The Queen

(See Cover) Rule, Brit-ann-ya,

Britannya rule the waves!

Britons nevernevernever

Shall be slaves!

Over the dingy Southampton docks loomed the three gigantic orange stacks, the coruscating white superstructure of the Queen Mary, Captain Illingworth, Master. Her 1,020-ft. length and her towering height dwarfed the battered buildings of the blitzed waterfront. The tugs chugged alongside. Antlike figures made fast the tossed lines. The town band, percussive and perspiring, panted with bravura through the Merry Widow Waltz, Pomp & Circumstance, and struck up the great invocation: Rule, Britannia! Through the mist in some watchers' eyes the colossal Cunarder wavered moltenly. Even Colonel Blimp blew his nose with a Tory blast prolonged by the boom of the great ship's sirens, which are pitched two octaves below middle A and audible ten miles across the downs. On decks and dock, the handkerchiefs fluttered, bon voyage bouquets were waved. The farewells grew fainter across the widening water.

Out in the stream the tugs cast off. The Queen Mary, carrying 1,883 passengers, was on her own, on one of the most momentous of her many momentous voyages--her first run 'as a luxury liner since World War II. As the Isle of Wight fell astern, and she glided majestically past the coast of England, the Queen was not only steaming for New York but out of an all but vanished age--an age of which she had once been a sumptuous symbol, and whose splendor (and profits sorely needed by Britons) she was making a gallant attempt to recapture.

Family Voyage. All across the Atlantic the weather was on the side of Britannia. The smooth sea was just what Captain Illingworth ordered. Most of the nights were lit by a theatrically mellow moon. But as the shoreline died away, the passengers had little to look at but themselves. The few inveterate voyagers among them recognized that nothing about the Queen Mary had changed quite so much as her passengers. The prewar glitter of the salon list was dimmed. Gone were the orchids and the ermine. Few British escapists, yearning after the fleshpots of Manhattan night life, rubbed magnificent elbows with U.S. escapists returning home from the fleshpots of Europe. Few colossal deals would be consummated in the hushed and paneled smoking room.

No sooner did the first sun come out than children came out too, in swarms. Scores of the deck promenaders and loungers in the deck chairs were the parents of British girls who had married American servicemen. They were going on a visit rather than a voyage. It was a family outing.

Many first-class passengers had scarcely been out of Britain before. A lawyer whose hobby is the antiquities of London looked forward to meeting the governor of Georgia, with whom his American son-in-law was acquainted. "Do you suppose," he wondered, "that it would be indelicate of me to ask His Excellency--is that right, do you call him His Excellency?--what that mixup was all about that time they seemed to have several governors of Georgia? Would he mind discussing it?"

The lawyer's wife proudly displayed a picture of her daughter on her wedding day and told a little story: "We invited three American officers to dinner without knowing any of them, you know. My daughter went to meet them at the station and my son-in-law says that he hadn't touched the ground before he'd made up his mind he was going to marry her. Now his parents write us that everyone loves her."

Her Notables. Only a sprinkling of notables was aboard. There was Lord Brand, who had recently made an important speech on the Transport Bill. There was Major General William ("Wild Bill") Donovan, who played deck tennis with youngsters a quarter of his age and did very well at it too. There was Sir William Stephenson,* who was the eyes & ears of the British Empire years before Bill Donovan's Office of Strategic Services was dreamed of. There were David Farrar, the movie star, David A. Smart, publisher of Esquire, and the very smart Mrs. Smart.

Snatches of conversation were reminders that not all the travelers were en route to visit daughters. The woman who had crossed so often that she had almost lost count was heard to say: "But didn't you hear what happened to him? He married a perfectly beautiful French girl and they found out she was a German spy, so the marriage was annulled, and now everything's all right."

The precise Czech economist made a political point with great economy of words: "Some Bulgarians were educated in Berlin and they mostly turned out Nazis. After the war they were shot. The other educated Bulgarians were trained in Prague and they were democrats. In Prague, I asked for an old Bulgarian friend and the Bulgarians told me he had been shot. I said: 'He was educated here. He was a democrat. I know that. You know that.' They said, 'Yes, we all know that. It was a mistake. But it has been rectified. The judge who sentenced him has also been shot.' "

An Australian, pacing the deck, told of attending the recent royal garden party at Buckingham Palace. "I went to Moss Bross and rented one of those outfits, and when we got there the crowd looked like people at the track milling about looking for odds. My wife pointed about a quarter-mile away and said, 'There's the pavilion where the King is. Shall we sit down?' I said, 'Let's sit down, but not here. Let's go back to the hotel where I can sit down with a whiskey.' "

In the smoking room a U.S. businessman was annoyed at what he thought were the excessively polite goodnights and hope-you-sleep-wells. He was for a more honest world: "What do we all care how each other sleeps? It's like me and my board of directors. When I meet them, I always call them gentlemen, but I know and they know I know they are a bunch of thieves, one and all."

