High Tea on the Cunard Queens E-Book

Paul Curtis

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 219

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This amusing insight into Cunard's legendary liners begins more than fifty years ago when Paul Curtis joined the original Queen Mary as entertainments officer. Over a Cunard high tea in the Queens Room, Paul recounts the stories of these iconic ships. Then, over a drink in the Red Lion, he shares the tales of the antics of both passengers and crews. The facts are delivered in vivid detail – some of them things you should know and an occasional peep at things you shouldn't. Simply turning these pages releases a sniff of the sea and a whiff of champagne. Paul has worked, travelled upon or photographed every Cunard Queen ever built. He has an offbeat sense of humour and a keen appetite for the ridiculous. A life at sea can do that to you.

Leseprobe

Front cover: Cunard ‘Getting there is half the fun’ poster/© Alamy/Shawshots

Back cover: Cunard ‘1930s’ and ‘Berengaria’ postcards/© Cunard

First published 2019

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Paul Curtis, 2019

The right of Paul Curtis to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9274 9

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed in Europe

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Ships that pass in the night,

and speak each other in passing,

only a signal shown,

and a distant voice in the darkness;

So on the ocean of life,

we pass and speak one another,

only a look and a voice,

then darkness again and a silence.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

CONTENTS

The Cunard Queens

Ye Olde Original Queen Mary

Foreword by Captain Aseem A. Hashmi MNM Master, Queen Elizabeth

1     Ships That Pass in the Night

2     What’s in a Name?

3     Building Problems

4     The Queens at War

5     The Transatlantic Years

6     On the Beach

7     QE2 Turns the Tide

8     Never Say Never: QM2 is Born

9     Raising Three New Queens

10   Pieces of Eight

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

About the Author

THE CUNARD QUEENS

Berengaria, 1912–1938 (named after a British Queen).

Queen Mary, 1936–1967 (Paul Curtis).

Queen Elizabeth, 1940–1968 (Paul Curtis).

Queen Elizabeth 2, 1969–2008. (Murgatroyd49, CC.SA 4.0 via WikimediaCommons).

Queen Mary 2, 2004. (Paul Curtis).

Queen Victoria (© E. Levavasseur/Adobe Stock).

Queen Elizabeth (Natallia Yaumenenka, © eAlisa/Adobe Stock).

The New Queen, 2022 (Cunard).

YE OLDE ORIGINAL QUEEN MARY

Mary Mary, quite contrary

How does your garden grow

With silver bells and cockleshells

And pretty maids all in a row.

In playgrounds across England and around the world, young schoolchildren have innocently recited this nursery rhyme for generations. While not wishing to spoil harmless enjoyment, let’s note that it is claimed the Mary alluded to here is Mary Tudor – or none other than (roll of drums) ‘Bloody Mary’.

The daughter of King Henry VIII, Mary, unlike her dad, was a staunch Catholic. It is thought the poem was a heavily veiled protest by her Protestant subjects; disguised, as even the slightest hint of criticism could get your head chopped off.

In this interpretation, the garden alludes to the increasing size of graveyards to accommodate those who dared to adhere to the Protestant faith. The ‘silver bells’ and ‘cockleshells’ were colloquialisms for instruments of torture. The silver bells were thumbscrews, the cockleshells were instruments attached to the male genitals.

The ‘maids’ were the original guillotines – a technological breakthrough of the day for beheading. It was also called the maiden as, by getting rid of the menfolk, it created quite a few. Until the maiden, beheading a victim could be a tad troublesome. The victim, often not enamoured with the deal, might have to be chased by the axeman around the scaffold. It could take up to eleven blows to completely sever the head. Much better with one swift, clean chop. See what technology can do for you?

Maybe it would have been better for all if Mary had stuck with her little lamb.

FOREWORD

There have been many books written about the Cunard Line over the years: very well-written accounts documenting the company’s long and illustrious history, retracing the iconic red-funnelled liners that have criss-crossed the world’s oceans for the past 178 years.

