Cruise and Liner History: The Cunard Line’s RMS QUEEN ELIZABETH 1947
Cruising The Past and Cruise History aboard the RMS QUEEN ELIZABETH: Enjoy 8MM travel footage from the fabulous website shipgeek.com as viewed on YOUTUBE. Deck scenes aboard CUNARD LINE’S RMS QUEEN ELIZABETH in 1947, accompanied by Ray Noble and his Orchestra! Home movies of another era. When “Getting There Was Half The Fun!”
Click on the following to see YOUTUBE video of the RMS QUEEN ELIZABETH:
Here is the trailer of A NIGHT TO REMEMBER – the greatest RMS Titanic film made.
A Night to Remember is a 1958 docudrama film adaptation of Walter Lord’s book of the same name, recounting the final night of the RMS Titanic. It was adapted by Eric Ambler, directed by Roy Ward Baker, and filmed in the United Kingdom. The production team, supervised by producer William MacQuitty, used blueprints of the ship to accurately create the sets, while Titanic fourth officer Joseph Boxhall and ex-Cunard Commodore Harry Grattidge both worked as technical advisors on the film. The film premiered in the United Kingdom on Tuesday July 1, 1958, and in the United States on Tuesday December 16, 1958.
A Night to Remember won the 1959 “Samuel Goldwyn International Award” for the United Kingdom at the Golden Globe Awards.
It is considered the finest film made about the famous ship.
The Titanic was the largest vessel afloat, and was widely believed to be unsinkable. Her passengers included the cream of American and British society. The story of her sinking is told from the point of view of her passengers and crew, principally second officer, Charles Lightoller (Kenneth More).
Once in the open sea on her maiden voyage, the Titanic receives a number of ice warnings from nearby steamers. Captain Edward J. Smith (Laurence Naismith) is unconcerned and the ship continues on at high speed.
Late on April 14, 1912, a lookout spots an iceberg directly in front of the ship. The ship turns hard to port, but the Titanic collides with the iceberg on its starboard side, opening the first five compartments to the sea, below the waterline. Thomas Andrews (Michael Goodliffe), the ship’s builder, inspects the damage and finds that the ship will soon sink, a bad situation made horrific by the fact the ship does not have sufficient lifeboat capacity for everyone on board.
A distress signal is immediately sent out, and efforts begin to signal a ship (depicted to be the SS Californian) that is seen on the horizon, a mere 10 miles away. But the ship’s radio operator is off duty and he does not hear the distress signal. Fortunately, the radio operator on the Carpathia receives the distress call, understands the emergency and immediately alerts Captain Arthur Rostron (Anthony Bushell) who promptly orders the ship to head to the Titanic at maximum speed.
Captain Smith orders his officers Lightoller and Murdoch to start lowering the lifeboats. Many women and children are reluctant to get in a small, cramped lifeboat, and Murdoch and Lightoller must use force to put them in. Many men try to sneak into the lifeboats, but Lightoller will not allow them. Murdoch, working the other side of the ship, is shown as more accommodating to men. As the stewards struggle to hold back women and children holding third-class tickets (“steerage”), most of the women and children from second and first class climb into the lifeboats and launch away from the ship.
For her final visit — her 710th — the venerable liner, which was sold last year for eventual use as a floating hotel in Dubai, was joined by the four-year-old Queen Mary 2, the latest flagship of the Cunard fleet and a throwback to a golden age of ocean travel before jets, when, as the company slogan had it, getting there was half the fun.
With shrill blasts from its three Tyfon whistles and a 39-foot-long red paying-off pennant streaming from the mast — a foot for each year at sea — that traditionally marks the end of a ship’s commission, the Queen Elizabeth 2 (only the actual monarchs warrant Roman numerals, not the ships named for royalty) split the predawn darkness to begin a day of festivities and souvenir photos by the Statue of Liberty and berthed at Pier 90 at West 50th Street on the Hudson River, where the ship tied up around 6 a.m.
As she entered the harbor, she was trailed by the grander Queen Mary 2. The two queens paraded to the Statue of Liberty before the Queen Mary 2 split off to return to its dockage at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.
Menu from Cunard Line’s RMS LUSITANIA – 1914
By afternoon, the Queen Elizabeth 2 was due to depart for a final Atlantic crossing back to her home port — Southampton, England — and then two week-long European and Mediterranean cruises, before sailing in November to a final resting place in Dubai, the oil-rich Gulf sheikdom. National investors there bought the ship for $100 million and intend to install her as a permanently moored hotel and entertainment complex and museum at the Palm Jemeirah, billed as the world’s largest man-made island and beach resort.
“It’s very sad, but it was inevitable,” said Peter Knego, founder of a ship buff’s website, midshipcentury.com, and co-editor of another website, maritimematters.com, who sails the world preserving bits of nautical history.
“After nearly 40 years of service, she’s wearing out,” he said. “Her day has pretty much come and gone.”
