God save the Queens
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
One of my oldest and most sagacious Cam- bridge friends talked to me briefly a day or two ago in King's Parade about the impact of the failure to deliver the 'Queen Elizabeth 2' on time or in reasonably good condition. He was afraid —and I agree with him, although the point had not occurred to me spontaneously—that this breakdown might be the equivalent of the In- vergordon 'mutiny' in 1931 which was the final blow to the very sick pound.
The disaster is especially painful for people like myself who not only grew up on the Clyde but had family connections with John Brown's (and by marriage with the Cunard Line). It is difficult to convey to land-locked citizens what the Clyde shipyards and the whole world open- ing from the Tail of the Bank meant to children like me. That deeply emotional feeling for ships, especially for Clyde-built ships, has never left me. By contrast, I have never been able to understand or develop any real empathy with my friends who devote their time to railways and to aeroplanes. I can well remember a bril- liant speech made on Saint Catherine's Day in Balliol by Christopher Hollis. The guest of honour was an eminent Balliol man, head at this time of the Great Western Railway. The GWR may have deserved all the compliments paid to it by Mr Hollis, but, I thought, 'Why pay any compliments to railways?'
I suppose I could recite all the sacred names of the great shipyards of the Clyde before I could read. In my small home town of Ruther- glen there was a shipyard which had recently gone out of business. It had launched its last ship in 1904 and a model of it was kept in the public library. Ships built in Rutherglen had to get over the Weir into the Broomielaw, and no ship was ever built at Rutherglen again although we all hoped that one would be built. But this was nothing to the pleasure of trips down the river, while I murmured the sacred names of Linthouse Fairfield, Yarrow's (a newcomer from London), culminating in the most famous of all, John Brown's at Clydebank. As I have pointed out before, John Brown's was owned and controlled from Sheffield. It had been Thomson's and was wrecked by a great strike. But I remember the awe with which I regarded the very charming lady who married a wealthy Glasgow widower, for she, I knew,
was a daughter of the original Thomsons, the real begetters of the great yard at Clydebank.
There was, of course, also a cluster of ship- yards running down from Port Glasgow to Gourock. Some of these were very old and very distinguished, like Scott's. There was another, a newcomer, Beardmore's of Dahnuir. Beard- more's was a branch of the great steel manu- facturing company whose chief plant was Park- head Forge. It was the last great expansion of the Clyde. It never quite came off, although be- fore the First World War it did well on Ad- miralty business (as nearly all the Clyde did), and built some very respectable ships. But the writing was already on the wall when I first sailed to the United States in 1925. I went, of course, on the Anchor Line, on the sTuscania,' and the Tuscania' had been designed not for the Glasgow-New York line, but for the Genoa- New York line, and all the notices on this ship were in Italian as well as in English. But, the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, credit was advanced to the Anchor Line to build ships in John Brown's or possibly Fait- field while credit was also advanced to Beard- more's to build ships for Italian owners, and so the Lloyd Sabaudo, with the 'Conte Verde' and the 'Conte Rosso,' drove the Anchor Line out of the Mediterranean.
Before the First World War, as I knew very well, half the ships built in the world were built on the Clyde. This, of course, was very proper, but not quite proper enough. All ships should have been built on the Clyde, and those that were not built on the Clyde were not safe. The 'Titanic,' built in Harland and Wolff's at Bel- fast, was sunk, not surprisingly, by an iceberg. But the fact that the `Lusitania' was sunk by a German submarine was nothing against the Cunard Line or John Brown's : it was simply an additional proof of the diabolical character of the Germans. But as I crossed the Atlantic very frequently, I came to realise that not all good ships were built on the Clyde, and that some ships built on the Clyde were not as good as they should have been.
I have already remarked in this journal that far too much sentiment was expended on the merits offered by the 'Queen Mary,' which was not a very good ship at any time in her life. She suffered, of course, from an unfortunate history.
She was laid down in the Depression, and then all work was stopped. I can well remember walking, on a very snowy day, on the hills above my mother's house south of Glasgow and look- ing north-west and seeing, to my astonishment, what I thought was a piece of burnt-over forest land on the edge of the Kilpatrick Hills. This was an area I knew well, and I could not re- member any forest land there nor had I heard about any fire. What I was looking at, as I quickly realised, was the rusty red hull of the abandoned Cunarder not yet named. There it lay, just inside the most northern point of the Roman Empire, which was an omen.
And when the 'Queen Mary' finally put to sea years later, she was inferior to the 'Normandie, and very inferior to her partner, the 'Queen Elizabeth,' which did not come into passenger service until after the end of the Second World War. The superiority of the 'Queen Elizabeth' 'lasted right down till both ships were taken out of service. I sailed in each of them on one of Aheir last regular voyages. The 'Queen Mary' was no better than she had been; the 'Queen Elizabeth' was even better than she had been.
But what has alarmed me in the recent crisis has been the imitation by the Cunard Line and John Brown's of the mistakes made in the pub- licity given to the 'Queen Mary.' There were plenty of rumours, circulated, under cover of course, by the Cunard Line, about the sailing habits of the `Nofmandie,' about its vibration, 'lab:Mt its habit of rolling. Ostentatiously, the 'Queen Mary' had no guy ropes, or very thin ones. They did not screw down the tables. The result was that when she ran into bad weather, as she did on the first voyage I made in her, she behaved much worse than the 'Normandie' ever did.
I may say that my Cunard cousin-in-law was very hostile to the attitude of the Liverpool office, which had tried to overplay the weak- nesses of the 'Normandie,' not foreseeing that this campaign would rebound, as it did. It has been the same with the 'Queen Elizabeth 2.' The recent numbers of the New Yorker have had very highly coloured prose about the new wonder ship, accompanied by a list of sailing dates and promises of marvels quite beyond any possible rivals such as the 'France' and the 'United States.' All of this would have been justified though rather vulgar if, in fact, the 'Queen Elizabeth 2' had been able to carry out any of the promises which were made by the Cunard Line's advertising department.
There is a great deal about this disastrous episode of which I know nothing. I don't know why the turbines broke down although I can understand why the cabins etc, were not ready. I think there is a danger that the buck will be passed from Clydebank to Southamp- ton and back again. No doubt excuses will be found for this alarming failure in public rela- tions. I can remember young men sent out from the Clyde tO work in La Spezia, to give special technical advice to Italian shipbuilders. I used to see frequently an acquaintance of my father,
Dr Henry Dyer, who started one of the first Japanese technical schools from which the great Japanese shipbuilders of today have come. It is not with any malice that I express the hope that there really will be a very thorough investiga- tion of this humiliating episode. If there are any repetitions of such a disaster, there will be no shipyards on the upper Clyde any longer, and what this will mean to loyal aydesiders like myself cannot be understood by people who are worrying about British Railways, about Stansted airport, or the London motorway box.
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