Queen To Sea

In Renfrewshire, Scotland, where a narrow little creek called the River Cart joins the twisting Clyde there is a fertile fan-shaped farm. It boasts three good fields, a bit of useless swamp, a shaded dirt road. For the past year what made it different from all other farm land in Scotland was that every time its farmer raised his eyes from the furrow he saw towering over his head the vast stern and mountainous superstructure of the greatest ship ever built in Britain, Queen Mary. When the farmer looked up from his field last week Queen Mary was gone, safe at sea after what her owners devoutly hope will be the most ticklish journey she will ever have to make.

To all the other sciences that have gone into the making of Queen Mary, astronomy was added last week. Astronomers and meteorologists agreed that one of the highest spring tides could be expected at about 2 p. m. to float the great Cunard White Star liner from John Brown's shipyard down the shallow Clyde.

Hours ahead of time the river bank was black with people for miles on either shore. The two most powerful tugs in Glasgow puffed importantly about the stern. Six lesser tugs stood by. At 9:30 a. m. the bridge gave the first order: "Let go!" Then down to the engine room went the signal DEAD SLOW ASTERN. All up & down the river whistles were tooting, crowds cheering. But there was hardly a sound from the shipyard workmen. As the steel cables snaked ashore they saw their 7,000 jobs go out with the ship.* The problem now was to move a ship a fifth of a mile long and 118 ft. wide down 14 miles of goosenecked channel only 300 feet broad. In at least three places there was less than four feet of water between Queen Mary's keel and the river bed.

Sliding the ship into the slot cut for her on the opposite shore at the time of her launching (TIME, Oct. 1, 1934) and turning her downstream was performed without incident. Less than half a mile below the shipyard the Clyde bends in a double S. There came the crisis. With an angry crack the stern cable to one tug broke. Before another could be made fast, Queen Mary's bow was out of the channel, moving like a relentless cliff of steel shoreward.

The bow struck. Down to the engine room flashed the signal: FULL SPEED ASTERN. Four propellers, each as big as a bungalow, churned the chocolate-colored water to froth. It was too late. Bow and stern, the 80,773-ton ship was aground. Her own engines were useless.

In 1914, as captain of a little freighter, Commander Sir Edgar Britten, Cunard White Star's commodore and commander of the Queen Mary, was locked in the Arctic ice near Archangel for five months. To him the next 20 minutes seemed as long. Could the eight tugs get Queen Mary off? Gaping crowds on shore stood only 20 feet from her stern, watched an epic feat of British seamanship.

With much pushing and more good luck, the Queen Mary finally floated clear.

Cunard White Star officials, mopping their brows with relief, called attention to the happy fact that in the few minutes that her engines raced full speed astern they had felt none of the vibration that has been the curse of the French Line's Normandie. Chief Engineer Llewellyn Roberts was too tactful to point out that full speed astern is considerably slower than full speed ahead.

Once more that day the ship that had taken five years to build and cost -L-5,000,000 grounded but only for eight minutes.

By 2:30 p. m. her huge anchor touched bottom for the first time in safe waters at Tail-of-Bank. Within an hour oil tenders were alongside and her lifeboats, sent ahead to lighten the ship over the mud flats, were swinging up to their davits. Twice in her crooked trip down the Clyde her deep whistle boomed in salute. First honored was a grimy little riverside statue of Henry Bell, who built the first steamboat on the Clyde five years after Robert Fulton's Clermont had first sailed the Hudson. At the journey's end another toot saluted a school built in memory of Clydeside's own James Watt, inventor of the steam engine.

Next day Queen Mary stood out to sea for secret steering tests, a trial run at three quarters speed. Thirty-six hours later she was in her own private drydock at Southampton to have her bottom scraped, her plates tested for possible damage during the stranding in the Clyde.

From drydock came an amazing piece of news. The 690 miles from Clydebank to Southampton are all the voyaging her four gigantic propellers will ever do because they are already obsolete. Four new propellers already waiting at the dockside will be fitted before Queen Mary makes her final speed trials next week. Then John Brown officials, with a great sense of relief, will turn her over to her owners preparatory to her maiden voyage to New York late in May.

*Hector Bywater, famed ship expert, announced last week that work on a sister ship to the Queen Mary, for which money has long been promised (TIME, April 16, 1934), will commence in August. Designed to be larger (90,000 tons) and faster, she will probably not be built on the Clyde. According to Expert Bywater "It would be better for national economic reasons if the order went to the Tyne" in the depressed coalmining Northeast.

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