RMS Mauretania

Mauretania was Britain's answer to a German decade. From 1897 the liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and her successors dominated the Atlantic — by 1906 Germany had five four-funnel superliners in service — while J. P. Morgan's International Mercantile Marine had swallowed the White Star Line. In 1902 Cunard and the British government struck a bargain: a £2,600,000 loan at 2.75 per cent to build two superliners, Lusitania and Mauretania, with a guaranteed service speed of no less than 24 knots and a stipulation that both could be converted to armed merchant cruisers if needed.

She was built by Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson at Wallsend on the Tyne, to designs by Cunard naval architect Leonard Peskett. Peskett had first drawn a three-funnel ship around reciprocating engines; when Cunard switched to Charles Parsons' new turbine technology — the largest application yet of it — a fourth funnel was added. Trials revealed severe vibration at speed, answered with strengthening members aft and redesigned propellers. Launched in 1906 by the Duchess of Roxburghe and named for the Roman province on the northwest African coast, she was at that moment the largest moving structure ever built.

Her interiors, overseen by the architect Harold Peto, suited Edwardian taste. The public rooms were fitted out by two London design houses, Ch. Mellier & Sons and Turner and Lord, in twenty-eight different types of wood with marble and tapestries, among them the octagon table in the smoking room. The multi-level first-class dining saloon of straw oak was decorated in Francis I style beneath a domed skylight, and a series of elevators — then a rare novelty on liners — stood beside the walnut grand staircase with grilles of the newly available lightweight aluminium. A Verandah Café on the boat deck proved unrealistic and was enclosed within a year.

Her maiden voyage from Liverpool on 16 November 1907, under Captain John Pritchard, ran into a storm that broke the spare anchor loose and cost her the westbound record. But on the return crossing that December she took the eastbound Blue Riband at an average of 23.69 knots, and in September 1909 she captured the westbound record too. She would hold both for twenty years — the only direct-drive turbine ship, with her sister, ever to hold the Riband.

The North Atlantic tested her. In March 1908 an 80-foot rogue wave smashed six bridge windows and injured an officer; that September her exposed propellers raced in a trough between two colossal waves and shed a blade, the vibration hammering the hull until the engines were stopped. In April 1912 she lay at Queenstown at the time of the Titanic disaster, carrying Titanic's cargo manifest by registered mail, while Cunard's chairman A. A. Booth organised a vigil aboard for the victims. In July 1913 King George and Queen Mary toured what was then Britain's fastest merchant vessel.

When Britain declared war on 4 August 1914, Mauretania dashed for the safety of Halifax, Nova Scotia, arriving on the 6th. She and Aquitania were requisitioned as armed merchant cruisers — the role the government's construction loan had always envisaged — but their huge size and massive fuel consumption made them unsuitable, and both resumed civilian service on 11 August. Unlike Lusitania she was not repainted in dark greys with black funnels, those precautions not being thought advisable for her. She was out of service at Liverpool for want of passengers when her sister was torpedoed.

Requisitioned as a troopship, she carried British soldiers to the Gallipoli campaign, her high speed and her crew's seamanship keeping her clear of U-boats. As casualties mounted she became a hospital ship alongside Aquitania and White Star's Britannic, painted white with buff funnels and large medical crosses, serving until 25 January 1916. Late that year the Canadian government took her up to carry troops from Halifax to Liverpool, and after America entered the war she brought around 35,000 US troops to Europe, roughly 5,000 per voyage, wearing the dazzle camouflage devised by Norman Wilkinson. She returned to Cunard colours in February 1919.

After a fire on E deck in 1921, Cunard sent her back to the Tyne yard where she was built to have her boilers converted to oil firing. The change cut her engineering staff from 446 to 175, let her make a full Southampton–New York round trip without refuelling, and in May 1922 she broke her own eastbound record. A turbine overhaul begun at Southampton in 1923 was interrupted by a shipyard strike, so Cunard towed her to Cherbourg to finish the work; she returned to the Atlantic in May 1924 and prospered.

In 1929 the new German liner Bremen took her speed record at 28 knots. On 27 August Cunard let the old ship make one final attempt to win it back. She fell just short — but in losing by a fraction, after more than two decades, she beat all her own previous records in both directions. From 1930, squeezed by the Depression and newer rivals, she ran six-day cruises from New York to Halifax, painted white for the role. In November 1930 she rescued 28 people, and the ship's cat, from the foundering Swedish cargo ship Ovidia.

The Cunard–White Star merger of 1934 left the ageing express liners surplus to requirements, Mauretania among them alongside Olympic and Homeric. She made her final eastward crossing from New York to Southampton that September at an average of 24 knots — exactly the speed her original mail-subsidy contract had stipulated nearly three decades earlier — and was then laid up, twenty-eight years of service at a close. Her furnishings were auctioned by Hampton and Sons in May 1935, and on 1 July she left Southampton for the Metal Industries breakers at Rosyth.

Sir Arthur Rostron, her former captain and the man who had commanded Carpathia during the Titanic rescue, came down to see her off but refused to go aboard, saying he preferred to remember the ship as she was when he commanded her. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was among the loyal passengers who protested her scrapping, writing privately against it. Cunard White Star, meanwhile, had the Red Funnel paddle steamer Queen renamed Mauretania to stop a rival taking the name, holding it until the new Mauretania was launched in 1938.

Her last voyage became a procession. She paused for half an hour at her birthplace on the Tyne, firing rockets, drawing crowds, and receiving the Lord Mayor of Newcastle's farewell. The town council of Amble telegraphed 'Still the finest ship on the seas'; she replied, 'to the last and kindliest port in England, greetings and thanks'. At Rosyth, where she arrived in a half-gale in the early hours of 4 July, a lone piper of the Black Watch played Auld Lang Syne from the quayside. Twenty thousand people paid to walk her decks that Sunday, raising £375 for charity, before souvenir hunters breaking into cabins for panelling forced the visits to be curtailed.

She survives in fragments. Her bell sits in the reception of Lloyd's Register in London, where two minutes' silence is kept and a wreath laid at its base each Remembrance Day. The carved and gilt African mahogany of her first-class lounge panelled a Bristol bar that still carries her name in neon and her bow lettering above the door, and nearly the whole first-class reading and writing room, chandeliers and gilt bookcases intact, serves as the boardroom at Pinewood Studios. A model stands in the Discovery Museum in Newcastle, and she appears in a stained-glass window of Newcastle Cathedral memorialising Andrew Laing, who designed her engines.