10 years ago today, on Wednesday 26 November 2008 Queen Elizabeth 2 spent her last day in open water as she headed for her retirement home of Dubai. Interestingly, her first day in open water took place exactly 40 years earlier, on Tuesday 26 November 1968, as she began her sea trials and a journey into the unknown.
For most of her almost 40 years in service QE2 was the most famous ship in the world being rarely far from the news, for good reason or bad. She became a strikingly potent symbol, recognised around the world, not just of all that is best in Britain, but of the enduring excellence of Scottish engineering. She sailed over five million nautical miles, more than any other ship ever, completed 25 full world cruises, and crossed the Atlantic, surely the world’s cruelest sea, over 800 times; yet her hull was as sound in 2008 as the day she first slipped into the waters of the Clyde four decades earlier.
QE2 was a magnet for well-wishers wherever she went; thousands turned out to greet her, not just out of passing curiosity but because they loved her. It is impossible to say just why this was so, but it was so.
QE2 was celebrated, acclaimed, revered and respected.
Yet it was a miracle she ever came into being at all. In the early sixties, in a miasma of muddled management and indecision, Cunard began planning replacement tonnage for the ageing Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. With alarming consistency the company made the wrong decisions, and only as late as the last minute was it pushed by external forces into avoiding disaster. But what this relatively conservative company eventually embarked on was a revolutionary replacement, at least 25 years ahead of her time: QE2.
Even when she took to sea and could be seen by all to be one of the most beautiful ships ever built, truly the pride of the Clyde, she was dismissed by City analysts rather unoriginally as ‘a white elephant’ that, in another inappropriate metaphor, would be ‘mothballed’ within six months. The age of the transatlantic liner, they said, was dead.
Well, how wrong they were.
QE2 spent her service life in the limelight, and her career at sea was even more eventful than her birth. It was not all exotic voyages and ecstatic welcomes. It included sailing 6,000 nautical miles south, partly through an icefield in the dark, without radar, to make her singular contribution to the Falklands Campaign; it involved various threats, from extortionists, from the IRA and from the Libyan government; it included rescuing all the passengers from a liner in distress, and having all hers similarly rescued after she hit rocks; it featured visits from every senior member of the Royal Family, from prime ministers and presidents, rock stars and film stars, and from Nelson Mandela. Not a year passed without something happening that would have been once-in-a-lifetime for any other ship – and usually hitting the headlines in the process.
QE2 was a phenomenon and there is no doubt she will continue to be one for many more years in Dubai where she retired in 2008. She was just one of a long line of noble Cunard transatlantic liners, but she served longer than most and she travelled further than any other.
And on 26 November 2008 the hearts of many were breaking!
Topic: 10 Years Ago Today: Wednesday 26 November 2008 (Read 781 times)
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