The Ocean Times, 25 January 1958
A donation by Richard and Dickie of a copy of the Ocean Times from 1958 had us scratching our heads. This was a single-sheet newspaper available (for free, probably) to the upper-crust passengers on board the RMS Queen Elizabeth ocean liner. It was even printed and published each week on board – imagine doing that now!
But a bit of background first. The Queen Elizabeth was a liner in the Cunard company’s fleet. The ship itself was launched in 1938 and was, at the time, the largest passenger liner in the world. But times were changing fast and in the 1950s travel by liner was being challenged by jet aviation. With declining numbers of passengers, the liner was replaced in 1968 by the QE2, a smaller and more efficient ship. As for Cunard, this had been around for nearly 200 years at the time. The Queen Elizabeth had been part of the White Star line until 1949 when the Cunard branding took over.
And to further divert ourselves, I checked our product files for White Star and found we had adverts going back to the 1920s, and I’ve included a few images here to show how cruise ship holidays were advertised at the time. They’re both from National Geographic, the one showing another of their ships, the Majestic, from 1925, and the ‘Watch your husband’ (!) from 1930.
But back to the Ocean Times. We can find out very little on this. It is a fairly simple publication, with more than half being editorial. It includes the previous day’s stock market listings, plus general interest articles (here, on gold jewellery), and a crossword. The front page is entirely taken up with news items – some political (Anglo-Turkish discussions, Russia and missiles, and with a clear UK bias, for example, what the chancellor will do next), plus half a column on a sports round up (mainly cricket). Being potentially with the passengers finding themselves in the middle of the ocean, and with no daily national newspapers available when at sea, the Ocean Times plugged some real gaps and kept the passengers informed.
Doing some checking, I found other copies of the Ocean Times for sale. One was from 1947 and is an eight pager – could ours once have been an 8-pager, and the middle sheet gone missing? There are no page numbers to help here. In terms of duration, other copies for 1946 are being auctioned, so we know it was available then, and another on ebay for 1961, so it survived as a publication into the 1960s.
The adverts are for what you might expect, bearing in mind the disposable incomes of the passengers, and their inclination to travel. There are adverts for hotels, cigarettes, whisky, and one for Capital Airlines. There’s even an advert for the Daily Telegraph. I’ve included some snaps so you can see how the advertising was laid out, and zoomed in on the Winston cigarette advert.
Just to close with the headline news in our copy, that the world’s oceans may provide electricity – at a glance I assumed this would be hydro or tidal, but in fact it was all about extracting heavy hydrogen from seawater for the fledgling nuclear industry. I guess, nuclear was going to solve all our problems at the time, and anything on the subject would have been newsworthy.
