Queen Elizabeth 2 and the Glamour of Atlantic Travel, July 1986
It is surely the most glamorously nostalgic voyage of all – crossing the historic North Atlantic aboard the last of the so-called trans-ocean super ships, Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth 2. Almost all of the passengers were, in contrast to leisurely cruising, being transported – luxuriously transported, for the most part – from one continent to another. Unlike cruise voyages (which the Queen also runs), the crossing has a definite sense of purpose, a very real destination.
My journey was slightly different, however. I traveled on a roundtrip: five days over, one night in England, and then five days homeward.
When I boarded the QE2, as she is surely best known, at New York, she had just returned from her longest and most profitable charter yet, a special sailing from Southampton to New York via Bermuda, and then a “grandstand” anchorage in New York’s Lower Bay for the gala Fourth of July-Liberty Weekend celebrations.
She had been chartered by Lee Iacocca, who had presided over the Statue of Liberty’s facelift and restoration fund-raising campaign, in his full-time capacity as chairman of the Chrysler Corporation. Some 1,500 guests, most of them car dealers who had far and away exceeded their sales quotas, were invited for what was billed as “a caviar-filled, Champagne-flowing” trip.
Robin Davies, the ship’s assistant hotel manager, was aboard for this special sailing and played an important part in the detailed planning:
“There were luncheon buffets and midnight buffets every day as well as an endless stream of special cocktail parties. The planning and preparation was enormous and even included a daily drink that bore an appropriate automotive name: Sundance, Shadow, Charger, Le Baron and Lancer. The passengers had been to Paris, a trip that included a special luncheon party at Versailles, and were then flown to London before being brought down to Southampton to join the ship.”
“We had a special detour to Bermuda and a day there at anchor, when Mr. Iacocca left the ship to fly onward to New York and prepare for the Liberty celebrations. Once at New York, the ship spent two days at anchor in Gravesend Bay. Champagne was served constantly on the open decks. We had perfect viewing for the Tall Ships parade and then the nighttime fireworks. Appropriately, we were anchored next to the largest representative from our Royal Navy, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal.”
On the Atlantic voyage, the Queen had resumed commercial service and departed on an eastbound passage from her Hudson River berth with 1,550 passengers, 14 cars, three dogs and two cats on board.
It would be her 586th voyage since being commissioned in the spring of 1969. Built at Clydebank in Scotland by John Brown & Company Limited (which in those fading years of British shipbuilding had become Upper Clyde Shipbuilders), she was royally launched and highly publicized from the start, and was clearly a dramatically different successor to the two previous Cunard Queens, the immortal Queen Mary and the first Queen Elizabeth, which had run the weekly trans-Atlantic shuttle since 1947.
Today, the Queen Elizabeth 2 is, I believe, the most famous liner on earth. It is a combination, in uncertain quantities, of her illustrious heritage (there has been no grander name in Atlantic passenger shipping than Cunard) and her own, quite distinct personality.
John Butt, her executive cruise director, adds, “She is, of course, the last of an era, a very glorious era. There will never again be another like her. She makes news wherever she goes, grabs attention and offers her passengers a vacation of a lifetime. Furthermore, there have been some very noticeable injections of pride into the ship. The old-timers among the staff are setting a very fine example to the younger crew members. Like Chrysler, we’re bringing the Queen back!”
John Duffy is equally proud of the 67,100-ton ship, the flagship of the British merchant navy. He is the ship’s general manager, a rather unique, very much behind-the-scenes post, but one with the rank of vice president within the Cunard Company. In pin stripes and presiding over an onboard office complex that is complete with mini-boardroom (where a daily meeting of ship’s officers in held), he is solely responsible for everything about the 963-ft. long ship. Even the captain (one of the world’s last remaining commodores), the chief engineer and the hotel manager (who is responsible for the food, accommodation and entertainment) answer to him.
Mr. Duffy described his role: “It is actually an executive position and the whole setting is corporate. I am the link, the official link, between the ship and the shore. Everything filters through me. It is not really ship-like, but in this very competitive age we are playing a numbers game, a very large and important numbers game. Every aspect must be competitive and, quite hopefully, every aspect must be run efficiently and systematically from embarkation at New York to disembarkation at Southampton.”
“We might have as many as 1,800 passengers, for example, sitting down to dinner at once, and afterwards we must entertain them. It is indeed a floating city, a vast resort at sea. But it is always changing. The Queen is so diversified, from trans-Atlantic crossings to a five-day Bermuda cruise, to a weekend ‘to nowhere,’ to an English cruise to Lisbon and the Canaries, to the three-month cruise around-the-world. We change, for example, in a matter of hours, the ship’s currency from US dollars to British sterling. Also, there are different demands from our passengers to which our staff must react, as well as different nationalities, from a reclusive European millionaire in one of the penthouses to a group of American tourists in trans-Atlantic class [Cunard’s redesignation of what was once traditionally called tourist class].”
