I was watching a video of the launching of the “Queen Mary” (Scotland, in 1934 - after a three-year construction halt due to the Depression). It followed the traditional procedures - the christening with a bottle of something bubbly (probably not Champagne - for a British ship?), and the slow glide down the slipway into the water.
My questions:
(1) How complete was this ship (or any passenger ship in general) at launch time? Any engines installed at this point, or did it have to be pushed/pulled by tugs to its next destination?
(2) Where was the fitting-out completed? In another drydock, or on the water? Always nearby, or could it be some (short? long?) distance away from the launch site?
(3) Were there any special ceremonies preceding the ship’s maiden voyage? Or just a large group of people waving good-bye?
Another “Queen Mary” related question: the documentary I was watching noted that the ship was docked in New York when WW2 broke out. She was emptied of her furnishings and painted gray to prepare her for wartime service. She was then sent to Sydney (Australia) to be fitted out for war. But why all the way to Sydney? Why not to Canada (e.g. Halifax) - a lot closer, and with the facilities to do the work. Were they afraid of possible U-boat attacks?
Can’t speak to the QM in particular, but the usual practice at the time was to install the major machinery while the hull was still “open” (before the upper decks were installed). However, since the superstructure — including the funnels — might not yet be in place, the machinery was not functional. After launch the ship would be towed to a “fitting out” dock for completion. This was not a drydock, but the ship might be put in a drydock during the process if a need arose.
Large ships today are usually (always?) built in a modular fashion, so the above is out the window.
The general trend over time was for self propelled ships to be more and more complete at launch, though smaller ones were also often more complete than larger ones (the weight of a large ship on the building ways could be constraint). Queen Mary was apparently fitted with both boilers and turbines after launch. As was correctly pointed out, a newly launched ship’s machinery is virtually never operational, but the major components might be fitted in QM’s time, and that’s almost always true now*.
Fitting out is mainly accomplished afloat, but the ship might go into drydock to perform certain work not easy to perform afloat which wasn’t done prior to launch, like fitting propellers for example. This was also more common back then ships were mainly launched off inclined ways and were less complete at launch.
There was a large public attendance of QM’s initial voyage down the Clyde. For modern merchant ships built in the Far East (where the vast majority are now built) the main ceremony is usually when the ship is delivered, since it’s almost always built in a building dock which takes a few hours to flood, so there’s no dramatic event to celebrate at launch. The ceremony usually features traditional rituals from that country (China, Korea, Japan as the case may be).
As mentioned the ship’s related mission was bringing troops from there. Fast passenger ships were considered essentially immune to submarine attacks in the open ocean because of their speed, and were only escorted in places where they couldn’t go fast or narrow places a submarine might predict they’d be. Nor could fast warships keep up with them over any distance anyway (cruisers and destroyers had similar theoretical speeds to very fast liners, but especially destroyers, the most useful against subs, could only maintain full speed for 100’s of miles and had to slow down significantly in any kind heavy sea).
*besides it being generally more efficient to fit ships with as much equipment, piping, wiring etc as possible as soon in the production process as possible, it’s particularly easier to fit and align machinery when the ship is on a solid level surface in a building dock. When inclined building ways were the rule (they haven’t entirely disappeared but are now rare) the ship, obviously, wasn’t level.
And, unlike Halifax, Sydney didn’t have anything better to do. Halifax built destroyers, and was a major repair center for ships damaged in the Atlantic.
I don’t have the date when the Queen Mary sailed for Sydney, but it may have been before the start of the Pacific war?
If you ever go cross the Erskine Bridge, which carries a motorway high above the Clyde west of Glasgow, have a look at how narrow and winding the Clyde is.Then consider that the Queen Mary and the larger Queen Elizabeth both sailed down it on their first journeys. It is several miles before the river and the channel are wider than the length of those ships. It must have been a fantastic sight. When I worked in the area I was asking older people if they’d witnessed the journeys, but no one I spoke to had (the QE’s one in 1940 was probably secret in any case).
On this point, I have read in the past that there was an incident on the Queen Mary’s first journey not long after it left the shipyard. The story is that the ship’s bows grounded on one side of the river, and the stern grounded on the other. The ship was stuck for a time in a sinking tide and it was realised that if it wasn’t moved before low tide, the middle parts of the ship would be unsupported by enough water, the ship would break and become a write-off. This would then block the hugely important port of Glasgow for months or years to come. I have seen an aerial photograph of the ship at the wrong angle for the river, with each end close to one of the river banks, and several tugboats racing around in a panic trying to free it. They did free it in the end and the day (and much else) was saved.
The strange thing is that when I first read this story (online I think) a few years ago, people said it had been covered up at the time. Now I can’t find any reference to it, nor can I find the picture I saw.
That’s very interesting. My dad was born in Glasgow in 1940 and he would talk about how they had to widen the Clyde for the launch of the QM. Whether or not that was true (I think possibly not, the slipway appears aimed straight at the confluence with the Cart), he was probably getting mixed up with what the young chap was told about them widening the channel for the first voyage.
The maiden voyage wasn’t the first time the ship sailed on its own steam, the maiden voyage came some time later. Clyde built ships would go out into the part of open sea which is confusingly still called the Firth of Clyde for sea trials before the owners tool possession. These would include measuring the maximum speed on the Skelmorlie Measured Mile.
The Queen Elizabeth had to scoot away to New York without doing these trials - Wikipedia says they tested the engines beforehand by disconnecting the propellers.
There is a tale (apocryphal?) that the Chairman of Cunard told George V, when it was in the planning stage, that it would be named after “our greatest queen” (meaning Victoria) but George misunderstood and said “Her Majesty will be so pleased”, so they had to call it Queen Mary.
The French had launched the “Normandie” a year or so earlier, and there was great competition between the two countries for being the fastest to cross the Atlantic. Champagne would have been appropriate for French vessels, but sometimes a bottle of Scotch was used to christen a Clyde-built ship.
I wonder what Australian wine it was? It probably wasn’t a sparkling wine – Australian sparkling wines were called Champaign until the 1970s, when Australian sparkling wines in German and Italian styles started becoming popular.
My father was aboard RMS Queen Mary December 1942 when it was a converted troop ship. They were hit by a 28 meter rogue wave and nearly capsized (listed 52 degrees, another 3 degrees would have capsized the ship). With 16,082 troops aboard, the death toll surely would have dwarfed that of the Titanic.
My mother (a WWII British war bride, bombed out of 3 houses living in “bomb alley”) was a passenger on the QM when she and my sister came to America in 1945. Here she is with her mother-in-law who met them when they docked in New York Harbor.