like? Let’s go on three imaginary journeys during the 1930s and see what kind of travel experience you could expect. To sample the best of everything, we’ll do the transatlantic crossing, the Orient Express, and to top it all off, a ride in the most famous airship of all.
Trip No. 1 – The Transatlantic Crossing
Route: London, England to Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
Expected Travel-Time: 7 Days (dependent on weather)
The Transatlantic Crossing – Part I – The Boat Train
A typical trans-oceanic journey of the late 1800s or early 1900s started at a railway station. Let’s say you’re sailing on one of the great Cunard steamships from England to America! What happened?
To get from London to Southampton, you boarded the boat train at Waterloo Station. The boat train was a special express train that ran regular services from major metropolitan stations to port cities around England such as Dover, Southampton and Liverpool. They worked in a similar fashion to airport shuttle-bus services today which scoot you back and forth from major cities to your nearest airport. These trains were in service specifically to make fast, punctual connections between major population centers, and the great ports of embarkation. However, even express, a journey by boat train took a few hours. You might nap, read or eat lunch on the train, depending on the time of its departure. The train of choice from London-Waterloo to Southampton was the Cunarder or Statesman boat train which would whisk you across the south of England to the great ocean terminal at Southampton.
At Southampton Docks, you got off the boat train with your mountain of luggage and boarded your ocean liner for your ‘crossing’ or ‘passage’ to the New World – the United States. The next leg of your journey would now begin…
The Transatlantic Crossing – Part II – The Crossing
Having arrived at Southampton, you now had to find your ship! Every major shipping company had docks assigned to them, much like how today, every major airline has a terminal and gates at an airport assigned to them. In the 1920s a wide variety of ships were available. If you wanted old world charm, you might sail on the R.M.S. Olympic, sister ship to the Titanic. If you wanted something grander and more modern, perhaps take the Berengaria, notorious for hosting American ‘booze-cruises’, where dried up Americans purchased return tickets and sailed to England and returned to America in a fortnight round-trip where they could drink to their kidneys’ discontent. Not being an American ship, the Berengaria was not subject to American prohibition laws!
Or maybe your ship is the Aquitania, a vessel which, until 2004, held the distinction of being the longest serving ocean liner plying the transatlantic route – thirty-six years! This record was broken in 2004 by the Queen Elizabeth 2, whose service reached 40 years doing the same route! The Aquitania became known as the ‘Ship Beautiful’ and was a common choice for passengers crossing the Atlantic.
RMS Aquitania. Source: Wikimedia Commons
In the old days, much care was taken in selecting which ship you would take to cross the Atlantic. There were loads to choose from, and each ship and company came with different things to recommend them to the discerning traveling public. The two biggest rivals were Cunard and White Star. They competed fiercely for passengers by boasting of larger ships, faster crossings, more luxuries, better food, improvements in safety and an ever-expanding range of on board diversions ranging from swimming-pools, spas and even cinemas.
After boarding the ship and being shown your cabin, you were allowed to settle in. The ship was dragged out to sea by tugboats and then would set sail for New York, a crossing that could take anywhere from five, to seven, to ten days, depending on the ship, the route, and the weather that it encountered on the way. That said, ships were typically expected to be able to make a crossing a week on the transatlantic route, so that passengers would never have to wait more than seven days to get another ship.
Once on board, you now had to find things to do. Southampton to New York takes the better part of a week, or more, depending on your chosen vessel. Are you a gambler or a betting person? Perhaps you should get in on the ship’s pool? No, not the swimming pool on E-deck, the ‘ship’s pool’ was the pool of cash which passengers contributed money to. You all had to bet how far the ship would go in 24 hours. At a prearranged time each day, an officer or steward would stick up a notice on the public noticeboard detailing how far the ship had gone during the night. The passenger whose guess was closest to the actual distance traveled won the pool!
This map of the Atlantic is found in the Grand Saloon of the R.M.S. Queen Mary, one of the most famous ocean liners of the Golden Age of Travel. The two lines track the ship’s routes from Southampton to New York. Small crystal models of the Queen Mary moved along these lines each day, indicating the ship’s progress during the voyage.
Of course, ships did come with actual swimming-pools, and gymnasiums, daycare centers, libraries, barbershops, cafes, restaurants and dining-saloons. During the 1930s, ships also started having cinemas on board, showing the latest films. If you wanted to take in the sea air up on deck, you might take part in a game of deck shuffleboard in which you had to slide painted wooden pucks along the deck using a long wooden paddle. The pucks would slide along the deck and across a painted and numbered grid. The skill in playing deck shuffleboard was in knowing how much force to put into your push to get your puck to slide across the grid and get the highest score – not always as easy as you might think, if the ship was rocking and lurching in the waves.
