RMS Queen Elizabeth
 The Queen Elizabeth in Cherbourg 1966
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RMS Queen Elizabeth was a passenger steamer of the Cunard Steamship Company .
Construction and use
The Queen Elizabeth was from 1938 to 1996 with 83,637 GRT the largest passenger ship; in length it was exceeded from 1960 by the France by one and a half meters. Like the similar Queen Mary a few years earlier , she was named after the wife of the reigning King of the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth , the wife of King George VI. , named and also baptized by her.
The Queen Elizabeth was built by the John Brown & Company shipyard in Clydebank , Scotland , and launched on September 27, 1938; however, her maiden voyage did not take place until March 3, 1940, after the outbreak of the Second World War . Her first trip was secret and took her to New York and then on to Australia. During the Second World War and shortly thereafter, the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary were used as troop transports. Due to their high speed, they were not threatened by German submarines and could therefore travel outside of convoys . But she also drove within regular convoys, such as the WS convoys .
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After the war, the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary dominated the Atlantic route for three decades . A maximum of 2283 passengers could travel in 761 cabins . Eventually, the faster airplane replaced the large ocean-going vessels as a means of travel. The Queen Mary was decommissioned in 1967 and the Queen Elizabeth in 1969 and replaced by a single, smaller ship, the Queen Elizabeth 2 (often called the QE2 ).
Later use and end
After its decommissioning, the Queen Elizabeth was sold to the United States and used as a floating hotel and tourist attraction by the new owners in Port Everglades ( Florida ), now called Elizabeth . However, after the ship only brought losses to the operators, it was decommissioned and auctioned in 1970. The new owner was Chao Yung Tung from Hong Kong . The Elizabeth was renamed Seawise University , towed to Hong Kong, and was to be converted into a floating university . The name Seawise University was a play on words with the initials of the owner ("CY's University").
On January 9, 1972, shortly before the renovation work was completed, the former Queen Elizabeth was badly damaged by a fire (presumably arson ) in the port of Hong Kong. The ship overturned due to the large amounts of water that entered the ship in an uncontrolled manner during the extinguishing work. The burned-out wreck lay in port for a few years; In 1975, the former Queen Elizabeth was finally scrapped on site.
Trivia
In the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), the capsized wreck of Queen Elizabeth / Seawise University can be seen. In the film, the British secret service MI6 maintains a secret headquarters with a grotesque interior in the sloping wreck. When the hydrofoil , with which Bond is traveling from Macau to Hong Kong, passes the wreck shortly before docking in Hong Kong harbor, the passengers are informed of this "attraction" via the on-board loudspeakers. The announcement is wrong insofar as the year 1971 is given as the year of the average.
The Cunard Line put a new ship into service in 2010, also named Queen Elizabeth .
literature
- Robert D. Ballard / Ken Marschall : Lost Liners - From the Titanic to Andrea Doria - the glory and the sinking of the great luxury liners . Wilhelm Heyne Verlag GmbH & Co. , Munich 1997, ISBN 3-453-12905-9 (English: Lost Liners: From the Titanic to the Andrea Doria. The ocean floor reveals its greatest lost ships. Translated by Helmut Gerstberger).
