The RMS Queen Mary is a retired British ocean liner and sister of the RMS Queen Elizabeth, that sailed primarily on the North Atlantic Ocean from 1936 to 1967 and was built by John Brown & Company in Clydebank, Scotland and owned by Cunard-White Star Line. The Queen Mary sailed on her maiden voyage on 27 May 1936 and won the Blue Riband that August but lost to the SS Normandie in 1937 but recaptured it in 1938, holding it until 1952 when it was taken by the new SS United States. When World War II broke-out , she was converted into a troopship and ferried Allied soldiers during the conflict. After World War II ended both the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth were turn back into passenger ships and the Queen Mary sailed sailed again for 22 years until retired from service in 1967. She left Southampton for the last time on October 31, 1967 and sailed to the port of Long Beach, California, United States, where she remains permanently moored. The ship serves as a tourist attraction featuring restaurants, a museum and a hotel. The ship is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has accepted Queen Mary as part of the Historic Hotels of America.
Construction[]
Queen Mary was built by the John Brown and Company in Clydebank, Scotland, the same company and wharf that also built Lusitania and her sisters.
Naming rumored[]
There's a legend saying that ship was originally going to be called the Victoria after Queen Victoria, due to it ending with ia. Representative of Cunard Line went to asked the King's permission to name the ocean liner after Britain's "greatest Queen" but the king thought that they were talking about her wife and said "My wife, Mary of Teck, would be delighted". So they had no other choice but to report that No. 534 would be called Queen Mary.
Maiden Voyage[]
RMS Queen Mary leaving Southampton for her Maiden Voyage
In 1934 the new liner was launched by Her Majesty Queen Mary as RMS Queen Mary. On her way down the slipway, Queen Mary was slowed by eighteen drag chains, which checked the liner's progress into the River Clyde, a portion of which had been widened to accommodate the launch.
24 March 1936, leaving Clydebank she ran aground on the River Clyde but with the help of tugboats she was refloated.
Queen Mary achieved 32.84 knots on her acceptance trials in early 1936.
When she sailed on her maiden voyage from Southampton on 27 May 1936, she was commanded by Sir Edgar Britten, who had been the master designate for Cunard White Star whilst the ship was under construction at the John Brown shipyard. Queen Mary measured 80,774 gross register tons (GRT), making her the world's largest passenger ship. Her rival SS Normandie, only measured 79,280 GRT. However, CGT modified the Normandie to increase her size to 83,243 GRT, reclaiming the title of world's largest passenger ship. Queen Mary sailed at high speed for most of her maiden voyage to New York, until heavy fog forced a reduction of speed on the final day of the crossing, arriving in New York Harbor on 1 June 1936.
Queen Mary's design was criticised for being too traditional, especially when Normandie's hull was revolutionary with a clipper-shaped, streamlined bow. Except for her cruiser stern, she seemed to be an enlarged version of her Cunard predecessors from the pre-First World War era. Her interior design, while mostly Art Deco, seemed restrained and conservative when compared to the ultramodern French liner. Nonetheless Queen Mary proved to be the more popular vessel than her rival, in terms of passengers carried.
In August 1936, Queen Mary captured the Blue Riband from Normandie, with average speeds of 30.14 knots westbound and 30.63 knots eastbound. In 1937, Normandie received a new set of propellers and reclaimed the Blue Riband. However, in 1938, under the command of Robert B. Irving, Queen Mary took back the Blue Riband in both directions, with average speeds of 30.99 knots westbound and 31.69 knots eastbound, records which stood until lost to SS United States in 1952.
World War II[]
In late August 1939, Queen Mary was on a return run from New York to Southampton. The international situation led to her being escorted by the battlecruiser HMS Hood. She arrived safely and set out again for New York on 1 September. By the time she arrived, war had been declared and she was ordered to remain in port alongside Normandie until further notice.[citation needed]
In March 1940, Queen Mary and Normandie were joined in New York by Queen Mary's new running mate RMS Queen Elizabeth, fresh from her secret voyage from Clydebank. The three largest liners in th
e world sat idle for some time until the Allied commanders decided that all three ships could be used as troopships. Normandie was destroyed by fire during her troopship conversion. Queen Mary left New York for Sydney, Australia in March 1940, where she, along with several other liners, was converted into a troopship to carry Australian and New Zealand soldiers to the United Kingdom.
In the conversion, the ship's hull, superstructure, and funnels were painted navy grey. As a result of her new colour, and in combination with her great speed, she became known as the "Grey Ghost". To protect against magnetic mines, a degaussing coil was fitted around the outside of the hull. Inside, stateroom furniture and decoration were removed and replaced with triple-tiered (fixed) wooden bunks, which were later replaced by "standee" (fold-up) bunks.
