So What is a Drawing Room Anyway?
In the 1500s, English houses got a room for leaving. After a formal dinner, the women withdrew from the table and left the men to their port. People called it the withdrawing room. By the 1640s the first syllable was gone, and it has been the drawing room ever since.
The Victorians turned the habit into a rule. The ladies retired to the drawing room after dinner, and the gentlemen joined them later. When the great ocean liners started selling first-class passage as a week in a floating country house, the drawing room came along.
The Drawing Room, A Cunard Line Staple
Almost every major liner had a room set aside for first-class women. For the most part, only Cunard called it a drawing room. Servia had a ladies' drawing room in 1881. Carmania had one in 1905. Aquitania had the most famous of all in 1914, the Adam Drawing Room. It had a carved frieze, an oval plaster dome, soft blue settees, and a copy of Cipriani's Neptune and Amphitrite over a marble fireplace.
Other lines used other names for the same room. White Star called it a Reading and Writing Room, and that's what Titanic had. German ships had a Damensalon. The French Line had a Salon des Dames.
There were exceptions. White Star's Majestic entered service in 1922 with a room called the Drawing Room, finished in ivory and soft blue with Queen Anne armchairs and glass-fronted bookcases. Her brochure promised the quiet of a library with the elegance of a drawing room. In 1934 White Star merged with Cunard, and Majestic ended up in the same fleet as the ship Cunard White Star was then building in Scotland.
The SS Normandie vs The Queen Mary
That ship was the Queen Mary. Her closest rival was France's Normandie, which entered service in May 1935, a year before the Queen Mary's maiden voyage. For the rest of the decade the two traded the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing.
By then the idea of a separate room for women was out of date. Normandie made that plain in her design: she opened her smoking room to women, which had been a men's room on liners for sixty years. She still kept a Salon des Dames, but by then it was a quiet room for women who wanted one, not the place they were expected to go.
The Queen Mary held on to the older tradition, and to the older name. Her drawing room opened in 1936 on the Promenade Deck, 43 feet long and 20 feet wide, painted in very pale grey, with amboyna and rosewood furniture and blue upholstery. It also served as the ship's chapel. At one end, hinged screens opened onto an altar under Kenneth Shoesmith's Madonna of the Atlantic.
At the other end was the fireplace. The Shipbuilder described it as onyx d'or with a Napoleon marble hearth and a decorative painting of a flower market by Kenneth Shoesmith above it.
The RMS Queen Mary; the one that's still here
Normandie caught fire at her New York pier in February 1942 and capsized. Her Salon des Dames went with her. Aquitania and Majestic were both scrapped. Of all these rooms, the only one still in the space it was built for is the Queen Mary's.
It has had several jobs. During the war it was a sick bay. It was restored afterward, and from 1968 it served as a souvenir shop. Through all of that, the fireplace and Flower Market stayed in place. It now functions as an art gallery on the ship.
The Queen Mary Heritage Foundation has already conserved Madonna of the Atlantic from this same room. Flower Market is next, and it needs $4200. Help us ensure the work recieves the attention it needs to last another 100 years.
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