His wife released the champagne against the bow, and with a roar, the great ship slid into the Clyde River.
Tugs then towed Queen Mary to the fitting-out basin where she would be, in the words of the king, transformed into the “stateliest now in being.”
As Queen Mary approached New York harbor on her 1936 maiden voyage, planes bearing photographers and newsreel cameramen swooped around her. The cameramen got dramatic shots of the enormous wave kicked up by her prow.
But Queen Mary failed to take the Blue Riband away from Normandie on her first voyage. It was not until August 1936 that Sir Edgar Britten pushed his ship to what he thought was the limit, taking the record with an average speed of 30.14 knots and a westbound sailing time of 4 days and 27 minutes.
His triumph was the first in a two-year back-and-forth battle between the Queen and Normandie.
Finally, in 1938, Queen Mary raced across the Atlantic in 3 days, 21 hours, and 48 minutes, beating Normandie’s 1937 time by an hour and 19 minutes. She averaged 31.69 knots.
And there the Blue Riband stayed.
Queen Mary beat Normandie in more than just speed. Of all the big liners on the Atlantic in the 1930s, the British Queen was the only one to make her owners a profit, and established itself as the A-list ship for celebrities, who found her atmosphere much more welcoming than the more opulent French liner. Rich Americans appreciated Cunard service, redolent of both a grand hotel and a British country house. She also appealed to ordinary travelers, who found her tourist- and third-class cabins vastly superior to those aboard Normandie.6 The British public, most of who never sailed on a liner, saw her as a trophy winner that vanquished foreign rivals. Despite complaints about her “Odeon cinema” décor, Queen Mary seemed to be a ship with a soul. Grand and fast as she was, she was cozier and statelier than the other European giants, whose nationalistic opulence could border on intimidating. While other superliners glittered, Queen Mary glowed. One could feel at ease aboard the Queen. Her regal name gave this grand machine a true feminine quality and linked her firmly to the nation whose flag she flew.
But not everything about Queen Mary was admired, especially her tendency to roll. Cunard had hoped that Queen Mary’s size would dampen her motion, and chose not to bolt down heavy furniture or install handrails in the corridors. It was a mistake. During one storm, with the liner tilted almost 45 degrees, a piano broke from its moorings in the tourist-class lounge. In the words of one crew member, “after two or three days of this the piano was reduced to its iron frame plus strings, and as it cartwheeled its way around the devastated room it uttered the most weird cacophony of noises.”7
Cunard eventually stripped Queen Mary’s interiors and found out that her engine machinery was too heavy and her superstructure too high, making her a bottom-heavy, or “cranky,” ship. The shipyard fixed the problem, at least partially, by placing ballast and water tanks higher up in the ship’s hull.8
William Francis followed Queen Mary’s problems with an odd sense of delight, saving newspaper articles that mentioned the ambulances greeting the Cunard flagship at her Manhattan pier to pick up passengers who had lost their footing and broken an arm or a leg. His designer mind wondered: how would a big ocean liner behave in rough seas if powered by the smaller, lighter turbines now employed in his newest destroyers?
The competition between the British and French liners captured the headlines, but they were not the only vessels on the seas. Both German and Italian liners held regular schedules throughout the 1930s to New York, although their visits were becoming increasingly controversial as fascism in both countries intensified. Italy’s Rex and Conte di Savoia sailed under the flag of Mussolini’s regime. By the mid-1930s, the specter of Nazism loomed over Germany’s Bremen and Europa, to the point where Americans, Jew and Gentile alike, were unnerved by her swastika-draped salons. (Kosher kitchens were shrunk, then shut down completely.) On July 27, 1935, a group of anti-Nazi rioters stormed aboard Europa as she sat docked at her Manhattan pier and cut the ropes to the swastika flag. When the demonstrators tried to stomp on it, protestors and crew members came to blows. The New York police came aboard and broke up the fracas.9 After the incident, an enraged Adolf Hitler made clear that the swastika flag would never be dishonored again: he decreed it the official flag of Germany.
As the European ships made headlines with speed records and anti-Nazi riots, the United States Lines still struggled to survive, even though it was now backed by Vincent Astor’s vast wealth. The company was chafing under an aggravating provision in their government contract: the aging liner Leviathan would have to remain in Atlantic service until 1936, making a minimum of five round trips per year. Her revenues were the worst of all the big liners—she was averaging only one-quarter full—even though Congress had repealed Prohibition and liquor could once again flow on American-flagged ships.10 Vincent Astor and the Franklins decided they had to take a drastic step to avoid being financially sunk by a seagoing dinosaur.
In 1933, IMM simply defied the terms of the contract and tied up the big liner at her New York pier, where she remained all year. Government pressure led to renewed service the following year, but Leviathan would make only five more crossings, losing half a million dollars, before IMM laid her up again.
The United States Lines was not the only company disposing of its old ships. To complete Queen Mary, Cunard White Star had to rid itself of many of its finest liners, most of which were built before World War I. After having been reduced to making budget booze cruises to the Bahamas for most of the early 1930s, the rust-streaked Mauretania sailed to the Scottish scrappers in 1935. President Franklin Roosevelt, a longtime admirer of the Cunard speedster, lamented that “the steel of her is being recast into shells, guns and other machines of destruction to human life.”11 Other prewar liners such as White Star’s Olympic—Titanic’s sister ship—and Cunard’s Berengaria quickly followed her to the breakers. White Star’s Majestic was given a brief reprieve when British Admiralty converted her into a training ship, but she was destroyed by fire shortly after her conversion.
As the older European ships disappeared, IMM president Philip Franklin had had enough with the superliner business. Paying the Shipping Board half a million dollars to be released from the Leviathan obligations, he ordered the ship out of service. In 1935, tugs towed the dead ship over to the same Hoboken pier where she had rusted after World War I. Leviathan would never carry another paying passenger.
But the breached contract drew the political scandalmongers, who charged that the Leviathan retirement was a corrupt bargain among cronies, reaching all the way to the president of the United States. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Ewing Y. Mitchell called the half-million-dollar deal “an example of official corruption,” a scandal that did not go away when Roosevelt axed him. Influential Washington journalist Drew Pearson, in his column “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” wrote that “the friendship between Franklin Roosevelt, his cousin Kermit, and Astor—the latter two chief owners of I.M.M.—the trips on the Astor yacht Nourmahal and the laying up of the Leviathan by I.M.M.—with Roosevelt’s permission—undoubtedly will figure in the next campaign.”12