In September I was privileged to be invited to cross the Atlantic as a guest speaker on the Queen Mary 2. Having spent many years researching and writing about the shiploads of emigrants who in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sailed from Greenock, Liverpool, London and Southampton – as well as approximately 16,000 who embarked at Aberdeen and other local ports – I was excited at the opportunity to experience the transatlantic crossing for myself.
The 500-seat auditorium in which I delivered my lectures took my breath away. Occupying three of the fourteen passenger decks in height and about three quarters of the ship’s width, it also functions as a cinema and planetarium. Like many of the Queen Mary’s public spaces, it is decorated in the art deco style that characterised the ‘Golden Age’ of ocean liner travel in the 1920s and 1930s.
During the crossing we enjoyed lectures from Dr Stephen Payne about transatlantic shipping, past and present. As a child, Stephen had watched a Blue Peter feature about the destruction by fire of the Queen Elizabeth in Hong Kong harbour. The presenter’s statement that ‘nothing like her will ever be built again’ provoked him to write to the programme, predicting that not only would another such ship be built but that he would design it. Stephen had to wait for several decades before – as Chief Naval Architect of the Queen Mary 2 – he received his gold Blue Peter badge for successfully completing his project!
My own lectures drew on personal testimony from letters, diaries and interviews to evaluate the expectations and experiences of nineteenth- and twentieth-century emigrants as they crossed the Atlantic; disembarked in New York, Halifax or Quebec; and dispersed across North America. I was well aware that I was not standing in the shoes of my subjects. Cocooned in the comfort of the world’s only ocean liner, my story was vastly different from those so vividly portrayed in the journals and letters of steerage passengers who in days of sail – and even steam – had endured lengthy crossings in cramped and often hazardous conditions. A significant continuity with past testimony, however, was an acute perception of the vastness and emptiness of the ocean, even when sharing the shipboard space with 2,600 passengers and 1,100 crew.
Seven days and nights at sea provided time and space for a great mix of activity, contemplation and conversation. One highlight of the crossing was the opportunity to meet interesting people from many countries and backgrounds, not least over a succession of amazing dinners. I even secured a new interviewee, who had first crossed the Atlantic to the USA on the old Queen Mary in 1939, returning to England on the Queen Elizabeth after the war. An atmospheric backdrop to our recorded conversation was provided by the frequent blasting of the foghorn as we traversed the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
The final highlight aboard the Queen Mary was our much-anticipated arrival in New York. It was 5 am, and still dark, when she passed under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge that connects Staten Island and Brooklyn. At high tide, the clearance is only 13 feet and we joined with several hundred others to watch the manoeuvre from the top deck. But our arrival was also tinged with poignancy, for it was 11th September and at 8.46 we observed a minute’s silence to remember the time at which, 22 years earlier, the first plane had been flown into the World Trade Centre.
By mid-morning the tranquillity of transatlantic travel had been exchanged for the bustle of New York City, where a two-day stay allowed me to harvest some new archival material for what I hope will be another lecturing assignment on the Queen Mary 2 in 2024.