What were the interiors like for first-class passengers on board the Titanic?
The A la Carte restaurant as illustrated by the publicity office of The White Star Line. The concept of eating when you liked was an innovative concept even for the upper classes at the time.
Since the Titanic slipped beneath the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, we have been obsessed with everything to do with the fateful, Belfast-built ocean liner. One area of persistent interest is the sheer spoiling enjoyed by its first-class passengers.
The first movie about the disaster premiered within a month of the sinking, the archived reels of which were lost in a curious studio fire in the 1950s. The movie’s star and Titanic survivor Dorothy Gibson, rowed up to the premiere in the same outfit she was rescued in, a white dress and long black evening gloves.
If you want to ride a further swell of outrage – The Australian Blue Star Line are due to launch Titanic II, which will cruise the same ports and route as the original ship - this time actually arriving in New York. It is expected to have all levels of accommodation from First to Third Class, extra lifeboats and will happily be a little wider and more stable in the water. Hurrah!
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Even with today’s super-liners, including the recently launched Royal Caribbean’s “Wonder of the Seas” with its 6,988 passengers and 2,300 crew members, the elegant bubble in which these top-tier society stars moved 110 years ago remains unmatched and second class ocean goers didn’t fare too badly on the Titanic either (bar the ship glancing off an iceberg).
This indulgent human spectacle was possible because the aristocracy and wealthy new-moneyed classes were propped at every turn by a retinue of servants and White Star workers. Raised from infancy in their townhouses and country manors, these toffs knew nothing other than indulgent splendour on land or on the waves, travelling everywhere with an entourage.
With tickets from £30 for a standard cabin, to £1000 for one of the four fabulous Parlour Suites, a lot was expected. Comfort and amusement were prioritised by the White Star Line over sumptuous decoration. Compared to other ocean liners, the interior design was relatively restrained and intended to appeal to the old money and titled poos filling the most expensive staterooms rather than the bourgeois self-made wannabes and commoners screened from view.
Domestic service was a bowing, crawling, 24/7 piece of meticulous theatre for maids, butlers, valets and stewards – an obsequiousness not demanded of employees today outside of a despot's palace. Etiquette and routine were vital.
You could be lifting your master or mistress out of their bath, collecting gossip for them on the promenade deck or cleaning their jewellery in the same morning. Most of the gentry would travel with more intimate members of the retinue of their own servants to keep their routine and tastes uninterrupted.
French personal maids were the rage for ladies. Showing off the best included a better division of companion displayed to your peers as you swished along the promenade deck. To aid and augment the duties of the personal servants, there were various roles divided up over the ship, including bathroom stewards and bath stewards.
Room service, apart from sending your servant out to hunt up grub for you, was not provided past tea and sandwiches. As in society, you were expected to formally dress and make your way to the appropriate dining room depending on the mealtime.
If you wanted to ride the electric camel in the First Class gymnasium, you would be wrapped up in a silk robe to pad down the decks – your personal servant trotting behind you. For a small fee of one or two shillings, you could shoot, play tennis, or have a dunk in the pinched 9m saltwater pool (nasty foreshadowing there).
The ship included a fabulous gilded, fully tiled Turkish Bath, with the rare treat of a Temperate Room, a Cool Room, a Hot Room, an Electric Bath (yikes), a Steam Room, and two Shampoo Rooms for a good body pummelling. You could always find a spot to read, write, sip champagne, gamble and smoke cigars (companion hobbies), flirt, or explode clay pigeons somewhere on Titanic.
Ladies favoured the First Class Lounge, where they could nip prettily at tea and socialise surrounded by the splendour of Versailles on which the room was modelled. The first-class lounge of her sibling, Olympic, was salvaged and redeployed as a dining room in the White Swan Hotel in Alnwick , so we have a very good idea of what the Titanic’s lounge would have looked like.
The staging and services on the Titanic might not have included rock climbing walls, laser tag, outdoor movie theatres and zip-line but it had everything a moustache-twirling mogul would demand. First-class accommodation took up B and C Decks, sections forward on A, D and E Decks and part of the boat decks.
The higher decks were quieter as they were furthest from the rumble of the engines, but as the fulcrum of the ship tipped, they were also the most likely to cause sea sickness in rough weather. Passengers could move around the ship on class-segregated elevators.
As the price per cabin increased, so did the lavish surroundings in 19 period styles. Fielded wall panelling, tester beds, architectural columns and sumptuous comfortable furniture combined English Neo Jacobean with French Rococo. Remember Jack’s “French Girl” scene on the cabriolet Louis XV sofa in Jim Cameron’s heaving ?
The interiors were faultless in the movie, whatever purple prose Cameron threw over history, and the filmmaker recreated details to include fabulous carving and exotic veneers in sycamore, mahogany and satinwood, gilt sconces, Aubusson tapestries chandeliers, marble, mirrors and rich Axminster carpets.
His replication of the William & Mary period style Grand Staircase is a wonder. The fit-out of the real Titanic was outsourced to various design firms, with cabins crafted and detailed from the fireplaces to cabinetmaking, ornament and soft furnishing right on the ship rather than being lifted by crane into position as they are today - fully plumbed and wired accommodation “pods”, finished and ready to go.
Decorative plaster-like friezes, together with the use of stained glass panels and wrought iron grilles, were used to disguise port holes, ventilation and heating elements.
Every First Class cabin and stateroom enjoyed central heating and electric heating. The heaters sat inside a fake fireplace. Still (shock horror) with the exception of B and C decks, most bathroom facilities, loos included, were shared in First Class. Baths had to be booked and the room sanitised between uses.
The suites included accommodation for your servants to keep them close at hand to peel you a grape or to iron a week-old copy of The Financial Times.
Wandering the ship, the Titanic offered something not experienced in cruising before – separate restaurant and café choices distinct from the main First Class Dining Saloon. This included the A La Carte and the Café Parisian and the more casual and colonial-inspired Verandah Café on A deck with its sweeping ocean view.
Eating off the main menu came at an additional cost, and it was quite revolutionary for these old stick-in-the-mud toffs, as you could order whenever you felt like it (the Dining Saloon closed promptly at 8.15pm). The Dining Saloon in the First Class proper was the largest room seen up to 1912 of its type, a full 1000m in a comforting Jacobean style familiar to the Edwardian society set.
The floor (surprisingly) was linoleum tiling, a brilliant choice for its flexibility, easy care and relative extravagance to an early 20th-century audience. With leaded glass, golden scramble egg all over the walls, and fixed table lamps, except for the stomach flipping swell, the doomed guests could have been sopping up the turtle soup in the finest address in London or Paris.
How could anything go on to spoil the night?
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