There was no internet access back during the Golden Age of Travel, no WIFI. But that didn’t stop you from contacting friends and relatives thousands of miles away. Perhaps your ship’s been delayed by storms and you’ll be in New York a day or two late? No problem. Off you went to the purser’s office. Here, you were given a telegraphic form where you could send off a brief message to your friends via the ship’s radio.
Telegrams were charged by the word. For example, it might be a shilling for the first ten words, and then a penny for every word thereafter. Unsurprisingly, telegrams were sent as infrequently as possible and when they were, were kept as short as possible. After filling out the telegraphic form with your message and having paid the fee, the form was torn off the pad and sent up to the radio-room by messenger or by pneumatic tube. The form was rolled up, stuffed in a cylinder and rammed into a pneumatic tube. The air-pressure in the tube or pipe pushed the cylinder up to the radio-room where it was spat out and landed in a basket. The radio-operators would open the tube, take out the message, and transmit its contents to the nearest land-station.
For all its glamour, ocean-travel did not come without risks. Ships were in constant danger of crashing into each other, of running aground, and of course, of sinking. In 1942, the RMS Queen Mary was sailing as a troopship off the coast of Scotland when a rogue wave of an estimated height at least 90ft (approx. 28m) hit the ship broadside. The entire vessel rocked over 52-degrees, and the wheelhouse windows were blown in from the force of the impact. In 1934, the SS Morro Castle, steaming the New York-Cuba route down the Atlantic coast of the U.S.A. caught fire. One of the worst fires at sea, the ship beached itself near the coastline. Passengers who could not escape on a lifeboat (what few which were not burned or made inaccessible in the inferno) jumped overboard and swam to shore, or floated in the water waiting for rescue from passing boats.
The RMS Queen Mary in New York Harbor, 1961.
In 1925, the Cunard Line offices in New York received word that a terrorist bomb had been loaded on board the RMS Berengaria. At the time, the ship was over a thousand miles out at sea. A radio distress-signal was sent to the ship from shore-stations and the vessel was searched. Passengers were herded to their lifeboat stations under the pretext of a fire-drill. The bomb was never found and the threat later turned out to be a hoax.
When shipboard life was calm, however, it could be idyllic. If the weather was fine you might take a stroll around the deck. You might visit the ship’s library, listen to the ship’s band or orchestra, or relax up on deck in a folding, wooden ‘deckchair’. Deckchairs could be rented, or they could be reserved. If you spotted a deckchair in a particular spot that you wanted to use, a steward might tack a card onto it, saying that it was reserved for a particular passenger, that way, you wouldn’t lose your special place in the sun!
The relaxed, carefree nature of ocean liner travel, as well as the friendships and connections that might’ve been made during long voyages around the world was captured in a popular song of the period, simply titled: “On a Steamer Coming Over”, about a blossoming shipboard romance between two passengers previously unknown to each other. Other popular songs of the 1920s and 30s which glamourized the allure and romance of international travel included “A Slow Boat to China”, “On a Sunny Street in Singapore”, and “Nagasaki”. In the 1920s, with America officially under prohibition, the song “I’ll See You In C-U-B-A” (1920) recommended that frustrated Americans should “…plan a wonderful trip, to Havana, hop on a ship, and I’ll see you, in C-U-B-A…”
When a ship docked in New York, customs and health officers and pilots were ferried aboard to begin the docking procedures. After going through customs and ensuring that nobody on board was seriously ill, the ship was permitted to dock and passengers were allowed off.
The Transatlantic Crossing – Part III – The Sleeper Car
Perhaps after landing at New York, you haven’t finished your journey? Then what? Well, another train-trip, of course. From New York, let’s say you travel to Chicago, the Second City, and Mobster Central! To do this, you would head to Grand Central Station in Manhattan, and from there, board one of the most famous trains in the world: The 20th Century Limited.
The 20th Century Limited ran nightly expresses from New York to Chicago, leaving Grand Central at 6:00pm every night, and arriving at Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station at 9:00am the next morning. The 20th Century Limited was so famous, it was featured in a number of films. The train featured in ‘The Sting’ (1972) was the Century Limited. The train featured in ‘North by Northwest’ (1959) again, was the 20th Century Limited.
The Twentieth Century Limited, ca. 1907. Source: Wikimedia Common
To ride the Century Limited was one of the greatest experiences in Golden Era tourism. Catering to first-class passengers and wealthy businessmen, passengers riding the Century Limited were given the Red Carpet Treatment – literally. A broad, red carpet with “Twentieth Century Limited” printed on it in gold letters was run along the platform, parallel to the train, so that passengers could spot it easily and board it without confusion. It was from here that the expression to be given the ‘red carpet treatment’ originated.
