John Maxtone-Graham
Author and speaker who left the theatre to celebrate the lost splendour of the transatlantic liners
JOHN MAXTONE-GRAHAM, who has died aged 85, was an American author of Scottish ancestry whose expertise on the golden age of ocean liners allowed him to make guest appearances on Cunard’s transatlantic crossings and even in an episode of
The Simpsons.
His book titles evoked an era of glittering opulence and grand enterprise: Liners to the Sun (1986), Cunard: 150 Glorious Years (1989) and Normandie: France’s Legendary Art Deco Ocean Liner (2007). He chronicled the spectacular voyages of passenger ships such as Aquitania, Mauretania and Lusitania during the first half of the 20th century, along with the tragic fate of Titanic and the decline of sea passages in favour of flight.
His wistful style was set with his first book The Only Way to Cross (1972), the definitive history of transatlantic liners. “It’s hard to believe they are gone. The piers are still there,” he wrote, “But there is no tomorrow. Every one of these fine transatlantic liners – and nearly all the others too – have vanished from service.”
He lamented the disappearance of a way of life as much as a mode of transport. He wrote about “bon voyage baskets” full of exotic fruits, and the dazzling decor of the dining saloons, but also of the “brutal employment” of the stokers coping with the “treacly black goo” of the oil and the sulphurous coal smoke. “I don’t feel people care how many rivets were used, or how many eggs served,” he observed. “They care about what really happens inside that steel hull.”
He was particularly drawn to the aesthetic qualities of these vast ships – and their quirks. “People say ships were more elegant then, but I don’t think so. There was, however, more luggage space in the cabin: a recess for trunks, and lots of drawers and cupboards. There used to be buttons to summon stewards, and there was always someone available in the pantry. Of course, there are now no bath stewards to summon when you want to bathe: it’s a dead profession.” Maxtone-Graham experienced the grandeur of liners at an early age, taking his first passage as an infant and becoming infatuated with the hulking vessels as a young boy.
He claimed that the interest was genetic, noting that his ancestor Lord Lynedoch had, in 1815, sailed from Stockholm to St Petersburg in
Savannah, a grand American steamer newly over from America.
Maxtone-Graham took hundreds of ocean voyages, lectured on board many liners, including Princess, Cunard and Norwegian Cruise Line vessels, and would spend seven months of the year at sea. In 2012 he had the privilege of giving an “animated” lecture to Bart Simpson aboard Royalty Valhalla, a floating extravaganza of rollercoasters and crazy golf, during an episode of The
Simpsons produced by his son Ian. John Kurtz Maxtone-Graham was born on August 2 1929 at Orange, New Jersey. His father was a Scottish banker, his mother Ellen (née Taylor) was American.
In later life John put his distinctive prose style – a combination of rattling yarn and illuminating detail – down to the influence of his British family. “Two of my aunts told stories that were funny by times, or gripping. They made you listen,” he said. One of those aunts was Joyce Anstruther Maxtone Graham, who wrote the wartime bestseller Mrs Miniver under the nom de plume Jan Struther.
When John was six months old his parents left America for London in the wake of the Wall Street Crash; for many years the family would flit between the two continents. By the age of 10 he had crossed the Atlantic a dozen times. “I remember crossings on Cunard and White Star ships before the Second World War. I was a boy and would get seasick,” he recalled. “I was amazed to discover the food was free. There were manned elevators in those days, often war veterans who had been injured.”
Maxtone-Graham’s education was split between Britain and America, but he graduated from Brown University on Rhode Island in 1951 before serving as a lieutenant with the US Marines in Korea. During the 1950s and early1960s he pursued a career in theatre, stage-managing a string of Broadway productions including King Lear (with Orson Welles in 1956) and The Night of
the Iguana with Bette Davis (1961-62). By the late-1960s, however, he was writing about ships and liner life for a number of magazines, a passion that was to lead to the publication of The
Only Way to Cross in 1972. He kept one foot on shore – with a home in Manhattan, where he wrote – while maintaining a busy calendar of talks on ships. He disapproved of the modern trend for cruises. “A cruise is an idle voyage, a frivolous voyage,” he said. “On ocean crossings there is a feeling that the passenger, crew and ship are going somewhere, not drifting around.”
When lecturing he considered himself to be a crew member and would allow his cabin number to be given out by the purser’s office to any passenger with questions. But despite his earlier career in the theatre he did not warm to on-board entertainment: “Much as I enjoy cabaret – jugglers, magicians and ventriloquists – I find production shows over-amplified and often derivative.”
His other books included Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner (2012) and, in a rare foray on to terra
firma, Return Doubtful: The Heroic Age of Polar Exploration (1988). Maxtone-Grahame married Katrina Kanzler in 1955. The marriage was later dissolved. In 1981 he married, secondly, Mary Bergeron (on the liner
Rotterdam as it sat in New York harbour). He is survived by two sons and two daughters from his first marriage. John Maxtone-Graham, born August 2 1929, died July 6 2015