High Tea on the Cunard Queens is not just another elegantly bound maritime history book, nor a nice ornament for the coffee table; it’s written with a meaningful intent. This is a first-hand version of how things were in the golden age of ocean travel on the Queens, a bygone era that can be relived in this book by those who missed it the first time around. From turning the first page you will have ‘boarded’ a Cunard Queen. You’ll hear the ship’s foghorn booming, the commotion on the crew decks below, the champagne corks popping, and the afternoon’s white-gloved tea-pouring. The author, a former Ship’s Entertainment Officer and now seasoned passenger, will give you the unedited insider’s story of working and travelling on the greatest liners that have graced the North Atlantic and their modern, very different, successors today.

It tells the story of the shaky start in life for both Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, their service to King and Country, their rise post-war to reign over the North Atlantic and their demise with the onset of the jet age. The story continues with the birth of the legendary QE2, the trials and tribulations that accompanied her birth to the current Queens that proudly reign on the high seas and one of which I have the privilege of commanding. High Tea on the Cunard Queens will appeal to both seasoned passengers and to those who have never even stepped on board a ship (yet) as well as to members of the crew past and present, as they know what’s written is ‘spot on’.

I congratulate Paul Curtis on High Tea on the Cunard Queens, which is written with an unapologetic but essential sense of humour, topped off with lots of nautical anecdotes that you perhaps always wondered about but will now get to finally uncover.

Now all that remains for you to do is to sit back, relax and enjoy the voyage ahead – bon voyage!

Captain Aseem A. Hashmi MNMMaster, Queen Elizabeth

Captain Aseem Hashmi. (Cunard)

GRACIOUS, IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO. I am a young man, dressed in my work clothes – dinner jacket and black tie – leaning my weight against the heavy door opening onto the boat deck. It is the wee small hours of the morning on 25 September 1967. Blasts of rain hit my face, but I see the white-capped waves continually rising and falling into darkness. It is what my father used to call weather cold enough to make brass monkeys testicularly challenged. We are in the middle of the North Atlantic and I’m out here in the cold, when I should be snug in bed. But this is a major milestone in passenger shipping history and I don’t want to miss it.

I am on the world’s greatest and largest liner: Queen Mary. Soon we will cross paths with the other ship that claims to be the world’s greatest and largest liner: Queen Elizabeth. Mary’s crafty crew quibble over the measurements used and seek to bend statistics to their advantage. Okay, Elizabeth is a teensy bit bigger. I will get over it.

Since 1946, on their respective voyages between England and the United States, these sisters have crossed midway nearly a thousand times. This was not always within sight, but as this is a very special but sad occasion, tonight they most definitely will be. The unthinkable has happened: both ships are now on the auctioneer’s block and tonight’s crossing will be for the last time.

There are only a few people on deck: three or four small groups, seeking ineffective shelter under the lifeboats, huddling along the rail, gazing steadfastly out to sea like a row of phlegmatic penguins. The number of passengers is at half strength and most of them are just unaware, or not particularly interested in the significance of this moment.

Of course, our thousand crew all know. It has been topping the ship’s rumour charts for months. But at this hour, many are on duty, while others are just too sad and disillusioned to be out here and bear witness to the end of their lives at sea. After all, it’s the middle of the night and all we will do is catch a mere glimpse of the other ship’s lights, swishing past at a combined speed of 60mph.

Fortunately, our wait is short. Both ships are on schedule. As we cross, each momentarily flashes her deck lights. At 1,000ft apart, it is more eerie than spectacular. On our bridge, Captain John Treasure-Jones doffs his cap to Commodore Geoffrey Marr on the bridge of Queen Elizabeth. The salute is returned, but in the darkness goes unseen. The ships sound rumbling baritone blasts on their whistles saying goodbye. Tonight, that deep throaty roar, which can be felt on board and carries for 10 miles, sounds muted and forlorn.

Within minutes, she is gone. Just like the movies, Elizabeth’s lights fade to black. The End. Roll the credits: no more grand liners, no more ships this big, no more magic and romance in crossing from the Old World to the New. Death by airlines.

Instead of four formal evening dinners, followed by dancing and entertainment, travellers will forever more be crammed and cocooned into narrow aluminium tubes to be hurled through the sky like javelins.

Sadly, we straggle below for glasses of consolation at the bar. We mutter regrets at the end or our way of life and proclaim that the glory days of passenger shipping have just hit the dustbin of history. Or so we thought.