Once on board the famous train, you had dinner in one of the train’s dining-cars, eating food prepared on board. The train left New York City at 6:00pm and travelled nonstop through the night. The train didn’t stop to pick up coal or water. Instead, it relied on track-pans – large steel troughs between the railroad lines which collected rainwater, (or if rainwater was not available, were recharged using pipes connected to a reliable water-source) to refill the boiler with water during the trip – a steam-powered vehicle requires more water than fuel when it’s in operation. Upon approaching a track-pan, a crank-and-screw mechanism was operated and a scoop was lowered from the bottom of the locomotive. The force of the train rushing over the pan forced water up the scoop and into storage tanks in the tender. Pipes then channeled the water into the boiler at the front of the train.
On an overnight train journey, dinner would typically be served on board. This wasn’t just some cheap snack-bar with packets of chips, hotdogs and chocolate-bars as we might expect today. Oh no, on the Century Limited, you were treated to a full, silver-service dinner, where passengers could choose from a menu of dishes cooked on board and served in the dining-car which was accessible from other parts of the train. After dinner, you might go to the lounge car or the bar for a drink, a smoke, a game of cards or a chat with friends. If you considered yourself too sleepy, you would retire to your assigned berth or compartment in your assigned cabin. Here, you could stretch out on a bed and relax.
Travel on trains like this wasn’t entirely primitive. You had running water if you had to wash up. And flushing toilets if you had to answer a call of nature (just so long as that call wasn’t while the train was in the station – toilets emptied their contents right between the rails in those days), but in the cramped quarters of railroad carriages, don’t expect to have a bath or a shower – that would have to be reserved for the end of your trip.
Once you arrived at your destination (in this case, Chicago), you alighted the train with your luggage. Depending on how much luggage you had, you might have stored it all in your compartment. If this wasn’t possible, then it was stored in the luggage-van at the back of the train. To offload all your trunks and suitcases and move them around the station, you might need a luggage-trolley. Not one of those tiny things that you see in airports today, a real trolley, capable of carrying up to half a dozen or more bulky, well-packed trunks, cases, boxes and suitcases.
In all, this is a journey that would’ve taken you roughly a week, depending on weather conditions and delays. And this was considered fast! To make connections faster and smoother, things like boat trains, steamship tenders, express services and nonstop water-filling on long train-journeys all aimed to cut out as many of the delays as possible, and give passengers a smooth, fast and comfortable journey as possible.
Trip No. 2 – The Orient Express!
About the Orient Express
Ask any group of people to name the most famous ship in the world, and the argument could go on until the end of time. The Titanic, the Olympic, the Berengaria, the Queen Mary, the Normandie…like a box of Whitman’s Samplers, it would be impossible to try and name them all!
Now, turn the question around. Ask any group of people to name the most famous train in the world. Almost at once, only one answer will come to the minds of most people: The Orient Express.
The Orient Express is a legend, a myth, and a time-machine. It has been running almost nonstop for over 100 years. It’s lasted through two world wars and the Iron Curtain. It’s been marooned in snowstorms, blown up by terrorist bombs, broken up, remade, threatened with closure and bankruptcy, and yet, somehow, it survives, and has outlasted almost all other famous trains in history. But what is it? A very valid question indeed, because the Orient Express is probably THE most confusing journey you will ever take in your life. Why? Simple.
Because there isn’t one Orient Express.
There are FIVE.
The first is the Orient Express, which ran from 1883-2009.
The next is the Simplon Orient Express, which ran from 1919-1977.
The third one is the Arlberg Orient Express, which ran from 1930-1962.
The fourth one is the EuroNight Orient-Express, which ran from 1977-2009.
The fifth one is the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, established in 1982 and which runs to this day as a period recreation of the original Express which ran the transcontinental route started back in 1883.
Confused, much?
On top of that, all these different Orient Expresses didn’t all run the same route. And they didn’t all run the whole route. And they didn’t always run all routes all the time. Routes depended on factors such as passenger-loads, public requirements and of course, the weather. But where and when did the Orient Express start?
Established in 1883, the Orient Express ran through Europe on various routes at various times. The most common short route was Paris, France, to Venice, Italy. The most common long route was the legendary long-haul train journey to beat all train journeys – London, England to Istanbul, Turkey. This is the route that is the most famous of all. It’s the route that everyone has heard about, read about, seen on TV and watched in movies. It’s the route where Hercule Poirot, travelling from Istanbul to London, has to solve the most baffling, famous and morally confusing case of his entire career, that of the ‘Murder on the Orient Express’.
Some might think that the Orient Express was supposed to go all the way to Asia, the ‘Orient’. It doesn’t, and never did. The name ‘Orient Express’ comes from the Latin ‘Oriens’ or ‘East’, so literally, ‘The Eastern Express’.
The original Orient Express ran from 1883-2009, with stops and starts and changes along the way. The Express was originally operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits, or ‘International Sleeping-Car Company’ in English. The running of the Orient Express was interrupted at numerous times throughout history, most notably in 1914, 1939, and in the 1960s and 70s during the Cold War.
