Cunard celebrates 175 years of crossing the Atlantic

The last time I shipped out to New York from Southampton was over half a century ago, in 1961, when I was a baby. We stayed in New York for more than a year while my father worked for a Wall Street investment bank. During our homeward journey on the Cunard Line’s celebrated RMS Queen Elizabeth — 83,000 tonnes of staunchly riveted Glasgow steel — I won the best-dressed baby competition as the Roman sea-god Neptune (complete with a tinfoil trident).

Getting to and from New York was half the fun. Queen Elizabeth — “Lizzie”, to veteran Cunarders — represented all the beauty and glamour of ocean travel. She had a wealth of mahogany deck planking, polished brass rails and glistening veneers all around. But even then, the golden era of transatlantic sea crossings was already drawing to a close, their prestige eclipsed by the new jet airliners. Today only one ship, of any nationality, provides a regular express passenger service to New York across the Atlantic — the RMS Queen Mary 2. She was modelled nostalgically on “Lizzie” and, berthed in the oily waters of Southampton Cruise Terminal last month, she looked every inch a Cunard flagship. She was about to set sail on a historic recreation of Cunard’s maiden Atlantic crossing, exactly 175 years earlier. I was lucky to be on board.

On July 4 1840, the Britannia, Cunard’s first steamer, weighed anchor at Liverpool for a 14-day voyage to Boston by way of Halifax in Nova Scotia, carrying 115 passengers, 89 crew, three cats (to patrol for rats), a milk cow and the Royal Mail. The going was rough on dark heaving seas yet the journey changed the face of transatlantic travel forever. Britannia was not the first steamship to cross the ocean (the SS Savannah, a hybrid steam and sailing ship, had taken that honour in 1819), but her July 4 sailing marked the inauguration of the first regularly timetabled passenger service across the Atlantic.

The previous year Samuel Cunard, a Halifax businessman, had won a contract from the British government to provide a transatlantic mail service. With other investors he set up the British and North American Royal Mail Steam-Packet Company, which commissioned four paddle-steamers to operate from Liverpool to Halifax and on to Boston, monthly in winter and fortnightly the rest of the year. Charles Dickens was an early customer — travelling on the Britannia in January 1842 and, despite suffering seasickness and calling his cabin an “utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box” he travelled again with the company in 1844. Colloquially known as “Cunard’s Line”, it was officially renamed the Cunard Steamship Company in 1879 and went on to ferry some 2.5m European emigrants to a better life in the New World and to become a byword for stylish seaborne transport.

In Southampton last month, an air of excitement pervaded the QM2 as red-liveried bellboys directed passengers to their staterooms. Strung like bunting on board were commemorative “175” flags. From my cabin amidships on deck 10, I watched seagulls swoop down the Solent. Already the real world seemed remote and unessential to me. Palatial and all-inclusive, the ship has a ballroom, lecture theatre, planetarium, library, an art-deco Titanic-style dining hall and the world’s largest floating bookshop. Passengers do not want for anything; there is even a mortuary. 

At about 4pm on July 2 our engines thrummed into life. Rain was blowing squally off the Solent but I could feel the intoxication of the first league out from shore. Up on deck 12, an Irish Guards band in busbies serenaded our departure for Liverpool. It was nipping cold. In a pair of tennis shoes (one must do these things properly) I set out to explore. A heavy door on deck 9 aft led to Churchill’s Cigar Lounge, where a man in parti-coloured brogues was puffing importantly on a cheroot. “All right, captain?” he asked me. He said he was from Liverpool; the ship’s 2,600 passengers were of all nationalities, but British strongly predominated, with many Liverpudlians.

© Provided by Financial Times Queen Mary 2 arrives in New York on Cunard’s 175th anniversary sailing in JulyOfficially, the QM2 is a one-class ship, but higher-fare passengers are allotted tables in upscale restaurants. I ate like a king in the Princess Grill, where the Hungarian-born maître d’ was solicitous to a fault (“always important is the lady’s and gentleman’s comfort”). Waiters uncork as many as 600 bottles of wine each day at sea; the ship’s Yorkshire-born executive chef Nicholas Oldroyd spends much of his time taste-testing. “Everything’s made from scratch,” he told me. “No powdered custards or granulated gravy substitutes.” Any food not eaten is “churned into a pulp” and discarded over the side for the fish.

The QM2’s 1,200-strong staff were a cosmopolitan, polyglot presence, the majority from the Philippines. Time was when Cunard was a very British company with British staff, British food and Clydeside-manufactured ships. All that has changed. QM2, launched in 2004 from dry docks in France, is registered in Bermuda, rather than in the UK. Cunard is now a subsidiary of Carnival Corporation, the Miami-based group that is the world’s largest operator of cruise ships. All the same, the QM2 retains something of the gracious suavity and Gatsby-like allure of Cunard’s grand old super liners. Grainy studio portraits on the walls of QM2 showed the actors, writers and jazz musicians who crossed on the Queen Elizabeth during the pre-jet golden age, among them Elizabeth Taylor and Duke Ellington.

At an average of 20 knots we ploughed through the English Channel, then north to Liverpool. We docked on the morning of July 4, and a treat awaited those who disembarked. In the city’s great Gothic Anglican cathedral a 175th Cunard anniversary celebration concert was under way, with Last Night of the Proms-style flag-waving and music played by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Samuel Cunard was handsomely feted and we learnt, among other things, that it was a Cunard ship, the Carpathia, that sped through the berg-strewn north Atlantic in 1912 to rescue 700 survivors from the Titanic.

