Of all the bitching surrounding the great Kate Middleton and Prince William
break-up, perhaps the most hateful has been the gleeful reporting of his
mates’ “doors to manual” jibes, allegedly referring to the fact that her
mother, Carole, used to be an air hostess. Young men, especially in
multiples of two or more, are not generally endowed with the most
sophisticated sense of humour; but having a go at Kate because her mother
used to be a stewardess (or trolley dolly, or flight attendant, depending on
your age and degree of political correctness) displays a unique combination
of snobbery and sexism.
If Mrs Middleton had been some grand old trout with a ferocious up-do who once
held a summer posting at Sotheby’s before marrying Lord Snoot of
Saxe-Snootenburg and inheriting several large houses and an inexhaustible
supply of soggy sheep, they would never have dared. But the very fact that
she is a smiley, pretty blonde, well-dressed and elegantly groomed who also,
crucially, used to work as a stewardess would have afforded them, in their
view, carte blanche to take the mickey.
I suspect that the jibes were, in part, a clumsy postadolescent mechanism to
mask the fact that secretly they all rather fancied her.
Who knows what visions the combination of Mrs Robinson-style allure and
feverishly imagined mile-high adventuring might have conjured up in the
foetid depths of these young men’s minds. Better not to dwell on it. Whether
the “joke” was merely an affectionate tease or a more calculated insult we
will probably never discover; the fact remains that these days air
stewardesses (and stewards) have a pretty tough time of it.
Once the epitome of glamour, today’s cabin crews face more pressing concerns
than which shade of lipstick to wear and how to keep their pencil skirts
from creasing during long-haul flights. The advent of budget airlines has
brought with it longer hours, shorter turnaround times and precious little
in between. Flying is no longer glamorous and exciting. “Pleasure” is not a
term the modern traveller associates with hurtling through an overcrowded
atmosphere in a cramped metal tube, thoughts of terrorism playing on their
mind. The pre in-flight meal cocktail is now an abstemious bottle of water;
the cutlery (if there even is any) is plastic.
As for the hostesses themselves — well, the chances of finding an eligible
bachelor in time-honoured tradition in seat 23C of some of the new, cheaper
airlines are slim. Unless, of course, you consider a 17-stone football fan
with a trucker’s tan and a 99p internet ticket a catch. But even if such a
creature were the man of your dreams, the likelihood of igniting his inner
Romeo while wearing bright orange polyester and brandishing a black
bin-liner are limited. Emilio Pucci it ain’t.
It’s all so different from the way it used to be. The very first flight
attendants were not even female, since the job was considered too dangerous
to entrust to such a flighty creature. It wasn’t until 1930 that Ellen
Church, a nurse from Iowa, first put forward the idea of using nurses as
stewardesses. Church herself was a qualified pilot — but she knew that no
airline would ever employ a woman to fly aircraft. So she hit upon the nurse
idea as a way of assuaging passengers’ safety fears. She was hired by Boeing
Air Transport as head stewardess, and set about recruiting. Under her
tutelage, air hostesses were consummate professionals, present as much for
their technical knowledge as for their ability to mix a Martini. They were
even thought of as brave adventurers, given the relative ricketiness of
aeroplanes back then.
In the 1940s and 1950s, as air travel grew in popularity, the role of the
flight attendant began to change. Girls (and they were by now almost
exclusively girls) were required to speak a foreign language.
They were also required to be pretty, slim and able to make the best of
themselves. They were glamorous and cosmopolitan, invariably young and
single (it was not a job considered suitable for married ladies), and
implicitly in search of a husband. And for a comely young lady, well turned
out and with a willingness to please, the skies were awash with suitable
gentlemen, many of whom viewed the role of a wife as being identical to that
of an air hostess: to cater to his every need and smile sweetly at his every
utterance.
So how did an occupation that started off perfectly respectably as a sort of
airborne finishing school for nice middle-class girls end up as a schoolboy
joke, a byword for sexual availability with a reputation only slightly less
scandalous than that of Pamela Anderson? Well, in short, a lethal
combination of sexism and sexual liberation. Pan Am’s 1971 advertising
campaign, for example, featured the unambiguous slogan: “Hi, I’m Cheryl. Fly
me”. Delta Airlines’ 1969 poster campaign ran the caption: “No floor show,
just a working girl working.” In 1968 American Airlines even ran a bizarre
campaign featuring an alluring young woman gazing longingly at the viewer
under the slogan “Think of her as your mother”. Thankyou, but I would rather
not.
There were tales, which persist today (one thinks of the recent tabloid
kiss-and-tell involving the Qantas stewardess Lisa Robertson and a
well-known British actor) of steamy romps in aircraft lavatories, of
captain/crew assignations in five-star hotels, of all kinds of high jinks.
This, combined with the airline industry’s insistence on marketing their
cabin crews as little short of high-class escorts (in 1972, Singapore
Airlines showed a profile of one of their stewardesses, her lips parted
provocatively. Their slogan — “This girl’s in love with you”) — helped to
consolidate the image of air stewardesses as sex-mad bimbos, their unruly
desires barely controlled by the tight tailoring of their smart uniforms,
their brains as soft as reheated in-flight mashed potato.
Such a reputation, however unjustified, is not easy to shake off. And even in
these antidiscriminatory days, air hostesses are still subject to, shall we
say, certain aesthetic criteria. Anna, a senior British Airways stewardess,
recalls that in the mid-Nineties, when she was working for British Midland,
girls were still being marked on the standard of their make-up. “Your
ability to wear the right shade of lipstick went down on your report card.”