But what was it like to ride the Orient Express back in the Golden Age of Travel? As it would be too confusing to pick through the minutiae and differences of all the different Orient Express trains, the trip presented here will be one which takes the best of all the Expresses, to give us a general feel of the whole journey. Now for the starting point: London, England.
The Orient Express – Part I – The Boat Train & Boarding the Orient Express
Route: London, England to Istanbul, Turkey
Expected Travel-Time: 3-4 days (dependent on weather)
Just like with any other international trip from Great Britain, your first stop was the boat train. This time, you caught the Continental Express boat train from London’s Victoria Station, to the docks on the south coast. From here, you caught the cross-channel ferry to France. Having arrived in Calais, you would board the Orient Express and ride it from there to its main embarkation point, which was Paris’s Gare de l’Est station, which was where it picked up all passengers not travelling on the Express from Britain.
The Orient Express near Constantinople, 1900
One thing you have to understand is that the Express was not a huge, long train of a dozen grand carriages, hauled proudly along by a gigantic, steam-powered, smoke-belching locomotive chugging ahead through the European countryside. At most it was only a half-dozen carriages at any one time. A typical layout of the Orient Express included the locomotive, its tender, a luggage-van, a couple of sleeper-cars, a dining-car, a galley-car, and another luggage-van. The train made frequent stops along its route, changing and shunting carriages and coaches all the time. Carriages were added and subtracted as the route required it, so that the train wouldn’t be overburdened. But we digress; back to the Gare de l’Est.
It was here (and always from here) that the Orient Express departed when it left from Paris. It left this station for the first time on the 4th of October, 1883, for its marathon run across Europe. The original eastern terminus was not Istanbul, but the port city of Varna in Bulgaria. Here, passengers had to get off the train and take a boat to Istanbul, then called Constantinople. It was on the 1st of June, 1889 that the first, uninterrupted rail journey from Paris to Constantinople was accomplished. Today, the modern Venice-Simplon Orient Express still leaves from the Gare de l’Est on its two different routes, to Venice and to Istanbul.
Paris Gare de l’Est, Paris, France, 2009. The main western terminus of the Orient Express.
The Express was not a daily service. It departed from London and Paris three days a week, (Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays) for either Bucharest, or Constantinople/Istanbul, depending on the day of the week. Travel-time took three-to-four days, depending on the weather and delays. If the weather was really bad, the train might not make it through at all. In 1929, the Express was trapped in a mammoth snowdrift that took rescuers ten days to dig out. This legendary event hit the newspapers and inspired Agatha Christie’s famous murder-mystery. It’s even referenced in the David Suchet TV production of the novel.
The Orient Express became wildly popular. Travel across Europe had previously taken weeks. Now, you could go from one end to the other in just less than a week! The Express became so popular that other trains with similar names started running similar routes across Europe, to pick up the excess passengers which the original Express couldn’t handle.
Sirkeci Terminal, Istanbul, Turkey. The eastern terminus of the Orient Express.
Whether you got onto the train at Calais, or Paris, what happened next?
Well, first you entered the station and presented your ticket. Your less important luggage was stored in the luggage-vans, and your more important cases were brought on board the train. You were assigned a carriage, and a compartment within that carriage – always a sleeper-car. Your steward (there was one steward for each sleeper-car, whose job it was to look after the passengers under his care) would show you to your compartment, put your luggage safely away, and then he would ask for your passport.
As the Orient Express was a transcontinental train, it passed through several borders and countries (thirteen countries in total!) At every stop along the way, border-officers would board the train to check the passports of each passenger. So that passengers wouldn’t be disturbed at every single border crossing, their steward would handle their passports, and present them to border-guards at each stop, where they would be checked and stamped with a minimum of fuss and disturbance.
A typical compartment on an Orient Express sleeper was very small. Designed to hold two people and their most essential luggage, it came with a double-bunk bed (which could be turned into a couch in the daytime by your trusty carriage-steward), electric lights, a call-button, a hook on the wall for your watch, to stop it sliding around, space for your luggage and clothes, and a closing wash-basin. All packed into a space 5ft wide by 8ft deep by about 8ft high! Pretty snug!
The Orient Express – Part II – Riding the Orient Express
Within the confines of about three or four passenger-carriages, the Orient Express had a surprisingly large number of features. You had electric lights, heaters, a call-button system, hot running water and cold running water provided by cisterns on board, and one flushing toilet per-carriage. But no shower, and certainly no bath! The Express was luxurious, but not that luxurious!
A carriage of the Orient Express in CIWL livery.
During your trip, your constant guide and assistant was your carriage-steward. He handled passports, answered questions, provided assistance, helped with your luggage and answered the light above your door if you called for assistance. But for all his efforts, your poor steward didn’t get too much in return!
