RMS Queen Mary
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The RMS Queen Mary is a former passenger ship that was in service from 1936 to 1967 for the Cunard Line shipping company . It has since been firmly moored in Long Beach, California, and is used as a floating hotel called Hotel The Queen Mary .
The construction
A replacement for the outdated RMS Mauretania was planned as early as 1926 . The construction contract to the shipyard John Brown & Company , Clydebank was not given until 1930. After the keel was laid on January 31, 1931, construction proceeded so quickly that the launch was planned for May 1932. Due to the global economic crisis , however, the Cunard shipping company announced on December 11, 1931 that the work would be suspended for the time being.
When the Cunard Line took over the White Star Line in 1933 , the two shipping companies merged to form Cunard White Star Ltd. The government secured a loan of £ 9.5 million for the new shipping company so that the Queen Mary could be completed and another similar ship (later the RMS Queen Elizabeth ) commissioned. Work resumed in April 1934. In August of the same year, work on ship No. 534 was completed.
Allegedly, according to the Cunard tradition ( RMS Lusitania , RMS Aquitania , RMS Mauretania , RMS Berengaria ), the name Victoria ending in "ia" should have been intended. At the request of King George V to christen the ship after "Britain's greatest queen", the latter is said to have said that his wife, Queen Mary of Teck , would feel very honored to have her name available for this magnificent ship put. The shipping company had no choice but to announce that the ship would be called Queen Mary ; and so on September 26, 1934, Queen Mary was baptized by the monarch of the same name .
A compromise solution is also possible, because the names of the White Star ships always ended with “… ic” ( RMS Titanic , RMS Olympic ), so that after the merger a different, ie not a traditional ending, was chosen.
The ship was completed by May 1936. The interior decoration was kept in the style of Art Deco . During the test drives from Southampton , a speed of 33.0 kn (61.1 km / h) was briefly reached.
Before World War II
The maiden voyage of the Queen Mary began on May 27, 1936 and ran on the classic route from Southampton via Cherbourg to New York . Due to thick fog, the ship could not win the Blue Ribbon on the first voyage. In August 1936, the Queen Mary succeeded in breaking the record set in 1935 for French Normandy on the crossing from Europe to America at an average speed of 30.68 kn (55.8 km / h) and thus removing the Blue Ribbon from it. As a result, intense competition developed between the two ships for the fastest cruising speed: In March 1937, Normandy brought the award back to France, and in August of the same year it broke its own record of 31.2 kn (57.8 km / h) ) once again clearly. In the course of 1937, the Queen Mary underwent several modifications, in particular to suppress vibrations at high speeds. In this context, the original ship propellers were also replaced with newer ones with a more favorable design. In this new configuration, the ocean liner finally got the Blue Ribbon back from Normandy in August 1938 at 31.6 kn (58.5 km / h) and was to keep it until 1952, when the US American United States was an even faster passenger ship went into service.
In her first year of operation, the Queen Mary had already carried almost 57,000 passengers across the North Atlantic.
Two days before the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the ship began its last crossing in civil liner service for the time being. When it reached New York on September 4, it was moored at Pier 40.
War effort
On March 21, 1940, the Queen Mary received the order to sail to Sydney via Cape Town . When the ship reached its destination, it was painted gray and converted for military service. From then on, like the now completed Queen Elizabeth , she transported thousands of soldiers from Australia to Great Britain. Among other things, she drove from June 29, 1940 in the WS 1 convoy between Great Britain and Ceylon.
On October 2, 1942, the Queen Mary was on a transport mission from the USA to Britain, during which approx. 10,000 GIs were on board, of which up to 14 men were accommodated in a cabin that was actually intended for two people. The Queen Mary crossed because of the submarine danger the entire trip over in a constant zigzag course, taking every four minutes, the direction changed by a few degrees. According to orders from the fleet command, it was never allowed to stop.
The technically outdated anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Curacoa , which was built in 1916 and could barely reach the 28 knots that the Queen Mary drove, and therefore could not take the zigzag course and drove a straight course, was used for escort protection in British waters . The smaller six escort ships had been left behind in the coastal waters of Ireland because of the bad weather.
About 80 km off the Northern Irish coast, the Curacoa got in front of the bow of the Queen Mary due to multiple and bilateral navigation and communication errors and was rammed and cut amidships at full speed. The rear part of the escort cruiser sank almost immediately, the front part after a few minutes. 337 people were killed, only 101 survivors could be saved, including the commander. In 1985 the parts of the wreck, which were about 1 km apart, were declared a national memorial.
Due to the fleet order, the Queen Mary could not take part in the rescue operation. The smaller ships left behind by the Curacoa did not arrive at the scene of the accident for about an hour. The Queen Mary was badly damaged at the bow. It had been torn open in such a way that, according to witnesses, "a rowboat would have fit through". The incident was kept secret and was only published shortly before the end of the Second World War, in April 1945. After several lawsuits, the captain of the Queen Mary was given a third of the guilt for this accident, the commander of the Curacoa two thirds.
