HUMILIATION OF AN ICON
by Jonathan Brocklebank Launched 50 years ago this week, she was the Clyde’s most famous ship. So what fate awaits the QE2, abandoned for years in a sweltering Dubai dock?
IT was not much of a 50th birthday party. Next to a forest of dockside cranes, the QE2 passed the day without fanfare or ceremony – and without her lifeboats, too. These now sit abandoned and decaying in a nearby car park.
Her circumstances in her current Dubai location are at least preferable to the last one where she spent several years with her engines off, no maintenance and her paintwork cracking under a coating of desert sand and city grime. At least she has had a clean.
But it is hardly the berth most would expect for one of the world’s most glorious vessels, the near 70,000-ton pride of the Clyde launched by the monarch she was named for half a century ago on September 20, 1967.
Some say that, as ocean liners go, RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 (designated Royal Mail Ship because she carried post), is eclipsed in celebrity only by the Titanic. Rob Lightbody, who runs a tribute website to the QE2, likes to call her the ‘most famous ship in the world which didn’t sink’.
And certainly, wherever she sailed during a working life lasting 40 years and covering six million miles, her arrival brought a huge sense of occasion. For this was the flagship of the Cunard line – the fastest, the most luxurious and the very last of the Transatlantic liners which represented a golden age of sea-faring tourism.
This was our modern connection with a world pre-dating affordable air travel and cheap and cheerful package holidays – and people loved her for it.
Among the 2.5million passengers who sailed in her were the Queen, of course, Nelson Mandela, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
But she was never just a floating palace for the obscenely rich and famous. Everyday people saved up for once-in-a-lifetime voyages aboard the QE2 – simply because she was the QE2.
Now, nine years after she was sold for £65.3million to Dubai World, a holding company belonging to the United Arab Emirates city, the clink of glasses in her sumptuous lounges and the cheers of crowds at ports around the globe are a distant memory.
Britain’s grandest old dame of the seas sits patiently in the searing heat of a foreign harbour as a succession of plans for her future are discussed, shelved, reviewed and reformulated.
FOR some, such as the ship’s last captain Ian McNaught, who delivered her to Dubai in 2008, her fate feels both unhappy and undeserved. The ideal retirement place for the QE2, he says, would be ‘at home’ on the Clyde.
He tells The QE2 Story website: ‘There she would have stood as a reminder and a symbol for what made the river famous as a great centre for shipbuilding over many generations.’
Instead, the QE2 awaits conversion into a longdiscussed floating hotel at Dubai’s Port Rashid – and at last plans seem to be moving forward. Lately, locals have seen signs of activity around the vessel. Cranes are at work on it, cleaners are aboard and construction crews have carried out external repairs.
Close to the old cruise terminal where the QE2 now sits, signs which read ‘Queen Elizabeth 2, hotel main entrance’ are now on display. They carry a crude crown symbol. Meanwhile, a few of the abandoned lifeboats have been moved to a roundabout on the approach to the ship.
And, while there is no official confirmation of exact plans for the QE2 from its current owner, the website of one of the firms contracted for the facelift gives a few details. Al Shafa Construction group says it has 110 people working on the ship, concentrating on a portion measuring 344,000sq ft. That is about half the total floor space, including cabins.
Pictures taken by satellite reveal the outdoor pool at the vessel’s stern has been decked over – and with the lifeboats, their winches and motors also away, there is a large open area suitable for ondeck functions.
Mr Lightbody, whose father once worked aboard the ship, says: ‘It’s now looking like they’ll manage to open her in some capacity, although we’ve been here before, so I’m cautious about that. They’ve moved her back around to the old cruise terminal and she’s been washed down.
‘There’s activity visible and they’re obviously working on her. The outside swimming pool is gone. We think it’s been decked over. But it makes sense because it gives them an open piece of decking at the back of the ship to hold events.’
For those who care about the QE2, the last decade has been rather like charting the failing health of a long-term hospital patient. There was a time in 2010 when Captain McNaught feared it was all over – that the financial crash which scuppered the original floating hotel plans would result in her being sold for scrap.
HE said at the time: ‘One hears rumours, and of course what people are saying is that she will be run aground on a beach in the Indian Ocean and broken up piece by piece, like so many great ships before her. That would be an absolute tragedy.’
In fact, she suffered a fate of almost equal indignity. Placed in dry dock as discussions stopped and started over what to do with her, she was left to moulder. Members of the public have not been allowed on board the QE2
for years, but Shaun Ebelthite, editor of trade magazine Cruise Arabia and Africa, gives an idea of the condition of the interior.
