Cunard's Queen Mary 2: royalty on the high seas

Stephen Payne was five years old when he saw his first liner on a grainy black and white television. It was 1965 and Valerie Singleton was taking a tour of Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth for the children’s television programme Blue Peter.

“It was love at first sight,” he remembers. “There was something captivating about that ship – her size and shape. She caught my imagination.”

Seven years later, the great vessel was reduced to a sorry wreck, semi-submerged and on her side in Hong Kong harbour following a disastrous fire.

“Blue Peter marked the Queen Elizabeth’s passing and said that a ship of her kind would never be launched again,” says Mr Payne. “I wrote in from school and said, 'Oh yes it will.’ I was going to design her.”

And so he did.

When the Duke of Edinburgh stepped aboard the Queen Mary 2 yesterday to celebrate her first decade in service, Mr Payne, the naval architect whose brainchild she is, was there to greet him.

Southampton played host to not one but three great Cunarders yesterday, all queens of the sea. The Queen Mary 2 was joined by the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, in a rare display of maritime grace and power staged to mark the company flagship’s 10th birthday.

People gathered on the shores of the Solent and Southampton Water before dawn to witness the arrival of the trio. A foghorn boomed out a doleful rendition of Happy Birthday to You as the QM2, all 150,000 tons of her, slid into her home port.

Prince Philip, 92, who served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, lost no time in deploying his famously salty sense of humour.

“So here are all the alcoholics,” he declared, on reaching one of the ship’s bars. A tour of the vessel and a celebratory lunch followed.

The British public’s enthusiasm for great ships remains undiminished in the early 21st century. The UK is the cruise industry’s most vibrant market, helping to expand a sector that has grown from under four million passengers globally in 1990 to more than 21 million today. Queen Mary 2 is at the apex of that industry, the world’s only true ocean liner, capable of making the Southampton to New York run in six days, even in the most challenging conditions.

“She is a genuine liner,” says Mr Payne. “She possesses the hull form, strength and power of her breed. Cruise ships have to slow down in the worst Atlantic weather, and generally take a more southerly route to avoid the worst of it.

“I’ve been aboard Queen Mary when 120 mph winds have been sweeping the deck and I can say she is a thoroughbred.”

Built by the French-South Korean combine STX at Saint-Nazaire on France’s Atlantic coast, QM2 cost some £700 million to construct. She was a brave commission, representing a considerable risk for Cunard, the high-end component of the enormous Carnival group, an Anglo-American conglomerate commanding half of the global cruise market.

Mr Payne was charged with creating a high-quality vessel on traditional lines that could supersede the Queen Elizabeth 2 as a liner while also serving as a cruise ship. To do so, he had to maximise cabin space while keeping an eye on tradition.

“I studied the designs of many trans-Atlantic liners like the Normandie,” says this pupil of Catford Boys School. “I insisted that modern improvements shouldn’t be allowed to detract from that essential pedigree.” One million design hours and eight million build hours later, Mr Payne’s dream was realised when the Queen christened his creation with a jeroboam of Veuve Cliquot in Southampton in 2004.

Power reserve is built in to sustain speed in bad weather — and much of her power is never used. Stabilisers weighing 70 tons reduce her roll by 70 per cent.

“I can vouch for her stabilisers,” says The Daily Telegraph’s Teresa Machan. “One foul night last October as the ship headed towards the St Lawrence seaway on a New York to Quebec City run, I would’ve been none the wiser had I not happened to open the room curtains and catch sight of the lurching Atlantic rollers before quickly closing them again and going to bed.”

But is she really a British ship? The days of British liner building are long gone and the last UK-built cruise liner retired earlier this year.

“Yes, she was built in France but this is a British-designed ship to her core,” says Mr Payne.

QM2 comes equipped with the usual selection of dazzling statistics: 38,000lb of smoked salmon consumed every year, together with 230,000 bottles of wine and, this being a British ship, enough tea to fill an Olympic swimming pool.

The top suites come equipped with their own private gym and passengers can while away sea days with courses on celestial navigation in the planetarium, or sessions in the 3D cinema. One detects that Mr Payne’s heart lies in the past, in the golden age of the trans-Atlantic liner, before the Boeing 707 put paid to those elegant, doomed behemoths.

“Of ships that I’ve sailed on, my favourite has to be Holland America Line’s Rotterdam,” he says.

“She was to me the most perfect ship — beautiful lines, big enough to be a good sea boat, but not too big, and fitted out with beautiful public spaces. Like a good wine, she aged well.”

Will the QM2 do the same?

“The ship was specifically designed to have a structural life of at least 40 years so she is still a youngster,” says Mr Payne.

And what will her successor, if there is one, look like?

“Passenger ship design is an evolving science and it really is too early to tell,” he says. “I imagine that economy will be to the fore but we will see.

“A replacement would have to be an epoch-making vessel, something spectacular. But we are a long way off from that.” The first Queen Mary, launched into the Clyde in 1936, was British through and through. Neither storms nor U-boats could threaten her — but the airliner could.

Yet, the popularity of the trans-Atlantic crossing is growing. Cunard expect to employ the QM2 on the run for two thirds of the year from April to December.

The likes of Rod Stewart apparently prefer to take a (relatively) slow boat home.

Already, QM2 has undertaken 419 voyages, including more than 200 trans-Atlantic crossings, called at 182 ports in 60 countries and carried more than 1.3 million guests. A lot more tea and champagne will be drunk before she ends her life as a hotel – or razor blades.

“I’ve been on her in a force 12 storm when she’s been able to sail through at 24 knots,” says Mr Payne.

“Other ships manage just four knots and radio: 'How do you do it?’ And the bridge replies: 'We’re the Queen Mary. What do you expect?’ It gives me immense pleasure.”

Visit the Telegraph Cruise Shows
Come along to the Telegraph Cruise Show in Liverpool, October 11-12 2014 and London, January 9-11 2015. Get tickets and sign up for the newsletter at www.telegraph.co.uk/cruiseshow