Back on ship, the Liverpool esplanade looked regal in the early afternoon sun. At 2pm precisely, a foghorn sounded to signify the moment when the Britannia had departed in 1840. Thousands had lined the dock to wave goodbye as a firework display lit up the sky over Cunard’s splendid former headquarters at Pier Head. The company had been founded here and local pride in the fact remains. I watched the grey slip-slap of the Mersey as hundreds of new faces came up the passenger gangway. It was the first time in nearly 50 years that a Cunard ship had set out across the Atlantic from the great Merseyside city.

On deck 8 aft, meanwhile, passengers in yachting costumes were whooping it up for the sailaway party. I wandered around rather ill-at-ease among the swirls and eddies of hard-drinking, dancing people. (“Do you know the way to the champagne bar?” an elderly woman asked me. “Oh how kind you are.”) The ship’s glamorous unreality seemed to heighten during the eight-day journey to Halifax. My white-jacketed cabin steward, Eugene, was more and more Jeeves-like in his politeness and concern. (“I see that you are not wearing your slippers tonight, Mr Thomson.”) I was pampered royally.

The days followed a languorous routine. After cocktails in the Commodore Club, below the ship’s bridge, I took dinner at the Princess Grill, then went to the ballroom to watch passengers waltz under the instruction of the Ukraine-born dance instructor Volodymyr. Most nights the ballroom milled with Cunard-sponsored “gentlemen hosts” whose job is to dance with single women. David Swanston, from Derbyshire, was given free passage and meals in return for his chaperoning. “We’re not creepy guys looking for a blind date. We’ve got the official Cunard badge,” he told me. “You often know when a woman wants to dance because she’s sat there on the ballroom’s edge doing a hand-jive version of the waltz or cha-cha-cha.”

I learnt early on not to hurry the crossing but to slip into an intoxicated state of self-forgetfulness. The days blurred into each other as an extra hour was added most mornings to the ship’s clock to accommodate the changing time zones. (Jet lag seems uncivilised by comparison.) Some afternoons I lay slumped on the Sun Deck reading War and Peace, or else ambled round the Promenade Deck for exercise: three circuits of the ship was about a mile.

Annoyingly, I had forgotten to pack my binoculars but as we churned towards Halifax petrels, gannets and other seabirds could be seen bobbing on the Atlantic’s black swell. Once, 475 nautical miles off the coast of Ireland, a school of dolphins plunged round a spookily abandoned yacht. (The QM2’s thermal imaging cameras established that no human life was on board.) Occasionally a whale surfaced from beneath the brine, blowing air and spray.

By the end of the third day a new wellbeing seemed to radiate from me. Lulled by the motion and murmurings of the rocking Atlantic, I slept like a baby. And I was never bored. Each day’s schedule, left at our bedroom doors the previous evening, offered Shakespeare theatre performances, jazz concerts, AA meetings, architecture lectures, raffle draws, Roman Catholic masses, fruit and vegetable “carving demonstrations” and passenger talent shows.

Cunard prides itself on its formal black-tie and cocktail dress evenings. Tommi Baxter-Hill, the QM2’s dapper social host, offered to help me tie my black tie, since I had forgotten. From his coat-tails and buttonhole carnation it was evident that he had just come from a wedding (QM2’s Bermuda registration allows for on-board marriage while English law prohibits it). As well as officiating at marriage ceremonies, Baxter-Hill, a former professional actor, is also required to oversee golden wedding anniversaries, vow renewals and so-called “scatterings”, where a person’s ashes are dispersed from a Cunard vessel as stipulated in a will.

Suitably black-tied, I dined that night in the Princess Grill on duck consommé and fillet of Dover sole. We were now five days out from New York: the wreck of the Titanic lay silent and submarine at a point three nautical miles north. Stars winked and deck 10 seemed to be entirely white with moonlight. I was ready to retire, but even as I walked back to my stateroom I saw that the night was not quite over. A man and a woman in evening finery stood at the stern, gazing down at the ship’s wash. They kissed — one moment of magical encounter as the liner passed right over the Titanic’s final resting place. What a place to fall in love, I thought.

At Halifax we were free to go onshore when we liked. On the Canadian city’s outskirts the Titanic cemetery stood forlorn and hushed with poignant lapidary inscriptions: “Alma Poulson — 29 years old. Lost with four children.” Victims were ferried to Halifax for burial as it was the nearest land mass.

Passengers were up at first light in their dressing gowns to see Manhattan and that great monument to hope and opportunity: the Statue of Liberty. In the pre-dawn dark the faint clanging of bell buoys was eerie. A US Coast Guard boat guided us down the great tidal seaway of the river Hudson. At about 5am it was light enough to make out the mighty Verrazano-Narrows bridge. The foghorns of the QM2 boomed mournfully as we scraped under the bridge and the sun came up in a blaze of red. Liberty, raising her arm, seemed to say that it is never too late to seek a newer and better world.

Fire boats sprayed cascades of water into the air as a salute. Soon New York lay before us in all its summer humidity and human industry. To my regret the 12-day crossing was finally over, and it would not be long before the QM2 was turning homeward to Southampton. It had been a journey to remember above all journeys; already I could feel the sadness of farewell.

Details

Ian Thomson was a guest of Cunard (cunard.co.uk). Seven-night crossings from Southampton to New York cost from £1,499 per person for an inside cabin, rising to £11,649 per person for a Duplex Suite. Fares include the return flight and transfers.

Photographs: Jonathan Atkin/Cunard; Topical Press Agency/Getty Images; James Fassinger/Corbis