The Lido Deck (Revisited)
Going through my slides, short listing the ones to probably place here, I happened upon one I never realised that I had. Having scanned what I thought were all my “Crossing the Line” pictures, suddenly up came this image of part of the inside of Caronia's new lido deck.
The reason I'd taken it being that I had dashed up there from the working alleyway to catch the King Neptune procession as it made its way forward, having collected the inductees at the passenger pool on the Lido. Whilst I will eternally regret not taking far more photographs of Caronia than I did, such detail shots become ever the more valuable, and I'm delighted to be able to place it here.
[Photo: © Peter Stevens - 1966 World Cruise]
The 1965 refit of Caronia also brought an anachronistic mix of 1960s furniture to an art-deco ship. The first thing to notice is the mix of the famed Cunard deck chairs with the moulded blue plastic chairs. I know which I'd rather park my posterior upon!
The other remarkable thing is the depth of the bracing for the new glazed side walls, the whole structure is really solidly built. This at a time when preference for lighter, and much weaker, metals like aluminium was becoming the vogue for ship superstructures.
All this indicates that although in her 17th year of service, Cunard had clearly earmarked the Caronia to be around for a lot longer than the reality of just two years. It should be remembered that 1964 was the start of quite severe rationalisation in Cunard and elsewhere, so this 1965 refit was not just a management whim.
While everyone is quick to blame the jet-airliner, which was catastrophic enough, the biggest impact on the British Merchant Marine was the devastating 1966 Seamen's strike, although in the Caronia's case this is probably mitigated slightly by another key factor.
For all of those years Caronia had always been the trend setter. Up to the late 1950s the pace of culture change could mostly be measured in decades. The 1960s brought with it what I called “The Plastic Age” - almost everything new was designed to be disposable. In many ways it was probably the most wasteful decade of the 20th century.
Certainly any attitude of building things to last had gone! This also had a huge impact on culture, where anything even remotely concerned with the 1950s or before was trashed. For example, the fine solid-wood furniture that you pay many thousands of dollars or pounds for today, was rendered worthless, it seemed almost overnight.
Other shipping companies had seen the Caronia's success and applied their more up-to-date version of it to their new ships. Suddenly the 1940s chic that Cunard had traded so successfully on, was completely old-hat.
Coupled to this, disposable incomes grew at a previously unheard of rate, along with extended holidays. With the Caronia Cunard could not begin to compete, so it was almost inevitable that in this new era the market for luxury cruises was going to go to much more modern ships.
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