On September 26, 1934, the Cunard liner Queen Mary was launched at John Brown and Company's yard at Clydebank, on the Clyde, in front of a crowd estimated at about 100,000. She was 1,019 feet long, 118 feet in the beam, and about 81,000 gross tons. She was the largest and fastest ship built in Britain, and she slid into the water sideways, down a slipway that had been widened for her.
Competition made her. Cunard had been building two liners to take the Blue Riband from the German Bremen and Europa and the French Ile de France, and the Depression had stopped the work in 1931 with the hull of one about a third done. The government then agreed to lend Cunard money to finish the Queen Mary and build a second ship, the Queen Elizabeth, on condition that Cunard merge with the White Star Line, which was failing. The merger happened in 1934 and the money came with it.
She served a weekly route. Two liners can keep a weekly transatlantic schedule between them, one leaving each end, and that is what the design assumed: about 2,000 passengers in three classes, a crew of about 1,100, and a speed of 28 or 29 knots sustained. She had 12 Yarrow boilers and four sets of geared turbines on four shafts, and she could produce about 200,000 shaft horsepower.
The name was a secret. Cunard had said only that the ship would be named after a queen, and the name Queen Victoria had been expected. The Queen, who was there to launch her, announced Queen Mary after the King had asked her.
The fittings were Art Deco and the ship has the reputation of being the last word in ocean liner design before the style went out: a first-class pool, a library, a cinema, a squash court, and a winter garden with budgerigars. The interiors have been restored and the ship is now a hotel and museum at Long Beach, California.
Her record came in 1936, when she took the Blue Riband from the French Normandie in August with an average of about 30 knots, and lost it to her in 1937, and took it back in 1938 and kept it until the American United States took it in 1952. In the war she carried about 800,000 troops and sailed at 28 knots, unescorted, because nothing could catch her.