Passengers and crew share their memories of life on board Clyde-built Queen Mary

Travelling with another 100 servicemen, they had the ship to themselves for several days. Then hours before she slipped down the Firth of Clyde, heading to the deadly open waters of the wartime North Atlantic, the remaining passengers came aboard: about 200 servicemen along with chief of the general staff Sir Alan Brooke, Marshall of the Royal Air Force Lord Tedder and Britain’s prime minister Winston Churchill.

“Churchill didn’t appear during the voyage. We only saw him when he arrived, we saw the cigar first, and then when he got off at Halifax, Nova Scotia,” the former flight lieutenant recalls.  The 94-year-old from Haddington was en route to Montreal. Churchill, it transpired, was on his way to Le Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, the action centre of the history-changing Quebec Conferences, which involved the prime minister, US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Strategy vital to securing victory for the Allies was hammered out at these meetings.

Ahead of the 80th anniversary next year of the maiden voyage of the Cunard liner that offered the epitome of transatlantic travel, served as a troopship during the war and was much loved by celebrities including Clark Gable and Bob Hope, The Herald asked readers to share their memories of life on board. Bowie was among those who contacted us from across Scotland and as far afield as America and Australia.

“The ship was empty until they arrived and it was a bit boring on board at Greenock because the weather came down. The only good thing about it was that we were living off the fat of the land because the Queen Mary got all her food in New York.  “They printed the menu every day and had a bit of fun with it. Whenever there  was a sauce it had a name which had something to do with washing powder, like sauce Omo or sauce Rinso or Persil,” he says, laughing.

“The air force had decreed they wanted Liberators in a hurry and six crews  were sent to Canada. We had lost all our gunners, the engineer and the wireless operator. There was only the two pilots and myself left on my crew. The aircraft were made in San Diego and sent to Montreal. The objective was for us to ferry them across the Atlantic.”

During the war, Bowie made eight Atlantic crossings, fortunately with none coming under fire. The speed of liners such as the Queen Mary meant they could stay out of reach of submarines. “With Churchill we had a County Class cruiser and two Tribal Class destroyers as escort and they were swapped halfway because they couldn’t keep up with the Queen Mary,” says Bowie. He remembers the usually stormy waters of the Atlantic being dead calm and the men standing on the rails of the bow of the ship – “that trick they did on the Titanic”.

Alexander Bowie

The Grey Ghost, as the liner was known during the war, transported more than 750,000 servicemen, with as many as 16,500 American troops onboard at one time.  She zig-zagged across the Atlantic to avoid  U-boats and was by far and away the largest and fastest troop ship. Churchill travelled three times during the war and at one point said he considered it his headquarters at sea. The ship secured another place in the history books when it was the venue for him signing the D-Day Declaration.

Between 1936 and 1967, apart from the years of her war service, the liner with her three distinctive red funnels plied the lucrative route across the Atlantic from Southampton to New York via Cherbourg. More than 1000 feet long and weighing more than 81,000  gross tons, the ship had a cruising speed of 28.5 knots (about 33mph). During that time she set a new speed record and took the Blue Riband title, the prestigious award given to a ship with the speed record for a transatlantic crossing, with record speeds for both west- and eastbound crossings.

She boasted five dining areas and lounges, two cocktail bars and swimming pools, a grand ballroom, a squash court and even a small hospital. These days she still earns a living as a floating hotel, permanently docked at Long Beach, California.

Romance blossomed for Ellen and Richard Stalley when they met on board 49 years ago. They were both aged 23. Ellen, who worked in social services in Ohio, was going on holiday, on a once-in-a-lifetime tour of Europe while Oxford graduate Richard was coming home after a year on a Fulbright scholarship at Harvard.  They were travelling in tourist class to save money and met in the cinema, a multi-purpose public room filled with rows of chairs that couldn’t have been more different from the glamorous image most people have of the liner.

“We left New York late in the afternoon and met the following day, within 24 hours of setting sail. We didn’t spend a lot of time exploring the ship because we just wanted to be together,” remembers Richard, 72, a retired professor of philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

“For me it was very accidental coming home on the Queen Mary. I had been counting my money to figure out how I could hang on in America and originally planned to come back on the Sylvania. Then I recalculated and decided I could spend a few more days there and switch to the Queen Mary.”

The couple live in Jordanhill, Glasgow, and from their garden they can see the Titan Crane and the site of the former John Brown shipyard, where the Queen Mary was built. Looking at photographs of their first few days together, Ellen explains that she didn’t want to travel on a package tour and ended up making the trip with another American girl, with plans to visit England, Holland, Germany, Italy and France, before flying back to the Midwest from Paris. She thought this would be her only trip to Europe but life worked out rather differently.

Though her accommodation was fairly basic, she has fond memories of the Atlantic crossing. “Although we were both in tourist class, I was one level up from Richard. He was in the bottom of tourist class where there weren’t any portholes in the cabins. He was below the waterline. Even so, we didn’t have our own bathroom or toilet: you had to walk down the hall. And there were bunkbeds in the cabin, it wasn’t like a luxury cruise. If you jumped out of the top bunk, which I was in, you could nearly hit the wall,” she laughs.

Though the dress codes of first class didn’t apply in tourist class, Ellen did get a peek at life on the upper decks one day when she lost her way.  “First class was very posh. Richard arranged to meet me at the swimming pool. I somehow found my way to the first class pool but he wasn’t there, obviously he went to the proper pool. I remember somebody was trying to chat me up and took me through first class, so I saw the public rooms. It was very luxurious, quite different from the part we were in,” she says.

