The Ocean Liner De Grasse
This is what I know so far about the trip taken by Carmen, Maria, and Joan; Anisa traveled separately by air, and I’ll discuss that in the next post.
I had an earlier post about how Carmen’s brothers had sent my mother and grandmother to Europe. I’m not sure who told me this story, but about this story, my mother said, “This is baloney!” So I’ve updated the post to reflect my mother’s version. My mother’s comments are in green; Anissa’s are in blue.
The trip to Europe was something that Joan and I came up with together. The conversations took place over a period time between the two dorms. Joan was in Davison dorm. Joan had already been to Europe. In fact, Carlos Meyer just did some spelunking on Ancestry.com and found Joan Farwell on an earlier passenger list–on, I believe, the Queen Mary, in 1946, when she had accompanied her father, who was going on a business trip. Conversations about the trip had been going on pretty much all of the young women’s Senior year.
Maria adds–echoing Carmen: The dollar was king y podíamos vivir más facilmente en Europa que en los Estados Unidos–pero that wasn’t the main motive. (we could live more easily in Europe than in the States). The main motive, I assume, was culture, pleasure, exploration, and, simply, the delights of going on a trip in that wonderful period between college and marriage when, given a certain income and a willing chaperone, one had the freedom to just take off and travel.
Interestingly, Carmen and Maria went straight to Europe, no pasé por Cuba.
Here is how Anissa puts the origins of the trip:
Well, in 1949 Joan, Maria and your grandmother were planning to go to Europe to spend the whole year there. We were graduating in 1949, and they had the plans all set up and the bookings; they were going to London then to Paris, then to Salzburg, afterwards in the autumn to Italy or in the winter, before later on to go skiing, and then to Spain. It was all planned.
Maria altered this statement slightly be noting, “we didn’t plan, plan.” In other words, they hadn’t planned out the exact dates, every location, and all the hotels at which they would stop. But I think that Anissa and Maria actually agree here. Planning simply signifies that they had the main itinerary of the trip figured out and the order of moving from England to France to Germany and Austria.
Now, of course, they had planned everything through a travel agency called Bristed Manning, I think. (Note from Terry: help on spelling from someone would be great here.) It was on 6th ave.
This must have been a quite good, and well-run, travel agency, because it’s still in business, on Madison and 53rd in Manhattan.
Here is what my mother has to say about the trip:
We crossed on the ocean liner De Grasse, making its first transatlantic trip since the war. Up until recently the ship had been used for troops and things. The spirit of the crew was absolutely wonderful, and we sat at the Captain’s table. Of course, the Maitre d’ comes and says ‘Madame, vous savez, nous sommes a votre service, le souffle….’ This only led to Joan saying that she was on a diet. Later, in France, Cecile de la Noue said to Joan, ‘Vy do you vant to be so sinn? but zen you will be cold in the winter time.’ It was quite a thing–Joan with her insistence on dieting. In German the first thing she learned was “keine kartoffel.”
More recently, in early July 2012, she re-thought the scene. I don’t think we were at the captain’s table; we were very close to the captain’s table.”
My frequent source, Christopher Endy has an interesting comment on eating on board ocean liners after the war: “One tourist, cruising to Europe in 1947 on a French liner, recalled the ominous sight of British voyagers eating ‘singularly in large portions’ aboard the ship. Hearty meals, he soon realized, would be more difficult for European residents to acquire once the ship landed in Europe. Pan American World Airways tried to make light of stark conditions in one 1946 press release by joking that food rations allowed the average traveler to reduce ‘that executive bulge at the waistline'” (25).
The De Grasse was a French liner that operated as a luxury transatlantic ship until from 1924 until it was seized by the Germans in 1940. It could take up to 664 passengers. Although it was sunk by gunfire near Bordeaux in 1944, it was raised and refitted as a tourist liner in 1947. The liner ended her days as part of an Italy-West Indies-Venezuela service until it was lost at sea in the vicinty of Cannes. (See http://www.simplonpc.co.uk/DeGrasse_1_PCs.html)
The website of the Compagnie General Transatlantique (http://www.luxurylinerrow.com/frenchline.html) adds that it was the only French ocean liner operating before 1950. (For even more information, go to http://www.frenchlines.com/ship_en_119.php.)
The story of the De Grasse line is symptomatic of much of transatlantic ship voyages after the war. As Endy notes, “While ninety-one ships carried passengers across the Atlantic in 1937, only fourteen were available for civilian use ten years later.” As we will see, this is the reason that Anisa Saadoun was stranded in England, waiting to get to Vassar. With priory given to the military, humanitarian workers, and diplomats, there were just no ships available to get her across the Atlantic. The United States had, essentially, placed sever restrictions on transatlantic travel until 1947–a bit late for Anisa.
It was exciting to find a plan of the ship right after it had been transformed from wartime to tourist ship–just at the time that the three women traveled on the ship. It’s at the top of the blog.
Return to my mother’s comments. Thinking of the Captain’s Table and of Joan’s diet, she then commented: “I gained a lot of weight. Joan commented: ‘Maria, you won’t be able to fit into your clothes.'” Perhaps she gained weight because “I wasn’t seasick; no one was seasick that I knew.” The rest of the time seems to have been spent socializing and relaxing. Joan met a woman and her daughter that she knew from Chicago. Maria adds that The lady and her daughter were absolutely delightful. It was very nice for mother … mother was the daughter’s age.
Clearly a good memory overall, leading Maria to add, “I was so thankful for the times that we were able to cross on a boat.”
Interestingly, Mahaut de la Noue also traveled from the States to France on the De Grasse. In her words: “When the term [at Vassar] was ended, I got back to Paris with my mother on the first trip of the “de Grasse,” the only ship of the Transatlantic left after the war. As we will see, the group of travelers made sure that they saw Mahaut and her family when they came to Paris.”
Lovely as the sea voyage was, the arrival in England was a come down. An avid fan of Jane Austen, Maria added that I’d heard so much about the English countryside, but when we landed in Portsmouth it all looked so dull, and I said to mamá and Joan: “I don’t see anything very fantastic about this.”
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