RMS Aquitania

White Star's Olympic, Titanic and the coming Britannic outweighed Cunard's Lusitania and Mauretania by 15,000 gross register tons; the Cunarders were faster, the White Star ships thought more luxurious. Cunard's response, planned from 1910 under naval architect Leonard Peskett, was to borrow the rival's model — a slightly slower ship, but larger and more comfortable. The order went to John Brown & Company at Clydebank, builder of Lusitania, and the keel was laid in the same plot that had held her. Named for the Roman province of Aquitania to match her two predecessors, she was the third of Cunard's grand trio and had no sister.

Peskett drew a hull about 130 feet longer and wider than Lusitania's, gave her four funnels to echo the famous speed pair — none of them a dummy — and borrowed glassed-in superstructure touches and tall forward ventilator cowls from his earlier Carmania. He sailed on Olympic in 1911 to learn how a 50,000-ton ship felt. Cunard paid for her alone, but she was built to strict Admiralty specification, reinforced to mount guns as an armed merchant cruiser.

The Titanic inquiry marked her too: Aquitania was among the first new ships to carry lifeboats for everyone aboard — eighty of them, including two motor launches with Marconi wireless, in a mix of swan-neck and newer Welin davits — with a double hull and subdivision meant to keep her afloat with five compartments flooded. Twenty-one double-ended Scotch boilers in four rooms fed Parsons turbines across three engine rooms driving four shafts. She was launched on 21 April 1913, christened by Alice Stanley, Countess of Derby, and fitted out over thirteen months.

Aquitania's public rooms were the work of Arthur Joseph Davis of Mewès and Davis, the firm behind the Ritz in London. In a strange arrangement between rivals, Davis took Aquitania while his partner Charles Mewès decorated the Hamburg America giants Imperator, Vaterland and Bismarck, the two working in England and Germany respectively and forbidden to discuss it. Davis gave her a Louis XVI dining saloon, a Carolean smoking room and a Palladian lounge faithful to the manner of John Webb. Passengers called her the Ship Beautiful.

Her extra length and beam bought space rather than speed. Second class had its own dining room, lounges, smoking room, veranda café and gymnasium, unusual for that class on a British liner. Third class, usually crammed forward on Cunard ships, ran the full length of the hull with three large dining rooms and open and enclosed promenades. She could carry 3,220 passengers in 1914.

Her maiden voyage left Liverpool on 30 May 1914 under Captain William Turner, arriving in New York on 5 June — a crossing overshadowed by the loss of the Empress of Ireland the day before, though not a single passenger cancelled. She averaged 23.1 knots despite a five-hour stop for fog and ice, briefly exceeded 25 knots, and burned notably less coal than Lusitania or Mauretania. Homeward she carried 2,649 passengers, a record for a British liner leaving New York. Six crossings and 11,208 passengers later, the war took her.

She was converted to an armed merchant cruiser on 5 August 1914, stripped of decoration, armed, and on patrol by the 8th — a career of seven weeks, ended when she collided with the liner Canadian and the Admiralty concluded that big liners cost too much to run as cruisers. Recalled in spring 1915, she carried some 30,000 men to the Dardanelles between May and August, sometimes in company with Britannic or Mauretania, then served as a hospital ship in the same campaign. In 1918, under James Charles and wearing dazzle paint, she ran North American troops across from Halifax, once carrying over 8,000 men — some 60,000 in nine voyages.

Refitted at Armstrong Whitworth in Newcastle and converted from coal to oil, she returned to commercial service in July 1920 and had an extraordinary 1921: thirty crossings and 60,587 passengers, more than 2,000 a trip. With Mauretania and the former German Imperator, renamed Berengaria, she formed Cunard's 'Big Three'. American immigration restriction in 1924 gutted the third-class trade — 26,000 passengers in 1921 down to about 8,200 in 1925 — and Prohibition helped in its place, sending drinkers onto British ships and, after 1929, onto her cheap Mediterranean 'booze cruises'. A cinema was added in a 1932–33 refit. When the 1934 Cunard-White Star merger sent Mauretania and Olympic to the breakers, Aquitania was kept.

The Second World War saved her from a planned 1940 retirement. She was one of the handful of liners fast enough to sail unescorted — grouped with Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, the second Mauretania, Île de France and Nieuw Amsterdam — and she went everywhere. She carried Canadian troops to Scotland in Convoy TC1 in December 1939, escorted by Hood, Warspite, Barham, Resolution, Repulse and Furious; she lifted New Zealand and Australian troops in the great US.3 convoy of May 1940, rerouted mid-ocean to Britain via Cape Town as France fell.

In November 1941 she sailed from Singapore, and on the morning of the 24th picked up twenty-six survivors of the German raider Kormoran, lost in the mutually destructive action with HMAS Sydney — her captain breaking orders not to stop, and holding radio silence until Wilson's Promontory came in sight. She took 4,150 Australian troops to Port Moresby that December, carried the Singapore reinforcement as the single-ship convoy MS.2 under HMAS Canberra's escort in January 1942, ran troops from the American west coast to Hawaii, brought the Australian 9th Division home in Operation Pamphlet in 1943, and fed the Normandy build-up. In eight years she steamed more than 500,000 miles and carried nearly 400,000 soldiers.

Handed back to Cunard-White Star in 1948 and refitted, she spent her last working years carrying war brides and their children to Canada under charter from the Canadian government — a service that left a particular affection for her in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they came ashore. Her final commercial voyage ran from Halifax to Southampton between 24 November and 1 December 1949. The Board of Trade declined to renew her certificate: her condition had deteriorated, and bringing her up to new fire regulations would have cost more than she was worth.

She sailed from Southampton to Faslane in February 1950 and was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation for £125,000. Breaking her up took more than a year and finished in November 1951. She had steamed three million miles over 450 round voyages and carried 1.2 million passengers in nearly 36 years — the longest-serving Cunard ship of her day, the only major liner to serve in both world wars, and the last four-funnelled passenger ship to be scrapped. Cunard's own nickname for her, Old Reliable, was earned in the second war rather than the first.

Cunard historian Michael Gallagher records that Churchill credited Aquitania, with Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, for shortening the war in Europe by a year. Her wheel and a detailed scale model are held in the Cunard exhibit at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax — the port that saw both her wartime troop sailings and her last, quieter cargo of families.