THE WRECK OF THE ELIZABETH
Taking its maiden voyage out of Southampton in 1946, the RMS Queen Elizabeth was an 83,000-ton Cunard ocean liner with a passenger capacity of 2,200. It was, at the time, the largest riveted ship on the planet. Twenty-six years later, she wound up on the bottom of HK’s Victoria Harbour. Here’s her story in 10 quick snippets…
#1 While 1946 was the ship’s first leisure cruise, she launched in 1938, only to be used as a troop transport ship for the duration of WWII. And a hugely successful one, too; Sir Winston Churchill himself wrote that the end date of the war “must unquestionably have been postponed” without the help of the ship.
#2 At the launch ceremony in 1938, Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) apparently had to act quickly with the traditional breaking of the bottle of wine, as the ship started to slide into the water!
#3 After the war, normal operations resumed, and the ship was a popular cruise liner; a 1955 refurb added a swimming pool, better air-conditioning and other features.
#4 Cunard retired the Queen Elizabeth in 1967, at which time it was juggled by different owners before finally being sold at auction in 1970 to a Hong Kong tycoon.
#5 The plan of the new HK owner was to convert the ship into a floating university, as part of a programme known as World Campus Afloat.
#6 On 9 January, while docked in Hong Kong (at the very southern end of Tsing Yi, close to the northwestern end of today’s Stonecutters Bridge), the ship caught fire. Arson was suspected, but never proved.
#7 Firefighters worked hard to control the blaze, yet it was actually the water used to extinguish the flames that ended up capsizing the ship.
#8 The wreck of the Queen Elizabeth remained visible above the water line for several years (the photo to the left was taken around six months after the incident).
#9 Most of it was dismantled in the mid 1970s, before the last pieces of the wreck on the harbour floor were covered by land reclamation during the construction in the late 1990s of a container terminal.
#10 In 1977, the Parker Pen Company produced 5,000 special edition pens using metal fittings retrieved from the wreck.
Did you know? The Queen Elizabeth has a strong James Bond link; the climax to Ian Fleming’s book Diamonds Are Forever is set on the ship, while the wreck itself appears in the film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), as a secret headquarters for MI6.