For all the services that the carriage-stewards provided, they had almost no personal space of their own. At best, they slept in small, cramped quarters at the end of the carriage, or if not even that, then on padded benches or chairs out in the corridor at the end of each carriage. From here, they could monitor the service-lights above each compartment door, and help passengers if they exited their compartments.
A poster advertising the Orient Express
The Orient Express did not run one route. It ran several routes of varying lengths, with terminations in Athens, Paris, Calais, Venice and Istanbul. Common stops along the longest Express routes included Venice, Krakow, Budapest, Vienna, Belgrade, Munich and Bucharest, until the train finally arrived in Istanbul. The train was a popular mode of transport for the rich and famous. Authors, actors, musicians, dancers, and artists all travelled on the Orient Express. So too did diplomats, since the Express ran through many major European cities. It was also popular with British colonial officials hoping to reach India as fast and as comfortable as possible.
The three-and-half-day journey of the Orient Express meant that comfort and luxury had to be part of the package. Passengers weren’t going to pay to go on just any train if it didn’t come with some sort of draw-card. On the Orient Express, you were served meals cooked fresh and hot in the kitchen-car, which were served in the dining-car. The train was restocked at each stop along the way, so that the kitchen could be cleaned out and empty containers thrown away. Whenever the train stopped at a station, you could get out and send telegrams or letters from the station’s telegraph office or nearby post office, and have opportunities to take photographs and stretch your legs.
At the end of three-and-a-half grueling days, you would arrive at your destination. The eastern terminus for the Orient Express was the Sirkeci Terminus in Istanbul (or ‘Constantinople’ during the early years of the Express). From here, you could travel to countries like Egypt, Persia (Iran), India, Palestine (Israel), or sail further on towards Asia, reaching countries like Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Siam (Thailand), Burma (Myanmar) or the colonial holdings of the Straits Settlements (Malaysia & Singapore), the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) or French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam).
Come Take a Trip in my Air-Ship!
One of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Golden Age of Travel was the new kid on the block: Airships!
Controlled, powered air-transport had been a reality ever since 1852, when French inventor Henri Giffard took to the skies in the world’s first powered airship. This crude technology was a full fifty-one years before the Wright Brothers made their legendary flight at Kittyhawk in 1903. The Wright Brothers were not the first people to fly. They were not the first people to attain controlled flight. They were the first to do so successfully in an airplane. Airships predated them by half a century!
It was because of this that in the early 20th century, most people put great expectations upon the airship to be the air-transport king of the future! Flimsy airplanes with tiny engines, wooden frames stretched over with cloth and strung together with wires couldn’t possibly transport great numbers of people in speed, comfort and safety! But an airship, floating gracefully through the air, powered along by its propellers, looked big, sturdy and capable, although this was mostly due to publicity rather than fact. Early airships were slow, inefficient and lacked sufficient lift to make them effective modes of transport. In the 1880s and 1890s, experiments were made using batteries (which were too heavy and inefficient), and first-generation internal-combustion engines, which were too slow. It would not be until the turn of the century that the first real strides in airship technology allowed for practical transport.
Throughout the Edwardian era, airship technology, a pet project of Germans such as Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin, and Hugo Eckener, continued to advance. Nonrigid airships (‘Blimps’, we’d call them today) were phased out in favour of dirigibles, or rigid-frame airships, where gas-bags were inflated inside a rigid frame with fabric stretched over it. Airships remained largely experimental until the end of the decade, when the first flights of significant distance were achieved, first across Germany, and then across the European continent. In October, 1910, the first ever airship, the Clement Bayard II, managed to fly from Europe to Britain and made aerial-transport history. The airship captured the imagination of the travelling public like no other form of transport before it. In 1904 the song: “Come take a Trip in my Air-Ship” was published, many years before the airship became a popular form of long distance transport. Despite this, the song’s lyrics spoke of fantastical trips far beyond the vehicle’s capabilities at the time.
The first successful passenger-carrying airships started taking to the air around this time. This growth in confidence and advancement in technology led to the establishment of airship companies towards the end of the decade. In 1908, the Zeppelin Company was established in Germany, headed by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. In 1909, DEFLAG, or the German Airship Transport Company, was established. DEFLAG stood for Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktein-Gesellschaft, the company’s name in German.
Between the 1900s until the start of the First World War in August of 1914, the Germans had established the world’s first commercial passenger airship companies and a network of routes and airship fields around Germany. German expertise with airships was growing, and growing enough for them to start using airships in bombing raids.
In 1915 during the First World War, airships were used in the first long-range bombing missions ever carried out in wartime over a civilian population. London, although almost out of the effective range of airship technology at the time, was still a big target. The British were largely unprepared for this new form of warfare and had to hastily adopt strategies for attacking and destroying German military airships, as well as warning the public of air-raids (this led to the post-war creation of Air Raid Precautions in 1924). Airships, for all their size, had a notorious Achilles Heel – the fact that they were inflated with highly explosive and flammable hydrogen gas. British fighter-pilots took advantage of this by firing incendiary bullets at the airships as they flew past them in their primitive combat biplanes.