Floating Hotel. When conversation palled, there was the ship herself to explore--a floating Grand Hotel. For the sun baskers and the eight-times-around-the-deck strollers, there were three acres of deck space. A walk around the Queen's promenade deck added up close to a quarter of a mile. To carry the passengers effortlessly from one to another of the twelve decks, which rise within the Queen's 50,000-ton metal hull and spill above it like the hanging gardens of Babylon, were 21 noiseless elevators. The murals of the public rooms, boarded up during the war, were unveiled again. Both public and staterooms were paneled in woods from every continent--from beech to rich mahogany, rare and exotic betula and petula, zebrano and avodire.

Marine Marvel. Even to jaded voyagers, the Queen Mary was still a marvel of naval architecture. From her straight, businesslike stem to her bulging cruiser stern the Queen represents a blending of many ancient and modern arts. Her builders had to wrestle with the problem of constructing a hull of titan strength to withstand almost unimaginable strains as the seas pass under her 1,020 feet, lifting her first by the bow, then amidships, then astern. The propulsion engineers used the power of 50 locomotives to drive the four screws, each 20 feet across and weighing 35 tons, which are, nevertheless, so delicately mounted that they can be turned by a man's hand.

For the helmsman, instead of the angry, seven-foot monster wheel of the first Cunarders, which flung men to the deck or threw them across the wheelhouse, there is finger-tip steering with a complex series of superhuman power boosters to swing the 140-ton rudder through churning seas. If the watch officer chooses, a gyro pilot will relieve the helmsman entirely and keep the ship on course. No leadsman need stand in the bow to take soundings, for the navigator has an acoustic-electric fathometer to tell him, at the press of a button, how much water is beneath the hull. Radar eyes pierce night and fog.

The Sisters. Her wartime experiences had left few visible marks on the Mary. The marks, however, were deep in history and deep in the memories of the armies of American servicemen who traveled on her.

When World War II broke out, the Queen Mary was outward bound from Southampton carrying a record number of 2,332 passengers. The giant ship proceeded at full speed on a route far north of her usual run, arrived in New York harbor the day after Britain declared war (Sept. 3, 1939). She was reported to have brought a cargo of gold worth $44,000,000. For six months she was berthed near her rival, the French liner Normandie. Dock rent cost Cunard $520 a day.

Presently the Mary's new sistership, the Queen Elizabeth, quietly slipped into the berth beside her. Later the Mary's cabins were stripped, rugs and furniture (now irreplaceable) were packed and stored. Her bulkheads were taken down to make room for troops.

In 1941, the two Queens joined the Mauretania and old Aquitania in ferrying troops between Australia, New Zealand and Suez. Up to Pearl Harbor, the Queens had carried over 80,000 Empire troops, but their career in war had just begun.

Luxury Ferry. Grey and ghostlike in her war paint and swifter than any but the fastest warships (an average speed: 30 knots), the Queen Mary whipped around the Cape of Good Hope and up to Suez, turned up again & again in Boston and in Manhattan's North River, was sighted by Allied sailormen in ports and anchorages around the world. By the end of her war service she had carried 765,000 Allied troops to & from battle areas.

After V-E day the Mary carried U.S. and Canadian troops home again, a division at a time, topped off her war services by carrying G.I. brides and babies--2,500 at a time.

The Captain. Master of the Queen Mary in war, and in her return to peacetime service, is Captain Cyril Gordon Illingworth, 64. The Captain does things the way he learned that they should be done as a cadet (at one shilling a month) in white-hulled, white-topped, square-rigged ships, "with no steam at all." First of his family to follow the sea, he left his Lake District home for the long (about 100 days each way) run through the clean seas that lie between Liverpool's dirty Mersey and Rangoon's dirty Irrawaddy. Out with salt and back with rice, Captain Illingworth remembers now. "It was a hard life and a good life," he says, "and I like to think there will never be a better way of learning this trade. We used to say, 'When I leave the sea and go into steam--' "

After seven years of sail, he went into steam with the Cunard Line in 1910. In World War I, he served at Jutland, in H.M.S. Valiant, went back to Cunard when the war was over. He fondly remembers the Scythia, where he made the crew hop to their tasks. They gave him a handsome desk set when he left. Said the spokesman for the presentation committee: "You ran us hard, sir, but it's all in the way it's done."

As executive officer of the Berengaria, Illingworth's morning duty was to see that everything was shipshape. His special aversion was "Irish pennants"--ends of rope hanging where no end of rope should hang. "Bosun, what's that rope end dangling there for?" Illingworth would say. "Sorry, sir," the boatswain would answer, sending Seaman Brown to cut the end off. One morning, from a porthole, Illingworth spied two members of the crew, arms loaded with rope ends, tying them here & there to prepare a sort of treasure hunt for him. When he appeared for inspection, he spotted the first. The boatswain solemnly dispatched Brown to cut it. "Why Brown?" barked Illingworth. "Send the man who tied it there while I was watching him a half hour ago." Telling this story, Illingworth last week bounded about his quarters illustratively tying a handkerchief here, sticking a piece of paper there, until the bright, paneled room seemed aflutter with Irish pennants.

