January 2009

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Although Wadsworth and Woodford studied each others’ preliminary sketches, they otherwise worked independently of one another.15 Woodford designed bronze light fittings and two carved screens flanking the fireplace, which depict swimmers, mermaids and marine life. Wadsworth was initially commissioned to create three works, a design for the ceiling and two paintings for the fore and aft walls. One painting was to be placed over the fireplace and the other above the buffet. A contractor was intended to complete the ceiling commission but the project was never realised. Cunard archives do not indicate why.16

By early June, Wadsworth had sketched out his ideas and showed them to Morris. Reporting back to Cunard, Morris wrote, ‘I saw Mr. Wadsworth’s sketches to-day for the fore and aft panels of Smoke Room – and was much pleased with them and approved them’.17 Confident in his designs, Wadsworth travelled to Glasgow a few months later to present his ideas to Cunard’s board of directors. However, the meeting proved to be a huge disappointment. Assuming that Cunard would understand his sketches to be works in progress, Wadsworth presented the paintings squared up and ready to transfer to larger panels. The two works, Arrival and Offing, both depicted a single column surrounded by nautical paraphernalia (Figs 3 and 4). This, however, is not what Cunard had expected and the grids only added to their confusion.18

Adding to the nay-sayers was a colleague of Davis’s. After Davis fell ill in the autumn of 1934, he was replaced as Mewès and Davis’s representative on the Queen Mary project by J.C. Whipp. Although Morris initially agreed to this arrangement, by the summer of 1935, he was concerned that his designs were not being implemented.19 Whipp, whose tastes were more conservative, began to meddle with Morris’s decisions. On 9 September 1935, Whipp wrote to Cunard’s board members:

I believe that it is your Directors’ intention and desire that this ship should represent the zenith of British art, workmanship and industry, and that momentary vogues and eccentricities which are likely to date the vessel’s decoration should be restrained. After most careful consideration and full appreciation of consequences, I feel it my duty to convey to your Board that it is my opinion that the majority of the suggestions so far put forward by the various artists are not in sympathy with your Director’s intentions, or in harmony with general scheme.20

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