Despite the death and destruction wrought by the German ‘Baby-Killers’ as they were called by the British propagandists during the First World War, airships became wildly popular in the post-war era. By now, Friedrichshafen in Germany was the name that everyone associated with airships. It was where they were built, launched from, and where passengers travelled in order to board. With airplanes still being little more than open air, unpressurised biplanes – unreliable at best and lethal at the worst of times, airships stood to take on the rising market in international air-travel.
The golden age of the airship was truly the Roaring Twenties and the 1930s. Although other countries such as America and Britain had attempted to establish airship programs, either for passenger transport or for military purposes, only the Germans really succeeded in either of these endeavours. The British airship program ended in disaster with the crash of their most famous airship, the R101, in 1930. Similar disasters marred the American airship program in the years to follow. The result was that by the mid-1930s, only the Germans were still operating regular passenger airship routes. Their most famous was airship LZ-129, better known as the Hindenburg.
Trip No. 3 – LZ-129 Hindenburg!
Route: Frankfurt, Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Expected Travel-Time: 2½ days (3 days if you were flying Germany to South America)
The Hindenburg – Part I – Boarding the Hindenburg
If the rigid airship or dirigible was the symbol of cutting-edge transport technology in the 1920s and 30s, then the Hindenburg was rightly considered the flagship of this new glamorous and new-age technology – the most famous airship of its age, and of any age. The Hindenburg was to be the pride and joy of the Zeppelin Company, and its design and appointments were expected to rival even the most luxurious of the transatlantic ocean liners chugging across the ocean over which it glided, free of the dangers of Atlantic storms, icebergs, and wrecks with other vessels. It symbolized a bold, new post-war age of scientific advancement and technological skill. But what was it like to ride on? To find out, let’s take a typical flight on the Hindenburg. This would’ve been from Frankfurt in Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey, in the United States, a trip that typically took two-and-a-half days.
The Hindenburg’s departures were remarkable events. Docked on the ground, and tethered off, passengers would have their tickets clipped and their luggage loaded on board. As an obvious safety-precaution, passengers’ cigarette-lighters and matches were confiscated upon boarding. You were not allowed to use them, you were not allowed access to them, and you would only get them back at the end of the trip. Smoking in unauthorized parts of the airship was forbidden. Any fire could rapidly get out of hand, and if it did, the risk of explosion was high.
That’s not to say the Hindenburg didn’t have water on board – Water was stored in ballast-tanks and cisterns on board. These tanks controlled the ship’s weight and speed of descent and ascent. At the appropriate time, water was jettisoned from the ballast-tanks, and the tethers and ropes holding the airship down would be released. The Hindenburg floated into the air so quietly and noiselessly that many passengers on board never noticed the takeoff. On many occasions, passengers would ask the stewards why the airship had not yet left the ground! In reply, stewards would simply tell the passengers to look out the window, and they would see that they were already well on their way!
Despite the airship’s size, only a small percentage of its space was given over to passenger and crew accommodations. The majority of the airship’s space was taken up by the metal framework, maintenance shafts and corridors, and the huge gas-bags, which gave the airship its lift. Passenger and crew-quarters were limited to the small cabins or ‘cars’ underneath the airship. The airship had an auxiliary control-car at the rear, a main control-car at the front, and the large combined (but segregated) passenger-and-crew accommodations between them. The ship was powered by four ‘engine-cars’, two slung out on each side, with large propellers to power the ship through the air. They were kept well away from the passenger and crew-quarters, to cut down on noise interference.
Fully loaded, the Hindenburg could house seventy-two passengers in comfort. They were broken up into pairs, and each pair shared a cabin with a double-bunk bed and wash-basin with running hot and cold water. Cabins were housed on A-deck, along with the airship’s promenade area, dining-room, and lounge, complete with grand piano for passenger entertainment. Below, on B-deck, were the mess-rooms for officers and crew, the airship’s kitchen, bathrooms and toilets, the airship’s bar, and beyond the bar, the smoking-room.
The Hindenburg allowed only one functioning cigarette lighter on board, to cut down the danger of fire and the subsequent risk of igniting the hydrogen gas in the gas-bags above. This single cigarette-lighter was an electric one which was fixed to the central table in the smoking-room. To make the room as safe as possible, there was even a double-airlock door between the smoking-room and the rest of the airship.
To look after you once the ship got underway, the Hindenburg had forty crew and officers, and a dozen stewards and cooks to see to passenger comfort and cook the food for all the passengers, officers and crew. Officers, the captain and passengers all ate in the same dining-room.
Food on the Hindenburg was prepared fresh every day. The airship featured an electric stove, roasting and baking ovens, an ice-maker, and a refrigerator. A typical crossing would see the ship’s chef cook his way through 440lbs of meat and poultry, 800 eggs and up to 220lbs of butter!
