THE QUEEN MARY
Throughout out stay on the Queen Mary the music from the 40’s was playing. I could listen to Glenn Miller for hours and here his band was playing, along with others of the era.
I stand at your gate and the song that I sing is of moonlight.
I stand and I wait for the touch of your hand in the June night.
The roses are sighing a Moonlight Serenade.
(Every time it rains, it rains) Pennies from heaven
(Don't cha know each cloud contains) Pennies from heaven?
(You'll find you fortune fallin') All over town
(Be sure that your umbrella) Is upside down
The Queen Mary was conceived as the epitome of luxury back in December of 1930 in Scotland but, as the Depression worsened, the Cunard line could not get financing for the ship. One year later, work was stopped and Cunard applied to the British Government for a loan to complete the ship. Faced with the prospect of thousands of shipbuilders laid off, it agreed to the loan and not only was the Queen Mary built but also its sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth. (Sounds like a familiar story.)
Legend has it that Cunard had planned to name the ship the ‘Victoria’ since all of the names of their ships ended in ‘ia’ (like Lusitania) but when company representatives asked the King if they could name the ocean liner after Britain’s ‘greatest queen’, he said that his wife, Queen Mary, would be delighted. Oops. And, Cunard had no other choice than to name it the Queen Mary. All of the china, all of the silver, hundred’s of chairs, all of the curtains and many paintings, etc had to be scrapped because they had the wrong name on them. Finally, the ship was finished and on its maiden voyage, steamed into New York in 1938.
Among facilities available on board Queen Mary, the liner featured 700’ long hallways, two indoor swimming pools (without diving boards since diving in rough seas might be dangerous), beauty salons, libraries, and children's nurseries for all three classes, a music studio and lecture hall, telephone connectivity to anywhere in the world, outdoor paddle tennis courts, and dog kennels. The largest room was the first class dining room which was also the largest room ever built in a ship.
It was three stories in height, held 815 for dinner and had a huge marquetry map of the Atlantic showing the positions of the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth as they were crossing the ocean.
You could even get a full body x-ray in first class until 1950 when they realized that Madame Curie had actually died of radiation poisoning. It was also the first ship to use that new miracle material: plastic although it was called bakelite then. On our tour we saw a door handle that had been unscrewed - obviously someone wanted that piece of bakelite from the Queen Mary really badly. Who carries a Phillips head screwdriver onto the Queen Mary?
Ships horns are called ‘hooters’ in Britain and we got to hear the hooters go off. I’d make a joke here but this is a family blog. The first class had a beautiful shopping area, called Picadilly Circus. Here’s a view of of it from the stairs leading up to this deck where the shops were. There was a fine men’s haberdashery but no women’s clothing stores - imagine selling 2 of the same dress to 2 different passengers!
Third class passengers had only 2 glassed-in cabinets in their lounge from where they could order. The stewards would bring it to them from the ship’s storage. This must have been the origin of ‘window shopping.’
On the Queen Mary’s 143rd passage of the Atlantic, the message came to the captain that Great Britain was at war and he was to take evasive measures. They painted over the windows, removed all outside lighting and began a zig-zag pattern for the rest of the voyage back to England. They repeated this on the return voyage to the US carrying 2320 Americans home where the ship along with the Queen Elizabeth were refitted for war. At one point they almost decided to make it into a carrier but decided instead to retrofit it into a troop carrier. Both the Queen Elizabeth and another ship, the Normandie, also were retrofitted. In the course of the retrofit, the Normandie, now named the Lafayette caught fire in 1942 and sank in New York harbor. The Queen Elizabeth eventually carried more than 750,000 troops during the war.
GREY GHOST
In New York anything of value, all of the china, silver, curtains, mirrors, pictures, brass, etc. were removed from the ship and put into storage. Gunnery was added and a gunnery crew was added to the roster. Because the Queen Mary was so fast, it glided as swiftly and as silently as a ‘graveyard ghost’ through the seas with its human cargo. Hence it received its nickname, The Grey Ghost. All in all, it made 72 crossings and took 800,000 soldiers to the battlefronts in Europe. It has been estimated that without the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth the war would have lasted 2 years longer.
Obviously, the ship was packed to the gills. The Queen Mary set a record for the most people on a single ship: 16,683. And, remember this is a ship designed to carry 2400 passengers and 1100 crew. Of course, you are asking about the lifeboats, and, yep, they had lifeboats for 3500, not 16,683. The room we stayed in was fine for 2 but was retrofitted with 6- layer high bunks to hold 15. Men slept in the drained pools, they slept 4 abreast on the Sun and Promenade decks with only their blanket below them. One old soldier told our guide that you had to watch your blanket like a hawk. Another one told him that the bunks were so tight that to turn over, you had to get up, turn and slide back in a different way.
Men slept in shifts, 8 hours in and 16 hours out while others took their turn sleeping in your bunk. Out on the deck all you could do was to mill around. But, of course, they were carefully choreographed since the ship had to be carefully balanced. Each soldier had his place to sleep, his place to eat and his place to stand and only at certain times, could they move to the next place. There was no water for showers and each man carried only 1/2 gallon for washing.
But the Queen had her speed in her favor. She was the fastest ship and could outrace the submarines which were chasing her. Hitler offered a $250,000 reward for any captain who could sink her but none could catch up to her. She never took the same route twice and always zig-zagged. Neither the Queen Elizabeth nor the Queen Mary every had a convoy or an escort because they were so fast. In the end, the Queen Mary never fired a shot and never a shot touched her. (As another sidelight: the Queen Mary never, in all her voyages, whether in war or in peace, never had to use her lifeboats.)
Winston Churchill traveled on the Queen Mary several times under the name of Colonel Warden. Here on the Queen Mary he wrote his ‘Finest Hour’ speech which I think was one of his finest speeches. He insisted that his lifeboat be fitted with a machine gun so that he could resist to the end.
The ships carried troops to Europe for the war, carried POW’s back to the US and finally, at the end of the war the ships began a new life as a transport for war brides and their children back to the US. Making 13 trips for this purpose (what in the world were our soldiers and sailors doing in England?), the conditions were much better and they were not nearly so crowded.
The Queen Mary was then retrofitted back to being a passenger liner and, with the Queen Elizabeth, dominated the Atlantic passage for the rest of the 40’s and 50’s. However, with the coming of transatlantic flight, both ships saw their passenger lists fall and sometimes, there were more crew than passenger.
Finally Cunard retired the Queen Mary and bids were open for her. The Japanese wanted her for scrap metal but Long Beach wanted her as a major attraction. And that is where she is today. They stripped so much metal off of her though that there was a potential ballast problem so they filled her empty fuel tanks with harbor mud to keep her steady.
We thoroughly enjoyed our time on the Queen Mary. Just being on the ship amidst all that splendor and history was spectacular and staying overnight made it even more special.
One last thing, we were intrigued by the sink in our room. It was so low that I had to bend over to wash my hands. We also noticed this railing on the deck. The original railing is the lower railing. Because people have gotten taller over the last 50 years, they had to add another taller railing. That’s why the sink is about 10” too low also, it was built for people in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
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