Foreign News: S.S. Nostalgia

“It isn’t a maiden voyage,” said distinguished Passenger Sir John Woods of the Board of Trade, “but it’s rather like the second marriage of a very attractive widow.”

The dim past when Britain’s majestic liner Queen Mary had been the sleekest ornament in the luxury passenger service seemed almost like another age. For all the long war years the Mary’s career had been grim and dedicated. But last week her widow’s weeds were gone. After nine months of beauty treatments in drydock, she shone bridelike again as she glided away from a Southampton pier to take a two-day trial run.

New black and white paint glistened on her freeboard and superstructure. Furniture that had gathered dust in warehouses from Sydney to New York was polished and reinstalled in her cabins, saloons and lounges. Decks and rails that had been pitted with the initials of some of the 765,000 troops the Queen had carried in wartime were scraped smooth once more. Spick & span in new uniforms, many of her old crewmen were back to serve again under jovial Captain Cyril Gordon Illingworth, the Queen Mary’s chief officer.

Planes swooped and circled outside Southampton as the huge Queen Elizabeth saluted her older sister with deep-throated blasts. Some 700 Cunard White Star guests, including a covey of admirals and a duke, were aboard to enjoy the ocean breezes in new super-deckchairs and gaze greedily at the shop windows in the promenade. The rich goods on display were held under customs seal until the Mary’s first overseas passage this week, but there were free champagne, cocktails, candy and cigarets for everybody and a larder full of food, the like of which Britons had not seen in years, brought over from New York on the Elizabeth.

On the first day out, rusty water ran from the taps, and showers overshot their marks in the newly refitted bathrooms. Dust blew out of air-conditioners and the movie projector blacked out several times. But luxury-starved Britons cared little for such minor hitches. At the end of two days under a perfect summer sky, a svelte passenger stood by the ship’s side inhaling the soft night air. Suddenly she caught sight of a dockside below littered with trucks, bales and dingy trains. “Oh, my God,” she exclaimed, “how ghastly to see the Southern Railway again.”