Hi Bob,
Seriously, if you had paid big money for one of the better suites then your windows had an inner sliding screen made of rippled 'cathedral glass', which admitted light but you can't see through it. The rest maybe had to rely on 'net' curtains. Mark Chirnside is the man who would know.
Amidships, the
B-deck staterooms or suites were fitted with 'vertical upward sliding windows made of teak' according to the Peskett report. These were modelled on Mauretania to an extent, and it's one of my 'favourite tales' as I discovered the extent of
Bruce Ismay's involvement in this area: Cunard actually supplied drawings showing the working of Mauretania's windows to Harland & Wolff at Ismay's request, which struck me as an enormously cheeky request. I was surprised Cunard agreed to it, yet then again the tales of the cut-throat competition between companies sometimes overstate the case.
You're quite correct as regards the privacy issue: there was a mahogany jalousie and a 'cathedral glass vertical sliding window' fitted inside.
As regards the remainder of B-deck, such as the forward staterooms, it's frustrating as I am fairly sure I have these recorded at home. However, since my last university exam finished it's been one long drinking contest.
I won't get a chance to look for at least a month as I am away from home. However, I entirely agree that passengers would not have been left at the mercy of prying eyes. I remember that the recent Cameron expedition posted an image of a privacy screen in one of the forward
A-deck cabins, and my
assumption at this stage would be to assume that these screens would have been used on Olympic in this area of
A-deck as well as immediately beneath on B-deck.
I read an interesting rebuttal as to the profits on these suites. Apparently, around 1913 there had been concerns as to the profitability of reserving large areas of space to these enormous suites (such as the Kaiser suite on Imperator and the 'millionaires' suites on Titanic, or even Olympic's best 'parlour' suites). The concern was that if they were not filled, the companies would be forfitting a lot of passage money. However, in the event Imperator's (for instance) suites were booked every voyage in 1913 at a cost of (
strictly from memory -- correct me if I am wrong) around $5,000 each. This equated to an enormous number of third, second or even first class bookings, and all from a group of perhaps as few as two super-rich people. While I can understand the suites amidships on B-deck remaining as they were, it's always been something of a puzzle to me as to why some promenade suites could not have been constructed forward of the grand staircase on B-deck in the late 1920s. After all, despite Titanic's and Britannic's arrangement, there was no law saying these suites had to be amidships. It's known that a number of entirely new suites were constructed on Olympic during this period, yet none had a private promenade or really resembled one of these 'millionaire suites.' One report stated that Olympic carried a record number of millionaires in 1928, as well as over 26,000 passengers, which makes me doubt that demand was not there -- as do her average first class passenger figures.
Best wishes,
Mark.
