RMS Caronia

Introduction

Important - Please Read This!

Although I have collected several copies of the “Cruise News” issued on board the Caronia during her major cruises, this is the first attempt at transcribing them for on-line reading. There are some important reasons for not publishing the contents here before now.

Until the transition to modern web (accessibility) practices for the Timeline, it was more or less impossible to present these pages in an easily readable format without producing what for most Timeline readers would probably be just a boring script, with very few images. The presentation of these pages now includes “fly-outs” of portions of text that fill areas of the screen that would usually carry pictures. In technical parlance they're placed in <asides>.

Little Caronia Gems

Having said all this, there are some tremendous gems of information in these pages! At least you'll learn what the word “autochthonous” means, and find out that not all the World's diamonds come from the Kimberley Mines in Africa. By Bulletin 3 you will have another confirmation on just how much the World has changed in the interim.

On the Latch, Please

Before Caronia was fully air-conditioned in 1956, the only practical way of ventilating all the long internal alleyways was by asking passengers to put their doors “on the latch”. This latch held each stateroom door open with about a 2 inch gap.

Of course, passengers were also strongly urged to place their valuables into safety-deposit boxes, nevertheless, would you leave your stateroom open these days? From memory, I'm almost certain that if staterooms could be locked at all, they couldn't be locked from the inside. The need for a quick exit in an emergency was always paramount!

Cinderella Stamp

Another thing that has come to light from these copies of Cruise News, that I wasn't aware of, was the production and distribution of “green Caronia mail stickers”. In the philatelic world these were known as a “cinderella stamp”.

To the best of my knowledge, this was the first, and possibly only, Caronia cruise that it was used on. I've yet to see any further mention of it, so it appears that its use wasn't perpetuated. Was it perhaps that very few people actually used these for their intended purpose, hence the experiment failed?