shoreside Hotel Decals & Labels
You may be wondering why on earth a page of decals and labels from hotels ashore appear on a site to do with a ship. Well, the answer is very simple. A fair number of the crew and passengers aboard the “Green Goddess” would obtain free sticky labels or buy both waterslide transfers and felt pennants as souvenirs of most ports of call.
A Period World Cruise Status Symbol?
You will find that a few photographs of the crew quarters depicted on the Timeline have their bulkheads decorated with colourful pennants. Often, these would be attached at the start of a voyage, as a kind of status symbol showing “I've been before!.” The sticky labels or transfers were used for appending to suitcases.
[Left:]
A label from Hong Kong Hotel
[Image: Courtesy of Reiner Pachauer]
Certainly, during my time on board Caronia I'd managed to accumulate enough of these decals to completely cover two large suitcases on all sides. If ever there was a way of silently telling the world that you were “well travelled”.…
A “Poser” - Moi?
There was another, perhaps closer association with the Caronia for the transfers depicted here. Many of these luxury hotels were used to refresh passengers on shore tours, either for Luncheons or Afternoon Teas ashore, and for overnight stays on trips well away from the ship.
Quite apart from this, many of these transfers were miniature works of art and used almost unchanged for many years. Indeed, it appears that many of those still available in the 1960s actually date back to well before the “Green Goddess” was even launched!
I'm hugely indebted to Reiner Pachauer from Hamburg for providing me with all of the scans of decal images on this page.
