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CRUISES: The QE2: the Queen of Hearts

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

You had to have been a bit of a romantic in the early 1980s to cross the Atlantic by sea especially as those days of instant gratification of air were becoming de rigueur. A flying aluminum cigar could get you there so much quicker, but the airplane was so impersonal. Personality is something you get plenty of when you traveled on the Queen Elizabeth 2, the last of a breed to offer trans-Atlantic passage. It was a vessel full of anachronisms -- like a staff who cared. It was a ship that truly was the Queen of Hearts.

For example, John Bainbridge, the executive chef, started with Cunard in 1938 at the age of 15 and had sailed on them all: Aquitania, Mauritania, the first Queen Elizabeth and now the QE2. A man who was recognized immediately as he walked into any London club or New York restaurant while on leave, his greatest contentment, nevertheless, was getting back to the ship he loved.

Then he stood on the dock, his only thought being to check the freshness of the produce coming on board. He was needed. The mounds of food required for a trans-Atlantic round trip defied the imagination: 3,000 pounds cheese, 3,000 quarts cream, 3,000 gallons fruit juice, 800 pounds crabs, 800 dozen jars marmalade, 80,000 eggs, 25,000 pounds beef, 7,000 pounds lamb, 5,000 pounds chicken, 4,000 pounds pork, 3,000 pounds veal, 150 pounds caviar and 100 pounds Foie Gras.

Yet, surprisingly for a chef who had had every kind of compliment paid his cooking by glamorous movie stars, famous public figures and world business people, the QE2 memory this uncomplicated man cherished the most was when he stooped at the quayside to help a porter manipulate a patient's wheelchair. The passenger looked up and said, "Oh chef, I knew you'd be here. You're always around to help."

Another old timer who has always been around was Don Butterworth, now chief radio officer. He had seen the whole spectrum of radio from the old spark transmitters with a range of 250 miles to the worldwide scan of the satellite communications the QE2 helped pioneer. Butterworth began his career in the Red Sea on a cargo ship, the S.S. Mangalore. That year, 1939, was a momentous one for any British sailor. The first message this 19-year-old operator received left him speechless: "Britain and Germany are now at war."

An equally chilling, more recent transmission Butterworth received came in five letter-coded blocks from Cunard. Screaming out from the piece of paper was the four letter word: BOMB. Cunard had not foreseen the need to have a code word for that eventuality. The bomb scare of 1974, fortunately a hoax, caused unbelievable activity aboard the ship because safety of life at sea was always the prime consideration of any shipping line.

The sophisticated satellite navigation and computerized communication equipment on board the QE2 in the 1980s, however, had not made man obsolete. "A Mark I Eyeball remains a prime navigational instrument at sea," said Stuart A. Trundle, the second officer of the QE2. "We still use binoculars, although we no longer stand on the bridge with a sextant in one hand and the wheel in the other."

QE2's trivia expert

Trundle, a young, earnest man then aged 27, ate, slept and breathed Cunard. No matter how trivial any question might be, he would consider the matter and the answer would be found. The top speed in mph of the QE2? 35.1 at 168 revs. How far will she go on a gallon of fuel? Out came his pocket calculator: 23.86 feet. How much fuel is burned an hour? 23.5 metric tons. Although those figures seemed high, they represented a tremendous technological advance way back in 1969 when the fuel-efficient 67,000-ton QE2 was built by the John Brown shipyard in Scotland, the 49th ship it had created for Cunard.

A ship has always had to carry a lot of fuel to be independent of the wind. The 1,154 ton R.M.S. Britannia, for example, with which Samuel Cunard started his trans-Atlantic crossings in 1840, used 38 tons of coal a day requiring 640 tons of bunker space leaving only 250 tons for cargo. So excited were the citizens of Boston at the success of this first regularly scheduled Atlantic crossing Cunard received 1,800 personal dinner invitations his first week in America. In those days any successful crossing from the Old Country was grounds for celebration. After all, the unforgiving weather in the North Atlantic had been called a "seasonal catalog from hell."

Accent on Comfort

Once the Atlantic could be conquered regularly and safely, the accent changed to comfort. In 1936 when the 81,273-ton Queen Mary was launched it was greater than the combined Cunard fleet tonnage of 36 ships of 60 years earlier. Its rudder alone weighed 140 tons. Style was everything. The Queen Mary even offered a gold dinner service later withdrawn when the knives blackened upon cutting vegetables.

Nations vied with each other to produce luxury liners that would be "the supreme expression of the genius of man." However, speed became the ultimate element by which success was judged. As the 1930s ended the Queen Mary established a record speed of 31.70 knots to win the mythical Blue Riband. Speed was the factor that filled the ships with passengers and drove naval architects to a frenzy.

William Francis Gibbs, the famous American ship designer, was determined to seek for his country the award the S. S. Baltic had briefly won in 1852. His new ship, the United States, was built with a ruthless reduction in weight. Nothing would be created in wood if aluminum could be used. It was said that one passenger was even refused because he had a wooden leg. Weighing only 53,329 tons she established a speed of 35.39 knots eastbound and won the Blue Riband for America in 1958. Yet, one year later her bookings were off by 25 percent and by 1969 she retired from service after a life span of only 17 years.

Trundle declared passengers should cross the Atlantic in the Queen because, first, it's a vacation in itself – a new experience. Second, you share it with an interesting group and make friendships you’d never develop in the brief hours of air travel. Third, it is an alternative: You don't waste two days flying but actually enjoy five days of travel (we write that, tongue in cheek, because the North Atlantic was rough that week in the fall of 1980 and one of us was rather sick for much of the crossing). But in contrast to the airplane, it does offer a genuine alternative; you can sleep. Fourth, it's safe. Fifth, it offers marvelous services for business people. The Queen is the busiest commercial radio station afloat. There was perhaps a sixth reason why an American should in those days cross the Atlantic in a liner like the QE2. This was the way many of our immigrant ancestors came to a great new country and it was the way our sons and daughters went to war crowded 14,000 to 15,000 in either the Queen Mary or the Queen Elizabeth. It was the spine-tingling way they came home to welcoming plumes of water rising into the sky and sonorous echoing of sirens cleaving the city’s air.

The style of the great trans Atlantic liners is gone now, where cabin attendants almost saluted when they passed passengers. It was era of opulence and comfort on the high seas, an era when time stood still and elegance was queen. 

 
 

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