The Hindenburg – Part II – Travelling on the Hindenburg
The Hindenburg represented the pinnacle of early 20th-century air-travel. It was dignified, smooth, quiet, classy, modern, and comfortable. Airplanes by comparison were considered cramped, noisy and uncomfortable. Given a choice, most people would probably have flown anywhere in an airship, and the world expected these graceful, mechanically-powered balloons to transport people everywhere in style and comfort. The spire at the top of the Empire State Building in Manhattan was originally designed as an airship-dock, although this was later deemed to be so unsafe that the idea was scrapped.
A voyage on the Hindenburg took from 2-3 days, depending on the destination: either Rio in South America, or New Jersey in the United States. Passengers on board could kill time in the smoking-room, the reading-and-writing room, or the lounge. Passengers wanting a drink could go to B-deck, and visit the bar, located next to the smoking-room.
If you wanted to enjoy some music during the voyage, the Hindenburg’s grand piano was available for any and all musically-gifted passengers. This piano might be considered unique in the history of piano-manufacturing. Due to the strict weight-limits that governed the Hindenburg’s maneuverability and lift, the majority of this piano (a baby grand) was manufactured out of aluminum, to make it as light as possible! Even the legs were made of hollow aluminum tubing, to cut down on weight. The instrument’s weight was just 162kg, remarkably light for a piano!
Passengers on the Hindenburg could get amazing birdseye views of the seas and landscapes below by looking through the downward-angled windows on either side of the main cabin.
On opposite sides of the main cabin, both the dining-room and the lounge offered amazing views of the earth below, through down-facing windows. Passengers could lean on balustrades and handrails on the outer sides of these two rooms, and look down through the glass at the world passing by beneath them. If you had a camera on hand (and some passengers did bring them), amazing views of the world from above could be taken from these vantage points.
The Hindenburg – Part III – Landing the Hindenburg
Landing a modern jumbo jet is a fairly straightforward affair. After receiving clearance from air-traffic control, a plane lines up with a runway, slows speed, drops its landing gear, extends flaps and thrust-reversers and touches down, sometimes as smoothly as a landing feather.
Landing a huge airship like the Hindenburg was a significantly more challenging procedure. Here is how it happened:
Once the Hindenburg had been cleared for landing by radio, it would make for the mooring-area – on trips to the United States, this was the Naval Air Base at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The crew on board the Hindenburg would drop mooring-lines out of the airship’s body and ground-crews would grab them and physically pull the ship towards the mooring-mast. A main, central mooring-cable was dropped from the ship’s nose, and this was affixed to the mooring-mast. The cable was then winched in, drawing the ship towards the ground. The extra mooring-lines held by ground-crews would stop the airship from blowing off-target as it was being winched to the ground.
As the airship descended, water from its ballast-tanks would be released. This was to lessen the ship’s weight, and to reduce the chances of the airship crashing to the ground if it landed too heavily. Once near to the ground, mooring-lines would be made fast, and then the stairs and hatches under the airship could be opened so that passengers and crew could get out.
Bags were unloaded and sorted. Every passenger on the Hindenburg had his bags marked with a company stamp. On the stamp was a letter corresponding to the first letter of his surname. Bags were unloaded and sorted alphabetically, so that passengers could find them more easily. After a two-and-a-half day journey floating across the Atlantic, your trip on one of the great marvels of the Golden Age of Travel was over.
The End of the Golden Age of Travel
The Second World War signaled the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Travel. The powerful changes caused all over the world by this conflict meant that it was impossible to revive the glory days of travel that had existed before the war. Too much had happened and too much had changed or been lost forever, to make this possible. And it would be decades before anything even resembling a tribute to the Golden Age of Travel would be possible once more. Technological changes, as well as political and geographical ones would further speed the end of the Golden Age, as old forms of transport were replaced with new ones, and a whole new way of travelling swept across the world in the 1950s.
Countries once open to travel, like China, were now closed. Ravaged by war and internal political strife, the decadence and grandeur of pre-war Shanghai was lost forever after the Japanese invaded the International Settlement on the 7th of December, 1941 – the Day of Infamy. Foreigners fled the city by the shipload, and one of the most popular tourist spots in the world was abandoned almost overnight. It would be another forty years before Shanghai would open up to the West again, when the Americans re-established their consulate in Shanghai in 1980.
The Dutch, French and British Empires were rocked by powerful independence movements, especially in French Indochina (Vietnam), the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), India and Malaya. This made travel to the Far East unwise at best and dangerous at the worst of times. European countries like Germany, Austria, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands and Greece were heavily bomb-damaged. Malaya and Singapore were still recovering from the Japanese occupation.
The original Hotel Adlon, opened in 1907. Berlin, 1926, near the Brandenburg Gate.