Many airlines operate unofficial upper-age limits; and although they are not
allowed to dismiss girls for putting on weight (as a recent legal ruling in
favour of 13 stewardesses grounded by Indian Airlines for being too fat
proved), airlines can be ingenious in ensuring that their cabin crew conform
to a certain look. Imogen Edwards-Jones, the author of Air Babylon ,
explains: “If a girl is a size 10 when she starts her job and, over time,
puts on weight, the airlines simply ignore her requests for a bigger
uniform. Lots of stewardesses resort to taking out their uniforms
themselves. But there’s only so far they can go.”
The truth is that the priorities of passengers and airlines have changed.
Comfort is still a concern, but most people realise that safety and security
are the really important issues. “We don’t get long stopovers in luxury
hotels any more,” says Anna. “There’s less socialising, sight-seeing; fewer
dinners and so on. The focus now is on getting the passengers there and back
safely and quickly. There’s a lot of attention paid to the threat of
terrorism — we do role play, have restraint training. Nowadays there are two
sets of handcuffs for each aisle to deal with hostile passengers, drunks,
whatever.”
As for glamour, well — “It really doesn’t do much for your complexion,” says
Anna. “Some of the new aircraft are particularly dehydrating. My skin was
like an old handbag by the end of my last flight. And people have complained
of wheeziness.”
Personally, I don’t care a stuff what the cabin crew gets up to in their
private lives or whether they know how to make a decent gin and tonic. I
just want to know that, in the event of an imminent disaster, they are not
going to do what a Virgin flight attendant did recently somewhere over
Greenland and start screaming: “We’re going to crash!”
— Additional research by Rosie Stewart
‘The passengers have changed’
Harriet Andrews*, 38, stewardess:
When you’re a “hostee” — and yes, I call it that myself — you get two images
of you. One camp thinks it’s glam but the other thinks you’re arrogant. “All
you do is pour tea and coffee,” they say. “What makes you so special?” On
long-haul flights you have to be really careful if you’re in the same hotel
as guests. They often think of you as the service person and can’t stand to
see you out on the beach, having a life of your own. The younger girls don’t
understand this, so they get drunk and wild and don’t keep up the
presentation. You hear stories from women who used to work long ago about
how different it was. They got away with a lot more because they were
treated with reverence. But holidays have become so common you get a
different kind of passenger. One man grabbed my bum, called me lard-arse and
demanded another beer. Last year someone vomited down himself on a flight.
When I tried to clear him up he threatened to kill me. A lot of the job is
repetitive — cleaning, security duties and so on — and sometimes you get on
a flight and think “Oh God, can I really be bothered?” It’s the first time
in my life I’ve actually had to thank people for giving me rubbish. The ones
who’ve worked for ages get very grumpy as a result. We have all this medical
training, and we don’t focus on the make-up and trolley-dolly stuff that
they used to, but people don’t appreciate it. All they see is the person who
pours the coffee and tea. They think we’re thick. Some of us probably aren’t
the sharpest tools in the box. Lots of the girls who apply just think they
have to be tall and blonde, so that’s who they employ. You can see where the
image comes from. * Name changed
‘Hostesses? They’re impossibly rude’
In the 1980s, when I was very young, air hostesses were objects of impossible
glamour. When I was less young, they graduated into objects of impossible
lust.
Two decades on, and they are just impossible; it is impossible to get their
attention. They are impossibly rude when you do. And it is impossible to sit
in an aisle seat without the no-longer-gamine air hostess of today giving
you a brutal (and surely, sometimes, not-quite-accidental) passing knock
with her nylon-swaddled elbow.
I enjoyed a lot of long-haul travel as a nipper, flying as an unaccompanied
minor on various carriers between my parents in London and Sydney. My feet
may not have reached the floor, but I soon became a precocious aficionado of
each carrier’s relative appeals — chief of which was always its hostesses;
sisterly Qantas girls, bewitching Air India girls, faultlessly attentive
Cathay Pacific girls and of course the eyelid-batting Singapore girls. All
of them plied me with quite unnecessary attention in which I revelled. Thai
Airways was just about my favourite; its hostesses exotically demure,
endlessly solicitous, and so very free and easy with their branded key rings
and colouring books.
Yes, all of this is recalled through the sepia tint of reminiscence. But
undeniably what was in the 20th century a covetable career reserved for the
beauteous best — as a stewardess on a national carrier you were practically
a beauty queen, a feminine personification of your homeland — has become in
the 21st a mere job, to be executed gracelessly. Often even rudely.
The budget airlines are terrible, sure, flogging their “charity” scratchcards
and instant soups. But it’s the premium carriers who are shockingly
inhospitable. And I fear British Airways is among the worst of them. In a
brittle tirade, a BA hostess recently accused a friend’s husband of assault.
His crime? To attract her attention after repeatedly ignored “excuse me’s”
he had lightly touched her passing upper arm with his fingertips. She
wheeled around to make her outraged accusation with more gusto than she had
shown at any previous point during the London-Belgrade flight.
These experiences are rare. Common, though, is a lack of care, a lack of
charm, a lack of pleasure in the work and a shrewish delight in criticising
passengers for minor transgressions.
A BA captain, who most definitely does not want to be named, fervently agrees
that its hostesses are not what once they were. “British Airways cabin crew
are crusty old women. And although the PC term is flight attendant or cabin
crew, we still call them stewardesses or hostesses.”
I’m not sure why captains or passengers bother any more: there’s not much
sense of stewardship or hospitality in the air today.
— LUKE LEITCH