There was great pride in being a member of a Queen’s company. These were no idle cruise ships aimlessly trolling around a few islands. They were magnificent liners, strong ships with a purpose, a schedule to keep in all weathers, and we had a job to do, to get people safely across the vast North Atlantic dividing the Old World from the New.

The whole world held both Queens in so much awe and respect that working on them was the holy grail of going to sea. They were the biggest and fastest. They were steeped in history, played vital roles easing Britain’s Great Depression and served their county with honour during the Second World War.

In peacetime, everyone from royalty, world leaders, the rich and the famous to the migrants and the poor took passage on their life-changing journeys. For more than three decades the two ships reliably criss-crossed the North Atlantic in all weathers and with religious punctuality. No other shipping line could match us.

But for the last few months, an ominous dark cloud had dampened the crew’s normal cheer. We saw our passenger numbers rapidly declining. With a groan, we had to concede that on some crossings we had more crew than passengers. There might have been more time for crew partying, but stewards saw their tips vaporising into thin air.

From 1954 to 1965, the number of people taking airline passage from Europe to the USA rose from 600,000 to 4 million. In the same period, the number of passengers on the two Queens dropped from 1 million to 650,000. Our guest list was falling faster than the Mexican peso.

  LOOKING FOR A BIT OF COMMON  

To fight back, Cunard tried to modernise itself. My own job, for instance, was as an entertainments officer. Previously, this duty had been done by uniformed pursers, sourced from the best homes and schools and thus able to seamlessly blend in with the lords, ladies and high society on the passenger list. I, on the other hand, had only ever seen pictures of such people in the doctor’s waiting-room copies of Tatler magazine. But that same high society was the first to desert us and convert to the novelty of flying.

Seeking new markets, Cunard began to pitch to younger and more ordinary folk. With this in mind, I am sure that my interviewing panel was looking for a new entertainments officer: someone a bit common; someone not from their customary elitist gene pool. They wanted an ordinary bloke, someone who had been to neither Oxford nor Cambridge, someone the unwashed hoi polloi could relate to. They hired me.

I thought the offer to join was great. My seaman’s book already showed five years on passenger ships, but these had been either Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish or Dutch. Queen Mary was my first British ship. At last, the coveted Blue Ensign. Rule Britannia and all that. And what a ship! The crème de la crème of the North Atlantic liners. Only 23 and I had arrived. Hallelujah!

  RUMOURS, RUMOURS  

But no sooner had I signed on than my joy was scuppered by whispers about my new ship’s future. Aboard ship, wild crew rumours are the daily bread, and heavily buttering that bread was a pastime at which the British crew of Queen Mary excelled. The more absurd and shocking, the better. The rumours flew faster than Usain Bolt closing an endorsement deal. Twitter looks snail-paced.

Fake news? Of course, at sea with no radio, television or newspapers, we had to make our own. But the real trouble with the constant rumours was that some of them proved true. Damn.

Where do ship rumours start? In my time, it could never be tracked down as some clever chappies can do today with that internet gizmo. Although we had no internet, we did have ship’s telephone switchboard operators. They knew everything.

The Mary’s telephone switchboard.

In these days before direct dialling, phone connections were made by young ladies armed with combination microphone headsets and flying arms that moved in a blur, quickly stretching out and plucking multiple leads one after another from socket to socket in a tangled zigzag maze of confusion. Overhearing everything, these multitasking-enabled girls were armed with dangerous knowledge.

One of my former friends at sea was a tall, Amazon-built Dutch switchboard girl with an amazing ability to perfectly mimic not only male and female voices, but to do so in dozens of accents. Bad enough, you might think, but she could do it in three different languages as well. With a few drinks inside her, she was great fun at a party. With or without a drink, she was also armed with a quick and wicked sense of humour. You crossed her at your peril.

The smallest slight might result, during the wee small hours of the morning, in her poor victim answering a call from the captain ordering them to report immediately to the bridge. Hurriedly getting dressed with fear and trepidation, the long journey to the bridge would end in finding a confused and cranky captain wondering what the hell was going on.