Danger & Beauty. When not on the bridge, Captain Illingworth sits at his desk just below it, bobbing up every three or four minutes to scan the sea ahead. He is equally alert to the danger and the beauty of the North Atlantic, and the slightest change of light brings him to his feet. "Look at that, sir. Look at that patch of sunlight to the right of the fog bank ahead. Did you ever see anything like that?" he roars, his sea-blue eyes glowing at the sight. After 44 years at sea he still acts like a man from the Rockies seeing blue water for the first time.

In fog or bad weather the Captain does not leave the bridge. He has stood 53 consecutive hours on the bridge of the Queen Mary, 55 on the Elizabeth. Once on the Ascania he stood 75 hours without sleep. As a precaution against collision, the Mary has two radar installations. Captain Illingworth welcomes them, but he does not deputize even to radar his task of watching the sea. "In the North Atlantic trade we have a saying: 'We blow the fog horn for five hot-weather months and blow on our fingers to keep warm the other seven.' When fogs abound, any captain of a ship like this who doesn't watch the sea himself is a fool, sir, a fool."

When they gave him peacetime command of the Mary a few weeks ago, a spokesman for the Cunard Line said graciously: "You know, Captain, we've come to consider the Queen Mary as your ship." Replied Illingworth: "I've considered her my ship for over ten years."

To act as his deputy and a kind of general manager of the Queen Mary, Captain Illingworth has Staff Captain G. N. Jones, C.B.E., D.S.O., R.D., R.N.R. Captain Jones has a square-rigged jaw and a thatch of white hair over deep-set eyes. He looks (and is) the embodiment of that stout British character which a gloomy statesman in the House of Commons corridor recently said was Britain's one hope. As Captain Illingworth's deputy, he runs the crew. On last week's voyage, the crew was about 30% new to the ship. A few obviously did not know their way about. But, considering that it was a maiden voyage in a sense, surprisingly few hitches developed and the officers were delighted. The crew morale was skyhigh.

Bar & Showers. Seamen's wages are up to -L-24 a month minimum now, much more than before the war, when Labor politicians were yelling that the Queen Mary was a palace for the passengers with slave quarters for the crew. Now each seaman has a curtained bunk with a reading lamp of his own. Seamen have their own bar, plenty of shower baths and much more space than before. The big inducement, however, is the Queen Mary's food and the chance to buy in New York.

Top dog of the Mary's engines is Chief Engineer Archibald S. Fisher. Top dog of the stewards and Staff Captain Jones's right-hand man is Chief Steward G. N. Whitaker. His chief job is to keep house for the shipload of passengers and see that they are properly fed. The Mary's cooking and catering are aimed, but without notable success, at American taste. British influence remains in the form of kippered herring and heavy puddings. The all-pervasive Swiss grand-hotel influence is also present, but not with sufficient force to flatten out the food to the dead level of tastelessness that prevails in four-fifths of the world's higher-priced hostelries. Chef John Pearse sees to it that the Queen Mary's food retains a certain distinction, even though few gourmets would consider it better than fair. Most Britons on board found the food near perfection. Faced with a choice of veal or steak, they would hesitate. A few ordered both.

The 1,883 passengers did not really need 800-odd stewards or the twelve bellhops to wait on them. Nor did they need 250,000 pieces of crockery or 500,000 pieces of linen. Yet not even the British Socialists (so set on seeing that everybody gets what he needs that few Britons get what they want) begrudge the Queen of the Atlantic the extras.

Nor did the belt-tightening Britons begrudge the tons of food required to stock the Mary's first westbound voyage. Britons know that the Queens should bring in dollars. Eastbound, the Mary's tourist-class reservations are sold out throughout June of 1948. Her cabin class is sold out through November of this year. First class is never quite sold until the last minute, but the Mary's is booked pretty solid through October. A prewar calculation (neither supported nor denied by the Cunard White Star Line) was that the Queen Mary could make money at an annual average of 75% of capacity. As far as anybody can foresee, the Queen will run close to capacity in both directions. That prospect should make the owners and the dollar-hungry British Government happy.

The great ship's welcome as she steamed into New York Harbor this week left no doubt that the return of the three orange smokestacks made American well-wishers happy. As shore sirens hooted and fireboats sprayed their jets, the Queen Mary slipped into her old berth.

Somewhere a band blared:

Rule, Britannia!

Britannia, rule the waves!

Britons never, never, never Shall be slaves.

-Director of British Security Coordination in. the Western Hemisphere.

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