The Queen Mary’s ‘Last Great Cruise’: 39 days, 14450 miles, one death, a stowaway and a celebration
There wasn’t a dry eye in the house on the Queen Mary’s last night at sea. Guests of all class and style belted out national anthems, danced under a barrage of balloons, and traipsed through thousands of strands of twirling paper ribbons until the wee morning hours.
Nearly six weeks earlier, on a drizzly October morning, Capt. John Treasure Jones stood in his crisp dress blues as he waved goodbye to the thousands lining the docks of Southampton. Folks had gathered at the English port to bid farewell to the RMS Queen Mary as it embarked on its final voyage.
Jones was anxious that morning; being Welsh, he was a stickler for time. Departure was delayed because he was waiting for a satchel of letterheads to be delivered, according to a historic account by Queen Mary Commodore Everette Hoard. The papers would be postmarked at every point along the Royal Mail Ship Queen Mary’s 14,450-mile route, a souvenir for stamp collectors.
The 39-day journey would take passengers through the Canary Islands, twice over the equatorial line, along the eastern coast of Brazil, through the hazardous waters at Cape Horn, and up the western coasts of the Americas.
The excursion, sold by travel agents as the Last Great Cruise, featured stops in seven port cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Panama, and Acapulco. There were a total of 1,093 passengers and just over 800 crewmen on board.
When the ship left Southampton 50 years ago on the morning of Oct. 31, 1967, it was stocked with enough food to feed a small army. Passengers crooned the words to “Auld Lang Syne” as the Royal Marine Band played in the background.
The Queen Mary gave one final blast of its horn as four Royal Navy ships escorted it out of the harbor.
The trip got off to a rocky start when the ship sailed through the Bay of Biscay, between France and Spain, where it encountered powerful winds that caused the ship to pitch and roll, making many sea sick, according to historic accounts in the Press-Telegram. Rain splattered the ship frequently during the first two legs of the journey.
The vessel sailed into the port of Lisbon a little behind schedule, where a stowaway named Stacey Miller snuck aboard at the Portuguese port. The 21-year-old railworker from Chicago was sitting at a waterfront bar, taking a rest from his backpacking adventures through Europe, when he heard the ship was heading for the States. So he hitched a ride.
He was found out rather quickly when he confided in a fellow passenger, who turned him over to the Master at Arms. Capt. Jones, being a reasonable man, offered Miller to work off his passage for $1 a day, an offer the young man accepted.
The rains lifted as the ship stopped for a short call in Las Palmas, where passengers stocked up on lightweight clothing and cheap, duty-free alcohol in preparation for the longest leg yet, a 3,544-mile trek through the tropics, heading for the coast of South America.
But the Queen Mary was outfitted to traverse the Atlantic Ocean, with routes between England and New York. On its final cruise, the rising heat south of the equator was a source of major discomfort. When temperatures soared to nearly 90 degrees outside, the ship felt more like an industrial oven. It got so hot that a chef by the name of Lock Horsborough died from heat exhaustion. Per his wishes, he was buried at sea, sealed in a canvas bag.
Images captured during that seven-day leg of the trip showed bikini-clad women, sunbathing with men in swim shorts, on the upper decks. But the weather was simply unbearable for some, including one couple who would depart at Rio de Janeiro and fly home to Los Angeles, leaving behind 300 pounds of rare books.
When Mr. and Mrs. Dunlap returned to the States they held a press conference detailing the horrid conditions aboard the ship. They claimed there were cockroaches and other unsightly insects. Few corroborated that account of the journey. Capt. Jones called the claims outright lies.
One of the more memorable moments on the cruise came when the ship rounded Cape Horn, considered one of the most hazardous shipping lanes in the world, and a passage that neither the captain nor the Queen Mary had ever attempted.
The Long Beach Chamber of Commerce even figured out a way to turn a profit on it, selling tickets “round the horn” aboard two red double-decker buses that were secured on the rear deck of the ship.
Prepared for a blustery encounter, passengers bundled up and climbed aboard the stationary buses as they the ship sailed through the horn, but the rains lifted just in time, and it turned out to be a calm, quite afternoon on the sea. Many stopped to take in the beauty of the snow-capped Andes mountains, a stunning backdrop to Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago in the southernmost tip of the Americas.
The monarch of the seas had officially made it to the Pacific Ocean. There were only a few stops to go before it reached its new home on the sunny Southern California shores.
Job No. 534
But, what many don’t know, is that the storied ship was almost never built.
The Queen Mary was initially thought up as a way recapture the Blue Riband — an accolade given to passenger liners that clocked the fastest Atlantic Ocean crossing — by building the largest, fastest and most luxurious steamship. The idea came on the heels of news that the Bremen, a 32,000-ton German steamship, had topped the Cunard Line’s record for crossing the Atlantic, dealing a blow to British national pride.
It was 1930 when the Cunard Line commissioned the work for the world’s first 1,000-foot ship, known then as Job No. 534. The mammoth project was given to John Brown’s Shipyard in Clydebank, Scotland, an afternoon’s walk up the river from the industrial city of Glasgow.