Whatever the source, the stories ran from the moment you got up to the time you went back to bed. At first, I couldn’t believe the rumours that the Queens were to be sold. The mere idea was ridiculous. They were the pride of Britain. By gad sir, what utter nonsense. Pah.

But as the voyages passed by, the stories intensified. What was to happen to us? This was our home, our way of life. Do we go to another ship? But that would mean demotion as there weren’t any other 80,000-ton liners. And even if we did manage to get a job on one of those piddling little cruise ships, it wouldn’t last long either as they were also getting the chop.

Most likely, if we wanted to stay with a life at sea, we would end up on some rusty old freighter, or even a smelly and highly explosive tanker. As an entertainments officer, few prospects for me there. I would be down in the crew’s quarters, calling bingo for eight hairy stokers who, between them, had not a single word of English. Still, better than wearing a red coat in a landlocked Butlin’s holiday camp.

There were six of us in my department: cruise director, social directress, assistant cruise director, assistant social directress and then one entertainments officer for tourist class and another, me, for cabin class.

Cabin class was akin to the business section on today’s airlines: a sort of no man’s land for the vaguely educated with an expense account. They sit between the no-expense-account backpackers in tourist and the toffs in first who don’t need an expense account.

So, my role of calling bingo and novelty dancing for the middle classes was going down the gurgler. However, my cruise director was reassuring. He patted me on the head, ‘Don’t you fret yourself young man, you will be transferred to the Elizabeth. We still have a need for people like you.’ See, they were still pitching for the common touch.

But, in May 1967, both Queens’ captains were handed special sealed orders to be opened only after the ships sailed from port. Why? Well, the company wanted to make sure the crews did in fact sail. For the official announcement was the sentence of doom: both ships were to be sold.

Again, I was told to hang on. A new Cunarder was under construction, albeit a bit smaller. She was the QE2, but the remorseless rumour mills ground on. It seemed that while still on the building blocks, she was to be put up for sale and that she would never sail under the Cunard flag. Given everything else that went before, you had to believe it.

This was totally disheartening. There was an enormous sense of crew patriotism aboard liners of all nationalities and rivalry was intense. It was a measure of a country’s prestige to build the biggest, fastest and most luxurious ships. The investments were so costly that governments would assist their national shipping companies to make sure their country was as good as or better than any other.

All the nationality crews were proud of their ships. There is a very special relationship between crew members and their ship. It is their home. More than that, it is their mother as well. Sailors can go ashore, have a wild binge and spend every last penny they had. In land jobs you would then be destitute. But for us, the mother ship would take us in, provide a bed, put food on the table and see that we had proper clothes and washed behind our ears until the next payday. Rich again, we would go ashore in the next port keen and eager to repeat the whole process. On these forays, we would often meet crews from other ships and over a drink compare notes. But on the Queens, we always felt superior. Our ships were the biggest and best. We were top dogs, walking taller than the rest. But now it was us that faced the axe.

  THE END IS NIGH  

Of course, other European liners were facing trouble too and their crews were (if you will forgive the expression) in the same boat. On one of my past ships, I became friends with a wine sommelier. Remember them? They used to patrol the restaurant in a red waistcoat with a silver wine-tasting cup hanging from their neck on a heavy gold chain. They usually also had oversized and blistering red noses.

Part of my friend’s duties included looking after a huge tureen of Dorset Blue Vinney cheese displayed at the entrance to the first-class dining room. Expensive stuff.

He was from Sweden and as I came from a town closely bordering Dorset, he thought that gave me all the necessary qualifications to best advise him on the selection of the red wine needed to keep the prized Stilton at just the right crumbly texture. I had not done Stilton Keeping 101 and I really didn’t have a clue. However, as access to copious quantities of good free wine was involved, I hastily agreed. I’m good natured like that.

After dinner and when the dining room had emptied, he would join me at my table with the cheese and a few bottles. We would carefully examine the Stilton for texture and taste and then ritualistically sample a few of the finest wines to determine the best for the task in hand.

With increasingly merry quips, we would create our own blends of Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. Sometimes, not quite sure we had it exactly right, we would find it necessary to check the wine list and open another couple of bottles.

It was a lengthy process. Our duties could take us past midnight before we were at last ready to ceremonially pour in the ounce of wine needed for that night.

