An early design for the new ship.
In the 1920s, Cunard operated a trans-atlantic service with three ships; the Mauretania (whose sister ship the Lusitania was sunk by torpedo in WW1), Aquitania, and the Berengaria (a converted German liner seized as a prize of WW1). Cunard began to lose business though to new liners from other countries, particularly Germany, and Cunard knew they needed new ships to compete.
Up until now, it had been necessary to operate three ships to maintain a weekly service between Britain and the United States, because the ships could not travel fast enough to cross the Atlantic and be refuelled and leave again inside a week. Cunard now proposed to build two liners fast enough to do this without the need for a third ship.
The first of these ships was the Queen Mary, completed in 1936. The second was the Queen Elizabeth (1939).
An early design for the new ship.
To be commercially viable, the ship would have to be large, very large in fact, in order to carry a lot of freight and passengers. Cunard thought the ships would have to be about 1000 feet long, and about 80,000 gross tons (1 gross ton = 100 cubic feet of non-engineering space).
22 scale models were built over two years, and 8000 experiments were carried out on various hull designs in a wave tank. The funnels (stacks) were tested in wind tunnels. All this in the 1920s: an age long before computers. The ship would have to do 28.5 knots to keep to schedule, so steam turbines would be used to drive her with four huge propellers.
A 20 foot long Queen Mary model, made to demonstrate the proposed design.
Cunard gave the contract for the construction work to John Brown & Co. Ltd of Clydebank, Scotland on 1 December, 1930, and the job number allocated to the ship was "534". Until she was named, the Queen Mary was always referred to by this number alone. Construction was to begin on "534" before the end of 1930.
Return to History Index or go on with the history of the ship The Construction of the Queen Mary Return to Main Index