Articles
It’s 80 years since the maiden voyage of Cunard’s flagship liner, the Queen Mary, which held the transatlantic speed record from the 1930s to the 1950s. The IMechE library team has been cataloguing printed manuscripts ranging from the 19th to the 21st century, and one of these is a delightful publication from Cunard-White Star. It celebrates the launch of 534, as it was originally known, records the renaming of this liner as RMS Queen Mary, and describes the ship’s features.
Cunard signed the contract for the building of the Queen Mary on 1 December 1930, and construction began at the John Brown shipyard in Clydebank, Greater Glasgow. Because of the Great Depression, Cunard then had to suspend construction. However, the government offered the company loans to finish Queen Mary on the condition that it merged with former rival company White Star, to form Cunard-White Star.
This new company was better equipped to compete with rivals such as Norddeutcher Lloyd, Hamburg-Amerika, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique and other shipbuilders from France, Germany, America and Italy for supremacy over the Atlantic.
The Queen Mary was launched on 26 September 1934, but its maiden voyage, from Southampton to New York, began on 27 May 1936. The 81,000-ton liner could reach a top speed of more than 30 knots and during this voyage it sailed mostly at high speeds, reaching New York on 1 June. The ship’s arrival was celebrated with live music, and it was received by admiring crowds who had paid a dollar to charity to see the spectacle. From then on until its retirement in 1967, the liner’s main voyages were across the North Atlantic.
The Queen Mary was the flagship of the Cunard line from 1936 to 1946, and in 1936 it received the Blue Riband – an award given to passenger liners crossing the Atlantic – for its high speeds. In 1937 the Blue Riband was presented to the ship’s main French rival, the SS Normandie owned by Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, with its powerful steam turbo-electric propulsion. However, despite the Normandie’s fast speeds, apparently passengers did not favour its contemporary and lavish interiors, finding it uncomfortable. The following year, the Queen Mary reclaimed the Blue Riband and held it until 1952, when it was beaten by SS United States.
At 1,018ft (310.3m) long and 135ft high, the Queen Mary was certainly a maritime achievement of the time. The author of the Cunard manuscript, E P Leigh-Bennett, demonstrates the scale of the ship by comparing it to other structures. One of Queen Mary’s promenade decks would be more than twice the length of the façade of Buckingham Palace, and “if you could stand her up on one end alongside the Eiffel Tower, it would top that structure by 18ft” – this may have been so before the broadcasting aerial was added to the Eiffel Tower in 1957. The author says that 10 million rivets were installed and “if formed a chain would reach from London to Newcastle – 270 miles, and weigh 4,000 tons” and how one “can see where they will cut the 2,000 portholes and windows which will contain an area of glass exceeding 2,500 sq ft”.
Other impressive features included 27 boilers, 2,600ft of piping, seven turbo-generator sets – developing 10,000kW – and, for the propeller, a quadruple screw arrangement of Parson’s single reduction geared turbines with 257,000 turbine blades. The power transmitted by the ship’s gearing exceeded that of any other merchant vessel.
Further reading on shipbuilding in the 1930s is available in the IMechE library. For a list of references, email: library@imeche.org.