1937 Cunard-White Star Cruise Booklet with Fold-out Deck Plans
DESCRIPTION
This booklet advertising the recently merged Cunard-White Star Line's passenger cruises into the Caribbean and Northern South America touts the destinations, and luxurious accommodations, and sprawling floor-plans of its Georgic and Britannic liners. Logistical details such as prices, dates, and packages are here accompanied by romanticizing copy and fabulous photography that give readers a taste of the exotic lands and pampering which they can expect aboard.
Before the reader can even make it past the first page of itineraries to see if a trip might fit their schedule, they're seduced by a list of the perks of booking a cruise. Golf lessons, screenings of "the current talking feature pictures," and "fresh air insured by modern ventilating system"—these attractions immediately pique the reader and encourage them to read on. From here, they experience a mediated introduction to nautical life and learn the fine details by which "the British tradition distinguishes Cunard-White Star cruises." Servers provide friendly, meticulous service; gruff, stalwart sailors keep the ship in tip-top shape; hardworking, soulful, and thoroughly racialized locals provide a glimpse into an exotic world; it's this tasteful curation that sets Cunard-White Star prides itself on.
If the reader isn't sold after the prior 16 pages, the booklet hopes to solidify the sale by stunning them with the spectacular scale of the vessels they'd call home for a week or two. The remainder of the booklet is filled with detailed foldout diagrams of each of the Georgic and Britannic's 6 decks. Dispelling the fear of claustrophobia or boredom that might come with contemplating a cruise, these floor-plans aim to show the vast space to explore that passengers will have. Incidentally, they show the disparity in square footage, amenity access, and privacy between different packages.
The Economics of an Idle Ship
Issued amidst the Global Depression the winter of 1937–38, this booklet catches Cunard-White Star improvising. North Atlantic traffic had collapsed, so rather than let two liners idle out the cold months the line ran them south — six days to Nassau for $80, sixteen to South America for $225, with the copy insisting on "No Extras." This was relatively cheap compared to the price of a first-class Atlantic crossing at the time and to what a trip on these ships commanded in 1929. Cunard-White Star was here aiming at the minority whose incomes came through the Depression intact. There's no saying how profitable these offerings could have been given a wide-enough timeframe, for two winters after initially setting sail, the outbreak of WWII closed these routes for six years.
White Star's Last Liners
The ships themselves are a footnote of consequence: Georgic and Britannic were the last liners White Star ever built, and by this printing both sailed under the flag of the 1934 merger the British government imposed as a condition of finishing the Queen Mary — a house brochure for ships whose company no longer existed. The design is high commercial moderne, everything struck in vermilion and black, photomontage laid on the diagonal, a grinning sun for a mark, and a collage of blizzard headlines to sell escape from a real winter.
A Record of Lost Architecture
These foldout deck plans are some of the only surviving records of these ships' architecture. The Georgic's black-and-vermilion smoke room burned when German bombers set her afire at Suez in July 1941; Britannic, the last White Star liner afloat, went to the breakers in 1961.
CONDITION
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