Hotels from the Golden Age which once boasted famous journalists, actors, artists, politicians and diplomats as their guests, had been burned down, shelled or destroyed entirely during the War. The Hotel Adlon in Berlin, a popular haunt of foreign journalists and international celebrities in pre-war Germany, was badly damaged during the Russian occupation of the city. The Adlon has since been rebuilt in a style closely resembling the original hotel, and on the original site that it has occupied since it was opened in 1907. It was from the balcony of his room at the rebuilt Hotel Adlon, that Michael Jackson famously dangled his son, in 2002. However, the Hotel Adlon is a rare example of the Golden Age reborn. Most Berlin hotels destroyed by enemy air-raids or cannon-fire were not rebuilt after the War.
Destroyed by Russian artillery-shells and fire in the Second World War, the rebuilt Hotel Adlon opened in Berlin in 1997, 90 years after, and on the same site as the original. Source: Wikimedia Commons
In Singapore, the world-famous Raffles Hotel was taken over by the Japanese when they overran the island. With the Japanese surrender in 1945, officers committed suicide in its rooms. In 1942, at the start of the occupation, Raffles’ waiters had dug a huge pit in the gardens and threw in the hotel’s silverware and buried it, hiding it from the enemy. When the war ended, the hole was dug up, and the silverware was retrieved, cleaned and put back into service. One of the items dug up was Raffles’ solid silver antique carving-trolley, used to present and serve the Sunday roast. After being carefully restored, it’s still used in the hotel today!
The rise of communism and the Eastern Bloc in Europe meant that as soon as the Second World War was over, it was replaced by the Cold War. And countries and cities which might once have been popular tourist destinations, like Poland, and the Free City of Danzig, were increasingly difficult to visit because of the ‘Iron Curtain’, a word coined by Winston Churchill. The rise of the Iron Curtain also put an end to the traditional Orient Express. It continued to run, but it would be the 1990s before it could reopen its classic London-to-Istanbul route once again.
Airplanes now replaced ocean liners as the main means of intercontinental travel. The disastrous crash of the airship Hindenburg in 1937 and the subsequent Second World War forever squashed any ideas of airships being the primary mode of air transport around the world. Airplanes were faster than airships and ocean liners, and much cheaper. Before long, many shipping companies were sending their ships to sea with half or even one-third capacities. It wouldn’t be until the Queen Mary 2, that grand, ocean liners would cross the seas of the world in grandeur and style once more.
By the 1960s, grand ocean liner travel was something of the past. Ships like the Aquitania and the Queen Mary were either too old to run, or too expensive to rebuild or maintain. Competition from airports and airlines meant falling passenger numbers. And shipping lines could no longer get enough revenue from fare-paying passengers to keep their expensive seagoing ships in good repair. Famously, the Aquitania suffered structural failures late in her career. Corrosion, leaking decks and ceilings and rotting timberwork and unsafe floors resulted in a spectacular incident involving a piano falling through the deck into the dining-room below!
Airports replaced seaports. Luggage restrictions, security scares, hijackings and terrorist plots shaped the travel experience that we have today, and the era of relaxed, glamorous travel which we’ve seen in movies, novels and TV shows vanished forever.
Sources used in the writing of this posting included:
ARCHBOLD , Rick – “HINDENBURG – Reliving the Era of the Great Airships – AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY” – Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group, London (1994) – Illustrations and artwork by Ken Marschall.
DANKER, Leslie – “Memoirs of a Raffles Original”, Angsana Books, Singapore (2010)
DONG, Stella – “Shanghai – The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City”, Perennial, New York, U.S.A. (2001)
KRASNO, Rena – “Once Upon a Time in Shanghai: A Jewish Woman’s Journey through 20th Century China”, China Intercontinental Press, Beijing, China (2008)
MATTEOLI, Francisca – “WORLD TOUR – Vintage Hotel Labels from the Collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton” – Abrams, New York, U.S.A.
SERVER, Lee – “The Golden Age of Ocean Liners”, Todtri, U.S.A., (1996)
“Great Journeys – Travel the World’s Most Spectacular Routes”, Lonely Planet, Victoria, Australia (Aug. 2013)
http://www.airships.net/ – One of the most comprehensive web-sources out there, on the history of airships and the Hindenburg – Accessed 25th, June, 2014
http://mikes.railhistory.railfan.net/r045.html – Mike’s Railway History – ‘The Orient Express’ – Accessed 20th of June, 2014
http://www.seat61.com/OrientExpress.htm#.U7QWjJSSxD1 – Seat61.com – ‘The Truth Behind the Legend – The Orient Express’ – Accessed 21st of June, 2014
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-orient-express-149702768/?no-ist – Smithsonian.com – “A Brief History of the Orient Express” – Accessed 21st of June, 2014
This article was originally posted in the July, 2014 issue of the Australia Times – HISTORY online magazine, and is reposted here with permission.