‘Without air-conditioning the wood panelling in the public rooms and cabins would have rotted in the hot, humid conditions,’ he says. ‘Similarly, mould likely began to pervade most of the carpeting and other soft furnishings.
‘It’s likely then that Al Shafa Construction’s renovation works include a total overhaul of all the original carpets, curtains, couches and other materials on board.’
The QE2, then, spent her 50th birthday as she has spent much of the past few months – under repair and unseen by those who wish to celebrate her half century. It is all a far cry from the pomp and ceremony on the day she was launched.
Back then, more than 30,000 filled the streets of Clydebank as the Queen and Prince Philip made their way to John Brown’s shipyard. Sitting there was a vessel known to those who had built it only as Number 736 – and to Cunard as Q4.
It was only when the bottle of Australian white wine crashed against its bow that the world knew what she was to be called.
The Queen named her ‘Queen Elizabeth the Second’ – rather problematically, for this was the first Queen Elizabeth to reign over Scotland, where she was built. Cunard got round the problem by abbreviating her name to QE2, which uses the Arabic numeral 2 rather than the Queen’s Roman numeral II.
That was not the only problem. As Peter Kemp, a 19-year-old apprentice at the time, recalls, the ship did move down into the water on cue.
He says: ‘Somebody cried out “give it a shove”. One of the gaffers with a bowler hat jumped up and gave it a kiddy-on shove and then the thing moved off down the river. The chains were rattling and the dust was flying about and everything. It was an amazing sight.’
It certainly was. Measuring 963ft from bow to stern, this was the last passenger ship on anything like such a scale to be built on the upper Clyde. And in retrospect, that may be fortunate. For in the same year that the QE2 was launched, construction began on the Erskine Bridge, just downstream from the John Brown shipyard. Today, her funnel would not be able to pass underneath it.
WITH five restaurants and two cafes, three swimming pools, a 481-seat cinema, a casino and a hospital, the QE2 rewrote the rule book on what could be incorporated into an ocean liner – pointing the way to the ‘floating city’ behemoths of the 21st century.
She was also among the fastest, designed to cross the Atlantic in five days in all weathers.
The marketing strategy was barely less bold than the hubristic one used for the Titanic 55 years earlier. ‘The only thing QE2 has in common with other ships is that she floats,’ said one poster. Prime Minister Harold Wilson, meanwhile, declared that she was forged in the ‘white heat of technology’, making her a symbol of British
design excellence. Not that her early years were entirely trouble free.
The maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, scheduled for January 1969, had to be cancelled due to persistent engine troubles. It did not sail until four months later.
There were mutterings of a £29million ‘white elephant’ in the Press – and, as teething problems grew, one headline screamed ‘ship of shame’.
But teething problems is all they were. By the beginning of the 1970s, the QE2 was a globally feted style icon embarking on decades of adventure.
During her time as a working vessel she crossed the Atlantic 812 times, completed 25 full world cruises and made a total of 1,419 voyages.
Among those were her fastest Southampton to New York steam-powered journey (three days and 20 hours in June 1970) and her fastest diesel-powered journey between the two ports (four days and six hours).
IT was not all luxury crossings and cruises, however. In May 1982, she carried 3,000 troops and a volunteer crew of 650 to the South Atlantic for the Falklands War. Two helicopter pads had been installed on her decks and the public lounges transformed into dormitories. She returned to Southampton with barely a scratch on her the following month to be converted back to passenger service.
In the years that followed, she became Cunard’s longest-serving express liner – and widow Beatrice Muller became her most loyal passenger. By the time the ship was finally delivered to the UAE in 2008 she had been a permanent resident for 14 years, paying £3,500 a month for the privilege.
The QE2’s retirement and purchase by Dubai World had been announced in June 2007, partly as a result of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea regulations coming in 2010, which would have forced large and expensive structural changes.
Still some balked at the idea of such an iconic British vessel spending her retirement overseas.
Certainly, it was never a decision her final captain seemed completely happy with. Recalling the day he left the QE2 for the last time, Captain McNaught said: ‘My wife and I left the ship at four in the morning to catch an early flight home from Dubai.
‘As I stood at the top of the gangway in five deck forward cruise doors, I just touched the hull and said thank you, and then we went down the gangway, climbed into the taxi and went off without looking back.’
The sense of unease only grew as the plans to turn her into a 500-room floating hotel on the man-made Palm Jumeirah faltered just months later and the ensuing years brought only conjecture and apparent indecision.
Is some dignity at last to be restored to Clyde shipbuilding’s most magnificent monument? That is the very least her millions of admirers would hope.
But what they really ache for, perhaps vainly now, is to have her home.