The timing of the construction, however, was unfortunate. America was in the midst of the Great Depression and the nation’s economic collapse had rippled throughout Great Britain, shuttering John Brown’s Shipyard and leaving the oceanliner dead in the water.
The partially built ship sat stagnant on the banks of the River Clyde for over two years before a British monarch, King George V, offered an idea: The government would loan funds to Cunard to complete Job No. 534 so long as it agreed to merge with the White Star Line, a prominent British shipping company that had fallen on hard times.
The plan worked. Three years later, in May 1936, the Queen Mary set sail on its maiden voyage. It soon became the preferred method of transatlantic travel.
It carried Hollywood celebrities, such as Bob Hope and Elizabeth Taylor, royalty and dignitaries, including the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. All walked the length of the ship’s tawny, teak wood decks, which, on a good day, amounted to a trek across three football fields.
Over the following three decades the Queen Mary would complete 1,000 crossings of the Atlantic Ocean. It would also ferry some 800,000 Allied troops between the United States and Europe during World War II. During the war years, the ship was stripped of its amenities and painted a drab, steely grey, hence the moniker, the “Grey Ghost.”
After the war, the ship’s luxury fittings were replaced and staterooms returned to their pre-war grandeur before servicing passengers again. Cunard’s sister ships, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, dominated the transatlantic passenger transportation market until the dawn of the Jet Age in the late 1950s.
End of an era
The emergence of transcontinental airliners hammered the proverbial nail in the coffin for the steamship travel industry. Passengers could now hop on a plane in New York and be in London the next day for afternoon tea. And it was less expensive.
Cunard had been losing money for nearly a decade before executives announced they would retire the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth from passenger service.
Word went out that the Queen Mary was for sale — so long as it fetched more than it could be sold for at the scrap yard. Officials estimated it was worth somewhere between $1.8 million and $2.5 million.
There were 18 bids in total, including one from the city of Long Beach, which said it planned to turn the ship into a maritime museum and tourist attraction, and another from New York, which envisioned it as a school for Brooklyn children.
Cunard selected Long Beach’s bid at $3.45 million.
The city manager at the time, John R. Mansell, called it “the greatest single catalyst for progress in the history of the city.” Only the 1933 earthquake — which leveled buildings and resulted in over 100 deaths — rivaled the Queen Mary acquisition in focusing national and international attention on the city of Long Beach, he said in a 1967 Press-Telegram article.
“Over the years I’ve talked to council members and city staffers who were around then and they all believed they were doing the right thing, but they also realized they were sticking their neck out,” said John Thomas, the Queen Mary’s historic resources adviser.
Cunard offered to deliver a near empty ship to Long Beach free of charge, but that was a far too anticlimactic for local big wigs who saw the Queen Mary as the way to put the seaside industrial city on the map.
But the cruise line, which argued the ship was not built for tropical travel, refused to sell the voyage. So Long Beach hired New York-based Fugazy Travel Bureau, which sold out tickets to the 39-day adventure in a matter of weeks. Prices varied from $1,200 and $9,000 per person.
Most who bought in on the voyage were retired Californians. Aside from a few children who were on board, the average passenger was over 60. Some, including 71-year-old New York aviator Kenneth Behr, had even traveled on the Queen Mary’s maiden voyage 31 years earlier.
Wanting to bask in the successful endeavor, a slew of local officials joined in on the journey.
An October 1967 Press-Telegram article depicts Vice Mayor Robert Crow, holding a bloody mary with one hand and his wife with the other, boarding a plane to London to travel on the Queen Mary from Southampton to Rio de Janeiro. Soon after, councilmen Bert Bond and Paul Deats replaced Crow, who flew home from Brazil while the pair rode around Cape Horn and into Valparaiso, Chile, Long Beach’s sister city. Mayor Edwin Wade and Councilman Emmel Sullivan then hopped on the ship for the last leg of the journey.
The Harbor Commission was also well represented throughout the trip, which the port board divided into three legs that were assigned to commissioners H.E. (Bud) Ridings Jr., William A. Harrington and Lewellyn Bixby Jr. Other local dignitaries, including the special and administrative assistants to the city manager, marine development manager for the port and the city, and the Harbor Department spokesman also found their way onto the ship.
The final four-day stretch from Acapulco carried passengers up the San Diego coastline and into Long Beach waters, where the ship was surrounded by a flotilla of boats, small and large. Thousands dotted the shoreline on that warm winter morning to watch the Coast Guard shepherd the ship into Pier E, bringing an official end to the journey on Dec. 9, 1967.
Commodore Everette Hoard, who has talked with hundreds of passengers during his 36 years of hanging around the Queen Mary, said the final journey “was one of the things that highlighted their lives.”
The Queen Mary has this sort of intangible magic, he explained.
“Even today, there’s been so much life and history on there that it affects you the moment you step on board.”
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