The QE2 was the last beautiful ship - why are her successors so
ugly?
The liner was a symbol of 1960s design, while the new cruise ships
are purpose-built resorts
Ian Jack
Saturday June 23, 2007
The QE2 is to retire next year and become a big shop in Dubai. For a
year or two I watched her grow on the stocks beside the Clyde, but when
at last she was launched in September 1967, I was sitting in the chair
of a Glasgow dentist having a tooth pulled out. The fact that I could
have made a dental appointment on such a day still saddens me. I
intended to be among the crowd in the fields opposite John Brown's
shipyard in Clydebank, the favourite location of launch spectators,
watching the ship slide stern-first into the river and settle there as
the launch-chains tightened and the tugs took control. That evening I
turned up for my night shift in a Glasgow newspaper office and found
many special pages in preparation: pieces by writers who had a feeling
for nautical history and poetry, especially Masefield; pictures of the
Queen on the launch platform and also of the then-famous John Rannie,
who as John Brown's foreman wore a bowler hat. Perhaps we were aware
then that we were celebrating the last of something, but nobody was to
know it was the birth of the world's last beautiful ship.
Amid this week's nostalgia, it is worth remembering the British era
that produced her and its strange mixture of ailing tradition and social
change. The Boeing 707 was killing the North Atlantic liner trade; 1958
was the last year in which more passengers crossed by sea than by air.
Both Cunard Line and John Brown's (led respectively by Sir Basil
Smallpiece and Lord Aberconway) were struggling. State subsidy was
essential. Labour relations were terrible - the QE2's launch was the
first at Brown's where a delegation from the men who had actually built
the ship was invited to form part of the official party and attend the
launch lunch (the workers took up the offer suspiciously and only after
long discussion at the shop stewards' committee). From these unpromising
foundations rose a ship that its owners hoped would capture the new face
of Britain in the 1960s. Lord Snowdon, then the bright aesthetic guru,
visited the designers in their studios. His wife, Princess Margaret,
said that the new ship would show that British design was "not only
exciting and full of vigorous common sense but ... out in front, leading
the field". The QE2 would be a flagship for the new nation and not "a
grandmotherly, chintzy hotel".
Now seen as the last in a long tradition (the Mauretania, the Queen
Mary), the QE2 was meant to abolish it. The name itself was radical (not
even a Roman II), the funnel looked like no other (and abandoned
Cunard's red livery for black and white), many of the furnishings were
moulded plastic. The ship being a British industrial product of the late
1960s, the high-pressure steam turbine broke down during sea trials, and
the maiden voyage to New York was delayed by several months. Early
travellers were not overwhelmed. As John Malcolm Brinnin writes in what
is probably the best social history of the transatlantic sea trade, The
Sway of the Grand Saloon: "American passengers sighed to heaven and
ascribed it all to socialism, Carnaby Street and the decline of the
British working orders." It could be argued that the QE2 only began to
be loved when, after her duties in the Falklands war, the funnel was
made bigger and repainted in the old Cunard livery, her British turbines
were replaced by diesels during a German refit, and interior designers
threw away the new in favour of the retro. A "grandmotherly, chintzy
hotel" turned out to be, after all, what people were after.
She is very beautiful - and now almost alone in her beauty among
sea-going ships - but this quality comes from the old conventions of
naval architecture rather than the fashions of the 1960s. The QE2 was
built to cross the rough winter seas of the North Atlantic at speeds
approaching 30 knots, at a shipyard with a long history of the art. She
has a curved bow and a round stern, a long empty foredeck between the
bow and the navigating bridge, a sheer (or curvature) on the hull that
has been enhanced by clever paintwork. The funnel is centred, more or
less, and her hull is grey verging on black with upperworks plain white.
Why this should constitute "beauty" is as tricky as all aesthetic
questions but it conforms to the popular idea of "a proper ship". Why
can more ships not be built like this? Or to put it another way, why are
ships now so tall, so square, so ugly? The answer is simple enough -
that if form follows function, then function follows economics - but in
the cruise ship business where decks are sometimes stacked 12 high it
can have brutal results: suddenly in Venice, for example, a large block
of flats is towering over the Piazza San Marco, moving slowly upstream
to discharge its 3,500 inhabitants and have its sewage pumped.
The move began with container ships 40 years ago. The container changed
everything, cutting crew numbers and time spent unprofitably in ports,
and demanding simpler ships with engine room and bridge perched at the
stern to make as much room as possible for the cargo. A square hull can
carry more than a rounded one; furthermore, curved steel plates cost
more to make and to fit than flat ones. According to the maritime
historian Peter Quartermaine, "It may be true that a hull with a curved
stern is much more kindly in a following sea, but square means you can
get more in. The people who build ships aren't the ones who sail in
them."
The first generation of ships dedicated to cruising mainly comprised
ocean liners made redundant by air travel, built to transport passengers
from A to B. From the late 1970s purpose-built cruise ships were
designed to fulfil the idea that the ships were destinations in
themselves and could rival land resorts in their proliferation of
theatres, gyms, spas, casinos, rock-climbing walls and shops. Cabins
became rooms and rooms needed balconies rather than portholes. To get
more balconies you needed more decks. Open deck space, once the scene of
breezy outdoor pastimes such as quoits and shuffleboard, began to
disappear as the superstructure was stretched from bow to stern.
Quartermaine says, "When you're outside you're not spending any money.
The reasoning is that simple."
In 2005, 16 million people took a cruise on about 280 ships. More are
being built, nine to be launched next year and seven in 2009. Carnival,
the world's largest cruise company, has ordered 10 at a cost of $500m
(£250.2m) each from the Fincantieri yards in Italy. Typically, each will
carry 3,500 passengers and 1,300 crew. Where are they all to be taken?
The Bahamas and the Caribbean are saturated and the Mediterranean is
quickly filling up. Several lines own small islands that have been
outfitted to cater purely for cruise customers (the Disney line spent
$25m developing Castaway Cay in the Bahamas) and there is speculation
that they might build their own destinations, whole ports equipped with
shops selling duty-free Prada handbags and scotch, like a sunny version
of Heathrow.
Might there be a gap in this burgeoning market for the Quinlan Terry of
naval architecture and ships that look like the old Queen Mary? So far,
only the Disney line has tried. Their two ships have raked twin funnels
and dark rounded hulls - at a distance they could pass for the swift
prewar Italian liners that made Mussolini so proud. Closer to, there are
flaws. The funnels have the emblem of Mickey's ears. Hanging upside down
and painting from a bosun's chair over the stern is a 15ft-high model of
Goofy. The marine Quinlan Terry has yet to be found.
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