She was laid down at John Brown’s in December 1930 as simply Job No. 534 — Cunard’s answer to the new German and French record-breakers, and the biggest ship the world had attempted. Then the Depression struck. In December 1931 Cunard stopped the work, and for twenty-seven months the giant rusting hull towered over Clydebank, visible for miles: the most famous symbol in Britain of an economy, and a community, stopped dead.
Work resumed in April 1934, after a government loan on condition that Cunard merge with the White Star Line, and on 26 September 1934 Queen Mary herself named the ship — the first monarch to launch a merchant vessel — before an enormous rain-soaked crowd. Legend on the river says the name was a late surprise; Clydebank had assumed she would be Victoria.
In service from May 1936, the Queen Mary was everything her owners had hoped: she took the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing in her first season, lost it to the French Normandie and won it back in 1938, holding the record for fourteen years. Her art-deco interiors made her the most glamorous address on the ocean.
Her greatest service was in drab grey. As a Second World War troopship — the ‘Grey Ghost’, too fast for U-boats to catch — she carried whole divisions at a time, once more than 16,000 soldiers on a single voyage, a record never surpassed. Churchill reckoned the two Queens shortened the war in Europe by a year. The war years also brought her darkest hour: in October 1942 she accidentally ran down one of her own escorting cruisers, HMS Curacoa, with the loss of over three hundred sailors — under orders, she could not stop to help.
She sailed the Atlantic until 1967, made a final voyage round Cape Horn, and has been moored at Long Beach, California, ever since — hotel, museum and monument. Ninety years after her launch, the ship Clydebank built through the worst of times is still afloat.