A total of 6 miles (10 km) of carpet, 220 cases of china, crystal and silver services, tapestries, and paintings were removed and stored in warehouses for the duration of the war. The woodwork in the staterooms, the cabin-class dining room, and other public areas were covered with leather. Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth were the largest and fastest troopships involved in the war, often carrying as many as 15,000 men in a single voyage, and often travelling out of convoy and without escort. Indeed, only a handful of ships, such as the Polish destroyer ORP Blyskawica, could even provide an escort. The Queens high speed and zigzag courses made it virtually impossible for U-boats to catch them, although one attempted to attack the ship. On 25 May 1944, U-853 spotted Queen Mary and submerged to attack, but the ship outran the U-boat before it could do so. Because of their importance to the war effort, Adolf Hitler offered a bounty of 1 million Reichsmarks and Oak Leaves to the Knight's Cross, Germany's highest military honor, to any U-boat captain that sank either ship.
Queen Mary Collision with HMS Curacoa
The Queen Mary was not so lucky throughout the war. On 2 October 1942, she accidentally sank one of her escort ships, slicing through the light cruiser HMS Curacoa off the Irish coast with a loss of 338 lives. Queen Mary was carrying thousands of Americans of the 29th Infantry Division to join the Allied forces in Europe. Due to the risk of U-boat attacks, Queen Mary was under orders not to stop under any circumstances and steamed onward with a fractured stem. Some sources claim that hours later, the convoy's lead escort, consisting of Bramham and one other ship, returned to rescue 99 survivors of Curacoa's crew of 437, including her captain John W. Boutwood. This claim is contradicted by the liner's then Staff Captain Harry Grattidge, who recorded that Queen Mary's Captain, Gordon Illingsworth, immediately ordered the accompanying destroyers to look for survivors within moments of Curacoa's sinking.
Later that year, from 8–14 December 1942, Queen Mary carried 10,389 soldiers and 950 crew (total 11,339). During this trip, on 11 December, while 700 miles (1,100 km) from
Queen Mary almost capsized
during a gale, she was suddenly broadsided on her starboard side by a rogue wave that might have reached a height of 28 metres (92 ft). An account of this crossing can be found in Carter's book. As quoted in the book, Carter's father, Dr. Norval Carter, part of the 110th Station Hospital on board at the time, wrote in a letter that at one point Queen Mary "damned near capsized... One moment the top deck was at its usual height and then, swoom! Down, over, and forward she would pitch." It was calculated later that the ship rolled 52 degrees, and would have capsized had she rolled another three degrees.
From 25 to 30 July 1943, Queen Mary carried 15,740 soldiers and 943 crew (total 16,683), a standing record for the most passengers ever transported on one vessel. This was only possible in summer as passengers had to sleep on deck.
During the war, Queen Mary carried British Prime Minister Winston Churchill across the Atlantic three times for meetings with fellow Allied forces officials. He was listed on the passenger manifests as "Colonel Warden". On one crossing in 1943, Churchill and his staff planned the
and he signed the D-Day Declaration aboard. Churchill later stated that the Queens, "challenged the fury of Hitlerism in the battle of the Atlantic. Without their aid, the day of final victory must unquestionably have been postponed.” By the war's end, Queen Mary had carried over 800,000 troops and traveled over 600,000 miles across the world's oceans.
Post World War II[]
After delivering war brides to Canada, Queen Mary made her fastest ever crossing, returning in early 1946 to Southampton in only three days, 22 hours and 42 minutes at an average speed of 31.9 knots. From September 1946 to July 1947, Queen Mary was refitted for passenger service, adding air conditioning and upgrading her berth configuration to 711 first class (formerly called cabin class), 707 cabin class (formerly tourist class) and 577 tourist class (formerly third class) passengers. Following their refit, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth dominated the transatlantic passenger trade as Cunard White Star's two-ship weekly express service through the latter half of the 1940s and well into the 1950s. They proved highly profitable for Cunard (as the company was renamed on 31 December 1949).
On 1 January 1949, Queen Mary ran aground off Cherbourg, France. She was refloated the next day and returned to service.
In 1952, Queen Mary lost the Blue Riband she held for 14 years to the SS United States during her maiden voyage.
In 1958, the first commercial transatlantic flights by jet began a completely new era of competition for the Cunard Queens. With a London–New York travel time of just 7–8 hours now possible with the new aircraft, demand for a sea crossing of the ocean fell away markedly. On some voyages, winters especially, Queen Mary sailed into harbour with more crew than passengers, though both she and Queen Elizabeth still averaged over 1,000 passengers per crossing into the middle 1960s. By 1965, the entire Cunard fleet was operating at a loss.
Hoping to continue financing Queen Elizabeth 2 which was under construction at Brown's shipyard, Cunard mortgaged the majority of the fleet. Due to a combination of age, lack of public interest, inefficiency in a new market and the damaging after-effects of the national seamen's strike, Cunard announced that both Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth would be retired from service and sold off. Many offers were submitted, and the bid of $3.45m/£1.2m from Long Beach, California surpassed the Japanese scrap merchants. Queen Mary was featured in the film Assault on a Queen (1966) starring Frank Sinatra. That August, Queen Mary made her fastest eastbound passage since August 1938, crossing in 4 days, 10 hours and 6 minutes at an average speed of 29.46 knots (54.56 km/h).