I learnt a lot about red wine, principally that I liked it! You could measure its quality by its percentage of alcohol. This was easily determined from the little labels on the bottle proclaiming that was it was from the southern side of a sun-kissed valley, infused by virgins, equal to twenty standard drinks, and, if consumed all at once, with or without Stilton, you would either drop down dead or sleep for a month. Perfect. Cheers.

Occasionally, we would take a bottle back to his cabin to celebrate the success of our labours. It was there that, even in my inebriated state, I noticed, by channelling my inner Sherlock Holmes, that the proudly displayed framed photo of him with his wife and two children on the trip to New York was different from the photo of the family displayed on the way back to Europe. He looked the same, but the wife and two children did not.

He explained he had two separate families: one in Southampton and one in New York, each unaware of the other. What a glutton for punishment. But he was not without a sense of propriety. He would switch the pictures before docking so the right family was on display for their family reunion. After fifteen years of juggling this questionable double life, his ship also fell victim to the airlines and was now destined to be scrapped and made into razor blades.

Now he had a problem. Which family would he live with? He fretted over this decision for several crossings. His normal cheer sank to deep depression and on the last voyage, he found his solution. In the exact middle of the Atlantic, and at midnight, he hoisted himself over the stern rail and fell to a watery grave. He was a really a great friend who helped me hone my chess skills and taught me to appreciate classical music. Much as I mourn his loss, an odd part of me hopes that when he jumped, he took a bottle of red and a slice of Stilton with him.

Midnight was always a common time for people to commit suicide on ships. Many would leave their shoes on the boat deck before they jumped. One passenger on Elizabeth was considerate enough to leave his watch and passport in his shoes: a clear clue for later identification. It makes for faster and easier roll-checking on disembarkation. A crew returning to its home port does not like to be delayed.

Not all drownings are intentional. Leaning over the stern rail at night and looking straight down into the boiling wake can have a hypnotic effect. If you watch it for long, you may become susceptible to the ocean’s beckoning call. I don’t believe in legendary singing sirens, but leaning further out, you may find yourself literally drawn into the swirling water. If you’re on deck at night and on your own, don’t do it. It is not a sailor’s myth.

While not necessarily feeling suicidal, it was obvious to all of us that our lives were to change. With passenger shipping in such big trouble, was it time to ‘swallow the anchor’ and abandon the sea? Shore jobs were beckoning in booming industries in America and sea life seemed to have little future. I decided the Mary’s last transatlantic crossing would be mine as well. I didn’t jump the rail. I just decided it was time to move on.

Looking back, I was young and stupid. Now I am old and stupid. But I shouldn’t have quit when I did. I should have hung on for just a few more years.

For the Queens were not dead; in fact, they were just beginning. Passenger shipping boomed. Cruising took off in spectacular fashion and far from ships disappearing from the seas, they dramatically increased in both size and number. Cunard continued to play an important part in this and today has every justification for laying claim to having the best ships in the world.

Not only was QE2 completed, but she sailed successfully for thirty-nine years under the Cunard flag and gave birth to a succession of further Queens. It was a case of the Queen is dead: long live the Queen.

CUNARD’S ROYAL LINEAGE of ships came about due to a quick-thinking, crafty ploy by none other than the King of England. He wanted to score brownie points with his wife. Even kings must do that. But, in doing so, he broke the long-established tradition of, in its day, one of the most important companies in Britain.

Cunard had always called its ships names ending in the letters ‘ia’. The first ship was the Britannia, which in 1840 first started puffing her two side paddle wheels across the Atlantic at a stately 9 knots. Cunard’s following ship names were borrowed from Roman provinces, so we had Lusitania, Mauritania, Aquitania, Carmania, Coronia … you get the idea. Even a one-eyed, left-footed, hairy-bottomed orangutan can see the name Queen Mary in no way fits with this tradition. Ponder the reason for a moment and then we will come to it.

But first, we must point out, although a trifle pedantically, that Queen Mary was not, as often thought, the first Cunarder ever to be named after a British queen. That honour goes back all the way to a queen who died in 1230. Her name was Queen Berengaria. She was the wife of, wait for it, sound trumpets, roll drums: Richard I.