But Mr. Knego, who writes out of Moorpark, Calif., said devotees had expected Cunard to keep the Queen Elizabeth 2 in service for several more years, and are distraught over Dubai’s makeover plans, including, he said, the loss of her 7-story-tall funnel. “If you’re not going to preserve her,” he said, “scrapping her would be a more dignified end.”
“The Q.E. 2,” he said. “will be nothing like the Q.E. 2.”
Cunard Line poster – 1930s
A spokeswoman for Cunard, Maria Andriano, said the company could not provide any statistics on trends in transoceanic travel. But an industry organization, the Cruise Lines International Association, said cruising — including ocean crossings — has grown steadily over the years, to nearly 13 million estimated for 2008, compared with 3.7 million worldwide guests in 1990. Since 1980, the group said, the number of passengers has increased by an average of more than 7 percent a year.
Thursday’s ceremony was a reprise of sorts, nine months after the first encounter of three queens — the Elizabeth and Mary ships plus the latest Cunard liner, the Queen Victoria, launched last year — in New York harbor last January. The Cunard fleet, the only line still providing regular transatlantic passenger service, is to be joined by a new Queen Elizabeth in 2010.
On the final six-day crossing of the Queen Elizabeth 2, Cunard said, the ship is sailing full, with 1,877 passengers paying fares ranging from $25,445 for a duplex grand suite with verandah, to $2,992 for a plain inside single room. They consume daily — or commonly did, according to company figures, before the financial crisis hit — more than 6 pounds of caviar, 116 pounds of lobster, 200 bottles of champagne and 41 boxes of cigars.
The farewell to New York, to be marked by fireworks salutes and toasts by dignitaries, comes two weeks shy of 40 years after the ship’s predecessor, the Royal Mail Ship Queen Elizabeth, departed New York for the last time, bound for what would turn out to be an ignominious fate: It was initially sold for use as a hotel and resort attraction in Port Everglades, Fla., along the lines of the decommissioned Queen Mary in Long Beach, Calif., but the project foundered financially and the ship was resold to a Hong Kong tycoon, C.Y. Tung, who planned to use it as a floating university.
Fire destroyed the first QUEEN ELIZABETH in 1972 – Seen burning in Hong Kong…
But during conversion work, the ship caught fire, perhaps from arson; it capsized in Hong Kong harbor and was scrapped in 1972.
Her successor, the Queen Elizabeth 2, displacing more than 70,000 tons and stretching 963 feet in length, was built in the late 1960’s in Clydebank, Scotland, at a cost of almost $70 million (about $460 million in today’s money), and over the years it underwent more than $675 million in retrofits and refurbishments.
She was named for Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the queen mother; she was the wife of George VI, who took the British throne in 1936 on the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, in 1936, and ruled until his death in 1952; their daughter succeeded him as Queen Elizabeth II.
The QE2 collected superlatives. It is the longest serving ship in Cunard’s nearly 170-year history, now powered by a diesel propulsion system that turns out 130,000 horsepower, using 80 tons of fuel an hour, as much as would fill six swimming pools. (The ship itself has two pools, one indoor and one outdoor.) It has a tennis court, a golf driving range, a 13-car garage, a Harrods department store, a theater and a synagogue. Its crew of 1,016 includes 107 cooks, 4 fitness instructors, a disk jockey and 10 “gentlemen hosts” to escort unaccompanied women. (There are no female escorts for unaccompanied men.)
Sir Samuel Cunard (1787 – 1865) – the Founder of Cunard Line
The company grew from a packet ship line founded by the Englishman Samuel Cunard in 1839 to carry the Royal Mail to Canada and the United States. In 1912 Cunard’s liner Carpathia rescued survivors of the White Star Line’s Titanic in the North Atlantic. In 1915 the company suffered its own catastrophe when a German U-boat torpedoed the Lusitania off the Irish coast, with the loss of 1,198 lives.
In 1934, Cunard launched the Queen Mary, followed four years later by the Queen Elizabeth, and both ships were pressed into service ferrying troops in World War II. By the 1950s, Cunard had 12 ships in service, carrying one-third of all transatlantic travelers. But by 1959 with the advent of jet travel, more people for the first time crossed by air than by sea.
Four years after the line launched the Queen Elizabeth 2 in 1967, the company was sold to Trafalgar House, and then sold again in 1996 to a Norwegian conglomerate, which resold it two years later to Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise holiday group, with some 80 ships.
In 1992, the Queen Elizabeth 2 ran aground 10 miles west of Martha’s Vineyard, forcing evacuation of 1,815 passengers and most of the 1,000 crew members.
The line was joined, in 2004, by the Queen Mary 2, the largest transatlantic liner ever built, costing close to $800 million. The new ship weighs nearly 151,000 tons, more than twice the weight of the Queen Elizabeth 2, and is capable of carrying almost 2,600 passengers. The $522 million Queen Victoria, at 90,000 tons, was added to the fleet in 2007.
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Pier 90. It is at the foot of West 50th Street, not 53rd Street.
