Ocean Liners at the V&A

Last weekend I took my mum to see the wonders of Dundee. The main reason we’d gone, other than the fact we’d managed to cover most of St Andrews in about a day, was to see the Victoria & Albert museum. I live in London and my mum is a jewellery designer, she makes and designs her jewellery using semi-precious stones, so of course my childhood Sundays were often spent perusing around London’s many art and design museums, in particular the V&A. Though I unfortunately did not inherit any of my mum’s arty genes (they all went to my sister), I have always been able to appreciate art and decorative objects as historical artefacts, allowing you to get a glimpse of what a certain time or place would have looked or felt like. What kind of person would have owned or wanted to own these objects? Why did they mean something to someone? Who had created them and why? We are inherently material beings, prone to creating, flaunting and hoarding aesthetically beautiful things and I think often as historians we neglect looking at objects and art as primary sources, leaving them to the art historians.

Despite having quite low expectations (I mean we’re just looking at boats right?), I found the exhibition incredibly inspiring as a way of practising Transnational History. Ocean liners are connectors; they forge connections between places by transporting people from A to B, often crossing national borders in the process. As the principal method of travel across oceans until the invention of planes, ocean liners served the world in many ways: transporting immigrants to new lives, servicing global empires and carrying cargo from place to place. Shipbuilding also became crucial to many industrial economies, while an expanding network of ports created cosmopolitan hubs where international products were exchanged and people of different cultures and backgrounds interacted.

The exhibition mainly focused on ocean liners when shipping companies began targeting wealthier first- and tourist-class passengers travelling for business and leisure in the early 20^th century. Until then, intercontinental travel was difficult, sometimes dangerous, and was mainly undertaken by those who had to: imperial servants, or those emigrating in search of a better life. As the demand for luxury travel was increasing, the transnational customer came to connote a particular class of individual – you think of Kate Winslet in a black beaded dress and white gloves, descending the ornate wooden staircase to enter the first-class dining room. These were transnational people because they could afford to be.

Ocean liners were increasingly seen as symbols of state and intensifying national rivalries gave them a new political resonance as embodying the wonders of the modern, industrial world. As companies competed for wealthier passengers, interior design became an important feature that bridged both commercial and national concerns.

What I found particularly interesting was the way the interior design of the ship reflected the specific route. ‘Exotic’ decoration and materials often characterised ships on colonial routes, which may have influenced the expectations these people had when they arrived to their destination. This idea made me reflect on Derek Gregory’s ‘Scripting Egypt’. In it he directs our attention to the ways travel writing is involved in the ‘staging’ and ‘scripting’ of particular places. He argues travel scripting (like travel guides), “produces a serialized space of constructed visibility that allows and sometimes even requires objects to be seen in specific ways by a specific audience”[1].

This panel was designed by William de Morgan for the saloon and displayed on the Sutlej, a P&O liner named after a river in the Punjab, India. Below, are further panel designs he sketched for other P&O liners.

The display below it read, “His designs were inspired by destinations in India and Asia, and by Iznik ceramics of the 16^th century Ottoman Empire which he encountered at the South Kensington Museum”. It’s almost ironic to consider William de Morgan never crossed a national border himself whilst making these designs, instead drawing on objects from other museums himself.

Whilst researching the SS Sutlej at home, I found out the ship also made 10 journeys between 1908 and 1916 transporting Indian indentured labourers to the West Indies whilst on its return journey from Calcutta.[2] These labourers emerged when European merchants and businessmen began recruiting Indians who were enlisting to go abroad in hope of a better life to work in plantations after the abolition of slavery. The influx of docile and manageable Indian workers diminished the competitive leverage and bargaining power of the freed slaves in the West Indies, reinforcing the so-called ‘plantocracy’ system there.[3]

The paradox of coerced yet mobile indentured labourers compared to the unrestricted yet immobile English artist reminded me of Clare Anderson’s discussion of geographical immobility being bound up with social immobility. “The ‘modernity’ of colonial governance was constituted in part through representations of the ‘pre-modernity’ of Indians who belonged to static, unchanging and timeless religious or caste communities. The possibility of travel across social, cultural or geographic borders was thereby imaginatively erase”[4].

Overall, the exhibition provided me much to reflect on as an example of transnational history on display for the public. I very much enjoyed looking through these objects as historical artefacts once again, even if the description did not reveal the whole story.

[1] Gregory, Derek, ‘Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the cultures of travel’ in James Duncan and Derek Gregory (ed.), Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London, 1998), p. 116

[2] http://guyanachronicle.com/2009/05/05/the-coolie-ships, http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/descriptions/ShipsSS.shtml

[3] Misir, Prem The Subaltern Indian Woman: Domination and Social Degradation (Berlin, 2017), p. 20.

[4] Anderson, Clare, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World 1790-1920 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 19

Ocean Liners at the V&A