Our October meeting started with David Hutchings‘ fascinating talk on Cunard’s Queens at war, starting with an introduction to their predecessors’ failure in their planned role as armed merchant cruisers. Queen Mary, launched in 1936. Supposedly the original plan was to name her Queen Victoria, preserving Cunard’s tradition of ending their ship names ‘ia’. On being told that she was to be named for the greatest queen of Britain’ King George V is said to have remarked, ‘So kind to name her after my wife.’ A rapid script adjustment followed.
Queen Mary was immediately converted for use as a troopship on the outbreak of the Second World War. She typically carried up to 8,000 troops at a time, hot bunking, with a record on one occasion of 17,000. By the time she set out on her last voyage to Long Beach (where she remains) she had covered 3.8 million miles and carried 2.2 million passengers. Queen Elizabeth, launched in 1940, went straight into military service, carrying 800,000 troops half a million miles by war’s end. Her post-war commercial career ended in 1968 when, after passing through several owners, she was converted to a floating university in Hong Kong. At this point an accidental fire broke out. In seven places at once.
David concluded by reminding us that 92% of UK imports arrive by sea.
Nick Hawkins followed with a lively and informative presentation on the Bulgarian torpedo boat Drazki. This involved diving into the (sometimes hazy) distinction between displacement torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers (or simply ‘destroyers’), then into Balkan politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He rose magnificently to the challenge of keeping the audience awake for this bit. Moving on to the specific career of Drazki he brought out the, err, challenges of attacking a cruiser with the weapons then available. Closing to 50 metres, anyone? Finally – and here’s the point – Drazki (or at least a ship of that name) may be the only surviving WW1 ‘destroyer’ in the world. The talk was all the more impressive because much of the source material is in Bulgarian and was accessed with the help of Google Translate. Some of its suggestions were idiosyncratic, but there you are.
Please see our Events page for future attractions.