During a mission in July 1943, the Queen Mary was hit by a 28-meter-high monster wave about 1000 kilometers off the coast of Scotland . The ship entered a strong impact side (according to a later calculation was the angle 52 °) and nearly capsized. The incident inspired the author Paul Gallico to write his 1969 novel Schiffbruch (original title: The Poseidon Adventure ).
When the war in Europe was over in May 1945 , the Queen Mary , like the RMS Queen Elizabeth , transported soldiers back to their homeland. In total, the Queen Mary had transported over 800,000 soldiers.
post war period
On September 27, 1946, the Queen Mary was returned to the Cunard White Star. The ship was completely overhauled for ten months and also received a new air conditioning system.
On July 31, 1947, the ship began its first post-war voyage. Together with her sister ship Queen Elizabeth , the Queen Mary offered a regular Atlantic service, which gave the two Cunard ships an advantage over the competition, since other shipping companies only used single ships of the corresponding size on the North Atlantic. Until about the mid-1950s, the Queen Mary was able to build on the popularity of the pre-war period again, although in July 1952 she lost the Blue Ribbon to the United States , a more modern and far more powerful ship. Due to the massively increasing importance of transatlantic air traffic, which offered considerably shorter travel times and cheaper ticket prices, the large passenger steamers became unprofitable by the mid-1960s at the latest. On September 16, 1967, the Queen Mary ran out on her last crossing and was shut down.
Legends
According to stories, the ship is home to a number of ghosts. This is how a young seaman is supposed to handle in the engine room, who died during a fire drill on board. A ghost girl who once drowned in the pool still wails for her mother. And passengers have seen a " White Lady ", reported moving furniture and screaming screams. In 2004 the TAPS team, well-known in America, visited the ship. It conducted a ghost search, but came to no conclusion.
Hotel The Queen Mary
The Long Beach Community in California bought the ship for around £ 1,230,000 and converted it into a floating hotel. The boiler rooms and the front engine room were completely cleared out, only the rear engine room (for the outer propellers) with its huge turbines remained as a museum. The chimneys, which had been dismantled in order to be able to eviscerate the engine rooms, were also scrapped because they were badly rusted and replaced by identical-looking plastic dummies. The unused empty fuel tanks were filled to guarantee the stability of the Queen Mary. The outside cabins of the ship were converted into hotel rooms, so that the Hotel The Queen Mary has 365 rooms with portholes as windows. Since then, the hotel The Queen Mary in the local harbor has been used successfully as a museum, hotel and conference center.
On April 15, 1993, the RMS Queen Mary was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a structure .
Queen Mary 2
The current Queen Mary 2 ties in with the name of this ship.
The Queen Mary in the film
- In the US films time of love, time to say goodbye (1936) and the attack on the Queen Mary ( Assault On A Queen ) in 1966 played the ship itself.
- In the film The Foreign Correspondent (1940) by Alfred Hitchcock you can see her while the protagonist travels from America to Great Britain.
- Lorelei and Dorothy in Blondes Preferred (1953) cross the Atlantic on Queen Mary.
- In the disaster film The Poseidon Adventure from 1972, the fictitious passenger steamer corresponds Poseidon outside the Queen Mary and is represented by a Queen Mary model. Parts of the recordings were made on the real Queen Mary .
- Some exterior shots of the 1979 film SOS Titanic were shot on the Queen Mary .
- Parts of the film Homo Faber (1991) were shot on the RMS Queen Mary .
- The ship can be seen in the 2001 film Pearl Harbor (although in fact it was no longer in US waters at the time shown (1941), the scene takes place in the port of New York).
- In the film Titanic 2 - The Return , she was seen as a double for the (fictional) Titanic 2 .
- The Queen Mary is also shown in the television series Agatha Christie's Poirot . Hercule Poirot is on her maiden voyage in the second episode of season 3 - The Voyage on the Queen Mary ( The Million Dollar Bond Robbery ).
- On May 26, 2013, Hugh Laurie played live with his band on the Queen Mary . The concert was filmed and later released on DVD and Blu-Ray entitled Hugh Laurie - Live On The Queen Mary .
- In 2015 the episode " Mr. & Mrs. Castle " of the series " Castle " was filmed on the ship
In the series "Airwolf" in the episode "Hostage-taking on the Queen Mary" (3rd season) the action takes place on the Queen Mary.
literature
- Robert D. Ballard , Ken Marschall : Lost Liners - From the Titanic to Andrea Doria - the glory and decline 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).
Web links
- The Queen Mary (English)
- imdb.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Queen Mary - Our Story - Amateur Radio ( Memento from October 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
- ↑ John Maxtone-Graham: The Only Way to Cross. Collier Books, New York 1972, pp. 288-289.
- ↑ Entry in the National Register Information System . National Park Service , accessed June 1, 2016.
Coordinates: 33 ° 45 ′ 10 " N , 118 ° 11 ′ 23" W.