Queen Mary was retired from service in 1967. On 27 September, she completed her 1,001st and last crossing of the North Atlantic having carried 2,112,000 passengers over 3,792,227 miles (6,102,998 km). Under the command of Captain John Treasure Jones, who had been her captain since 1965, she sailed from Southampton for the last time on 31 October with 1,093 passengers and 806 crew. After a voyage around Cape Horn, she arrived in Long Beach on 9 December. Queen Elizabeth was withdrawn in 1968 and Queen Elizabeth 2 took over the transatlantic route in 1969.
Retirement and Reconstruction as a Hotel[]
Queen Mary, bought by Long Beach in 1967, was converted from a seafaring vessel to a floating hotel. The plan included clearing almost every area of the ship below "C" deck (called "R" deck after 1950, to lessen passenger confusion, as the restaurants were located on "R" deck) to make way for Jacques Cousteau's new Living Sea Museum. This increased museum space to 400,000 square feet (37,000 m2).
It required the removal of all the boiler rooms, the forward engine room, both turbo generator rooms, the ship stabilisers and the water softening plant. The ship's empty fuel tanks were filled with local mud to keep the ship's centre of gravity and draft at the correct levels, as these critical factors had been affected by the removal of the various components and structure. Only the aft engine room and "shaft alley", at the stern of the ship, was spared. The remaining space was used for storage or office space.
One problem that arose during the conversion was a dispute between land-based and maritime unions over conversion jobs. The United States Coast Guard had the final say. Queen Mary was deemed a building, since most of her propellers had been removed and her machinery gutted. The ship was also repainted with its red water level paint at a slightly higher level than during her service years. During the conversion, the funnels were removed, as this area was needed to lift out the scrap materials from the engine and boiler rooms. Workers found that the funnels were significantly degraded and they were replaced with replicas.With all of the lower decks nearly gutted from R deck and down, Diners Club, the initial lessee of the ship, converted the remainder of the vessel into a hotel. In 1969, it was reported that the hotel would be operated by Sky Chefs, the catering and hospitality division of American Airlines. Diners Club Queen Mary dissolved and vacated the ship in 1970 after their parent company, Diners Club International, was sold, and a change in corporate direction was mandated during the conversion process. Specialty Restaurants, a Los Angeles-based company that focused on theme-based restaurants, took over as master lessee the following year.
This second plan was based on converting most of her first- and second-class cabins on A and B decks into hotel rooms, and converting the main lounges and dining rooms into banquet spaces. On Promenade Deck, the starboard promenade was enclosed to feature an upscale restaurant and café named Lord Nelson's and Lady Hamilton's; it was themed in the fashion of early-19th century sailing ships. The famed and elegant Observation Bar was redecorated as a western-themed bar. The smaller first-class public rooms, such as the Drawing Room, Library, Lecture Room and the Music Studio, was stripped of most of their fittings and converted to commercial use. This markedly expanded retail space on the ship. Two more shopping malls were built on the Sun Deck in separate spaces previously used for first-class cabins and engineers' quarters.
A post-war feature of the ship, the first-class cinema, was removed for kitchen space for the new Promenade Deck dining venues. The first-class lounge and smoking room were reconfigured and converted into banquet space. The second-class smoking room was subdivided into a wedding chapel and office space. On the Sun Deck, the elegant Verandah Grill was gutted and converted into a fast-food eatery, while a new upscale dining venue was created directly above it on Sports Deck, in space once used for crew quarters. The second-class lounges were expanded to the sides of the ship and used for banqueting. On R deck, the first-class dining room was reconfigured and subdivided into two banquet venues, the Royal Salon and the Windsor Room. The second-class dining room was subdivided into kitchen storage and a crew mess hall, while the third-class dining room was initially used as storage and crew space.
Also on R deck, the first-class Victorian Turkish bath complex, the 1930s equivalent to a spa, was removed. The second-class pool was removed and its space initially used for office space, while the first-class swimming pool was open for viewing by hotel guests and visitors. Because of modern safety codes and the compromised structural soundness of the area directly below, the swimming pool could not be used for swimming after the conversion, although it was filled with water until the late 1980s. Today the pool can only be seen on guided tours and from the first class entrance on R deck. No second-class, third-class or crew cabins remain intact aboard the ship today.
Queen Mary is permanently moored as a tourist attraction, hotel, museum and event facility in Long Beach.
Appearances as the Titanic[]
Queen Mary was the perfect ship for making Titanic films. Allthough she's notably an entirely different ship, she was still the only vessel available that could at least come close. So it was used in several Titanic movies to portray her in a way.
- S.O.S. Titanic
- Voyagers -Voyagers of the Titanic-
- No Greater Love
- Titanic II
- Titanic 666