They married in the US in August 1969 and flew to Glasgow the following month to set up home, after Richard found work at the university. Two children and one grandchild later, they still look back with fondness and affection on the great Queen.

A fireman in the engine room of the Queen Mary, John Fleming remembers a particularly stormy Atlantic crossing returning from New York one December in the 1950s. “I’m not a religious person but I started to pray. There were waves about five storeys high and we could see an American destroyer in the distance. One minute it was there, the next it was gone as we went away down in the trough of the waves and came back up on the crest. It was unbelievable. I prayed if I ever got back to land I would never go back to sea again. I did, of course,” he says, smiling.

The lure of working on the iconic ocean liner was too much of a pull for the young man from Motherwell who was in his early 20s and saving up to get married to his sweetheart Jean. “The biggest surprise I got when I went to join the ship was when we turned into the docks and saw the size of her, it was unbelievable. You got a real kick from the fact the ship was made in Scotland,” he says.

John Fleming on board the Queen Mary

Fleming, now 83 and living in New Stevenston, in North Lanarkshire, worked the graveyard watch in the engine room, stripped to the waist because of the fierce heat generated by the 24 boilers. “It was the only ship you went down in a lift to the engine room. They used to bring visitors down at night and one time a woman asked a boy, ‘Where is the coal?’ He told her it was an oil burner and when she asked what kind of oil he told her it was castor oil. He could have lost a day’s wages for that.”

Though the celebrities and Hollywood stars who sailed on the liner were many decks above enjoying the ship’s luxurious first class facilities, on one crossing Fleming remembers American actress Joan Crawford venturing below to present the crew with two barrels of beer. “She had lovely sandy hair and stayed for a while in the Pig and Whistle, the mess we would gather in, to talk to the crew. After the two barrels of beer were nearly emptied the master of arms quickly took her away.”

For engine room crew like Fleming, their quarters were below the waterline where they slept eight to a cabin. It was like sleeping in a submarine, he says.

The conditions couldn’t have been more difficult for third engineer Joe Perkins in the 1960s. The 82-year-old from Newcastle, who moved to Arran when he retired, was in a cabin on the boat deck, previously used by cabin class passengers. Before the war, engineers were in quarters on the waterline. That all changed when unions called for improved conditions.

“The accommodation was great. They were well decorated and I remember there was a lot of veneered panelling. It was convenient to feed us from the first class galley. The menus would be put in the engineers’ mess and luxury items which were for first class passengers were scored through with a pen. So you couldn’t have the caviar or truffles. We had a good relationship with the stewards so if you fancied something like that I’m sure he could get you it,” he says.

When the liner docked at Pier 90 in New York harbour, Perkins got his watch off, working four hours on and eight hours off. Times Square and everything the city had to offer was just a 10-minute walk away.  Life at sea was worlds apart from other ships he had sailed on. “The Queen Mary was always immaculate and clean. Because of the number of engineers everything was kept in perfect order.  “For 11 months of the year the route was Southampton to Cherbourg and New York. Every January she went in for repair at Southampton, they did everything from removing carpets to parts of the boiler.”

A few years before he sailed on the Queen, when he was qualified as a chief engineer, he had the chance to travel on the liner as a passenger when he was going to New York to meet another ship. With a chief’s ticket, he was entitled to travel first class but when he learned that meant he would have to wear his dress blues uniform every evening he declined, and opted to travel second class instead.

The celebrities and famous faces who travelled on board are well known; it is the stories of the other passengers, going on holiday, on business, or heading off to start a new life in another continent, that are among the most exciting.

Young Glasgow man John Penman sailed to New York on board the great liner in September 1967 on one of her last crossings before taking up permanent residence at Long Island. With love in the air, he was sailing to meet his American fiancee Lynn, who had been his pen pal for three years. All these years on, they live in Statesboro, Georgia, and in December celebrate 48 years of married life. “I still remember my cabin number – D107 – which was way down in the bowels of the ship,” says the 76-year-old who has two married daughters and three grandchildren.  “There were four of us in the cabin, all young men who had never met one another. We became good friends and hung out during the voyage. It was very exciting for me because I served my apprenticeship as an electrician at Fairfield’s shipyard in Govan and had watched many great ships go down to the sea.”

Even in those last few weeks the Queen Mary spent at sea, Penman could still feel the rich heritage of the ship. He remembers chatting to a senior barman who had been a member of the crew for many years and served Churchill. And the handrails around the decks still had the carved names of American soldiers who sailed to Britain for the Normandy invasion in 1944.

“In mid-ocean, we all went up on deck to watch the Queen Elizabeth come up abreast on her eastbound voyage. The two ships passed each other like speedboats, with horns blowing in salute,” he marvels. “When we got to New York the Queen Mary was met with fireboats, all shooting water high up in the air as a salute to a great ship.”

Penman has another link with the liner. His father was a painter on the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth when they were built at John Brown’s shipyard in Clydebank. With his wife, Penman has visited the Queen Mary in Long Beach and heard first hand from their tour guide of her encounter with the ghost of a child who drowned in the swimming pool many years before.

His last connection the ship came after 9/11. He worked for the US government as a federal emergency communications manager during times of natural or man-made disasters. When he responded to the World Trade Centre attack and arrived at the Federal Disaster Office, he realised it was in the Cunard terminal building at Pier 90, where he had disembarked from the Queen Mary all those years ago.