I was lucky enough to cross the Atlantic on the QE2. Now a show at the V&A rekindles that era’s impossible glamourUntil the recent advent of other kinds of vessel – huge tankers and container ships – ocean liners were the largest moving objects that humans had ever made. They were also very magnificent. How was it,then, that when the last worthy transatlantic liner was being built, and only a few miles from where I lived,I never went to see it on the stocks? That my glimpses of it were always distant and accidental?It was as though there was nothing exceptional about the sight of a steel hull and superstructure rising at a slant above the rooftops of Clydebank, the bow pointing inland towards the Dunbartonshire hills. Other illustrious liners had risen in the same way at the same space – the Lusitania, and the Aquitania,the Empress of Britain and the two Queens – and smaller ships of the Canadian Pacific and Cunard fleets still regularly anchored downstream off Greenock to pick up passengers bound for Canada. By 1967 we must have known that jet aircraft were bringing these patterns of industry and travel to an end; even so, I was careless enough to be in a Glasgow dentist’s chair having a tooth pulled – personal decay at odds with a worthy historic moment – when the Clydebank hull at last slid into the river as the QE2.
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Source: guardian.co.uk