There is a space that used to exist aboard the Queen Mary that had become somewhat of a
mystery to me. In this video we’re gonna talk about the maids and valets aboard the ship.
Now to provide a bit of context, a few Saturdays out of the month I host a 90-minute live stream
with my friend and colleague, Stephen Ablonczy, who has been researching the ship his whole life
and is someone I would consider a historian on the subject. On our very first Livestream
about Queen Mary’s lost and abandoned places, we discussed all the dining spaces on R deck,
and we were satisfied that every dining space on that level had been thoroughly covered.
Except one viewer, JW Rogers, mentioned that we forgot to talk about the spare dining room used
for the passengers’ maids and valets, the dining room was labeled on my deck plans as an annex.
I mentioned this to Steve and he realized he had totally forgotten about it as well.
You see, most 20th-century ocean liners prior to the second world war had a separate dining room
or saloon for the passenger's servants, and we knew Queen Mary had to have one,
but we didn’t know where exactly it was and frankly, we forgot to research it prior to
the episode. Steve went to work looking for information on it and I did as well.
Now, let’s keep in mind that not everyone watching this video knows exactly what maids and valets are
and so I must take a moment to explain it. Also, keep in mind, yes you can pronounce valet as
[valay], either one is correct, however, I think of [valay] as the people who park
your car at a restaurant, and a Valet as a guy who works for you as an assistant.
Maids and Valets were the servants who worked for people of the middle and upper classes of society.
They often traveled with their employers wherever they went, this is somewhat similar to a personal
assistant, except that the maids and valets lived with their masters. And so when the upper-class
folks would need to travel to another country, they would book passage aboard an ocean liner,
not just for themselves, but they also paid for their servants as well. The servants usually
had their own rooms to sleep in, I can’t speak for every ocean liner, but on the Queen Mary,
servants of first-class passengers often slept in a separate cabin.
The cabin could be a small windowless room (referred to as an inside cabin) and it was
next to or nearby their employer's room, or they could be booked in second class and have to show
some kind of pass or identification each day they reported to work for their master in first class.
The more wealthy first-class passengers sometimes booked the suites on Main Deck,
and these suites sometimes included a room for servant's quarters and it was directly accessed
to the main cabin with a door. Today some of these small windowless servant's quarters are still in
use as the more budget-friendly hotel rooms aboard the Queen Mary. These small inside cabin hotel
rooms have their own toilets and showers today, but back then, if the occupant of the inside cabin
needed to shower or bathe, they had to use one of the public bathrooms scattered around first class.
My knowledge of how the Maids and Valets spent their free time aboard Queen Mary is
rather lacking. Because Maids and Valets are not a subject often covered or documented,
so my research on that is still ongoing, however, what we do know is that while their masters would
dine in the first or second class dining rooms on R Deck, the servants would have to take their
meal in a separate dining room. For this, Cunard created a small space adjoined to the main kitchen
just forward of the second-class dining room on the starboard side.
This area is sometimes labeled as an annex, but as my friend Steve had shown me, it was a dedicated
dining space. To get there, servants went down a set of stairs on B deck in first class.
The room was nicely laid out with proper tables and dinnerware, it was decorated similarly to
the second and third-class dining rooms and was paneled with blistered maple along its walls.
Portholes along the hull let in natural light through frosted glass panels,
but didn’t offer views of the ocean, which is the same with all the dining rooms on R Deck.
The interesting thing about this dining room was that it wasn’t only used for Maids and Valets,
it was also considered a children's dining room. You see, for first and second-class passengers,
dining aboard the Queen Mary was a major social event, it was to be kept formal and
cultured. That is why if a passenger knew that their child might be a distraction,
then they would have their servants escort the child to the separate dining room for their meal.
If the passenger was not traveling with a servant, then they would join their child in
the servant's dining room themselves. But there is possibly a third option, aboard Queen Mary,
there were attendants that looked after children in the three nurseries. I don’t know for sure,
but it's possible that if a passenger traveling without a servant needed their fussy child to
dine separately, then maybe one of the nursery attendants would be in charge of taking the child
to the servant's dining room and tending to their meal. Again, I don’t know for certain, but in
these times, Cunard was known for their service of going above and beyond to accommodate their
passengers, I wouldn’t doubt if they had their own employees feeding the passenger's fussy children.
When the Queen Mary was converted to a hotel in Long Beach, the servant's dining room was
cleared out and was used as additional kitchen space. The staircase that led down to it from B
deck was removed and decked over. The B deck access to it remains a storage closet today.
And that, folks, is the story behind the annex, a room that was rather a mystery to me for a while,
but with the help of a viewer and from my friend Steve,
it’s another secret unlocked, aboard the historic liner RMS Queen Mary.