The Great Ship

By STRIX

`rs4AN you tell me where I find the Queen Mary?' N....../The policeman stepped forward into the lamplight. A smile (as the novelists used to say) played about his lips.

'You don't,' he said. 'She's anchored off the Isle of Wight. Won't dock till tomorrow morning.' It was eleven o'clock at night. I turned the car round and set off on the sixty-mile drive home. The Queen Mary had been due in at ten. At six o'clock 1 had rung up Cunard's public relations officer at Southampton, explained that I was meeting a passenger and asked if I could have a pass to go on board. He sounded unenthusiastic. Why did I want to go on board?

I told him that I had covered the ship's maiden voyage for The Times, had not set eyes on her since, and thought that I might possibly be able to write, well, er, you know, some sort of article about revisiting the liner on which twenty-three years ago, the eyes of the whole world had been focused.

The merits of this barely specious project made, to judge from his tone, no overwhelming impact on the PRO, but he agreed to leave a pass for me with the night-clerk. He did not mention the pos- sibility of the ship being twelve hours late, and must have been unaware of it.

As I drove sadly northward I tried, without much success, to remember what the Queen Mary's first crossing of the Atlantic had been like. In these rocket-ridden days it is difficult to account for the furore caused by the debut of this large vessel, whose uneventful progress frOm Southamp- ton to New York made front-page news for five days in 1936.

In the columns of The Times the general excite- ment and the sense of occasion were reflected more demurely than in some other national news- papers. 'Our Special Correspondent on board the Queen Mary' was obviously bent on taking a quizzical view of the enterprise, and in the general atmosphere of ballyhoo struck an occasional deflationary note with sentences like 'All the designers concerned seem agreed that, whatever else the interior of a ship should be made to look like, it must in no circumstances suggest the interior of a ship.' But even his prose lapses

frequently into a sort of nautical plush; there is a Dimblebian tendency to refer to the ship as 'the great ship,' and as the voyage went on it is clear that the strain of ringing the changes on his verbs of motion (glide, forge, cleave, etc.) began to tell.

I find it difficult to recall a comparable event which aroused an interest so worldwide. The ship swarmed with journalists; there were twenty broadcasters of different nationalities. Some idea of the news-value placed on everything to do with the voyage can be gained from the fact that The Times, in addition to the long, otiose despatches from its Special Correspondent, carried on its main page summaries of any broadcasts trans- mitted from the Queen Mary; 'in the course of the BBC's second News Bulletin the announcer said "Over to the Queen Mary !", and immediately the voice of a speaker in the ship at sea began a report on her progress.' Immediately! Just fancy!

Two very important points, however, had been overlooked by those who focused the limelight on this floating caravanserai or ocean greyhound. The first was that, if all went according to plan. absolutely nothing worth reporting would happen while she was at sea. Were she to suddenly foun- der, or if her captain went mad or two first-class passengers fought a duel, there would indeed be something worth putting on the front page. It had not been foreseen that, short of some sensa- tional and preferably untoward occurrence, the army of special correspondents—they included Messrs. Hannen Swaffer, Gerald Barry, John Snagge and Sir Percival Phillips—would scarcely have two main verbs to rub together.

In these circumstances interest narrowed down and concentrated on the chances of the Queen Mary breaking the record (then held, I think, by the Normandie). Her owners said that they had no intention of breaking it. They said it so often and so emphatically that in the end people began to believe them. By the third day out, so briskly did the great ship glide, speculation was rife as to how she was going to avoid arriving ahead of the advertised time. Rumours that she would slow down, steam round in circles, or anchor just out- side ,quarantine put the passengers in an ugly mood; but the Cunard Company's interesting dilemma was resolved by fog, which at this junc- ture retarded progress for some ten hours.

As ill luck would have it this fog coincided with the discovery of a stowaway, a forty-one- year-old builder's labourer from Cardiff who had walked on board at Southampton with his sleeves rolled up, posing as a greaser. He was not a very interesting character. His purpose was the same as everyone else's : to travel to America.

By comparison with the empty piffle we had been sending to our newspapers, the fog and the stowaway were veritable bombshells. But alas, many of us were now at the mercy of a second unforeseen development. Although furnished with everything from a squash-court to a synagogue, the Queen Mary's means of communicating with the outside world were limited; her owners had underestimated the staff and equipment needed to handle the huge volume of outgoing traffic.

On the second day out The Times reported that the wireless transmitters were working at full pressure. By the fourth the operators were dead on their feet, the control-room was knee-deep in undespatched despatches, and the overworked apparatus was in a fair way to being jammed with incoming editorial reprimands. (There was the story that a despairing British journalist sent a

short 'service' message in the cablese of those days: 'unnews unfacilities unmoney.' The reply came: 'unemployed')

A fantastic scene—'Wellsian,' The Times called it—greeted the ship's arrival, dead on time. in New York. Aeroplanes swooped on her. Firetloats spouted silver gerbes of water. Sirens blared. Exiles in launches played bagpipes, inaudible in the general din. On one vessel bearing a British reception committee fifteen girls dressed in white trousers and black shakoes rendered the National Anthem, over and over again, on long silver trumpets. Blizzards of ticker-tape floated down from crowded sky-scrapers.

Our Special Correspondent On Board did his best to rise to the occasion. But, reading his long despatch, one feels somehow that he was not ideally cast, that maiden voyages were not his métier As the extraordinary panorama unfolds one wonders whether he really saw the Great Ship as the heroine he loyally makes her out to be. He seems to find a note of quietly hysterical com-

placency difficult to maintain. Towards the end he starts comparing the mast-high aircraft to driven grouse.

Still, there was something unique and exclusive about sailing in the Queen Mary on her first voyage across the Atlantic; it is the sort of thing one can only do once. Which is more (I reflected as I drove back to Southrornton next day) than can be said for going to meet her after her 632nd.