QE1

   Queen Elizabeth was officially named and launched by the late Queen Mother, Elizabeth, on 27th September 1938 and due to the war in Europe, her maiden voyage ended on 7th March 1940 with a surprise arrival in New York Harbour.
    She began this voyage by secretly leaving her fitting-out basin and heading for her home port of Southampton. As she headed down the Clyde, her captain opened his orders, which directed him to take his new charge to New York.
     When the Second World War broke out the ship had to be converted for service as a troop transporter. On most voyages she carried between 13,000 and 15,000 troops. During her war service she carried over 811,000 passengers and sailed over 500,000 miles. At 83,637 gross registered tons, she would be the largest passenger ship afloat for the next 34 years.
    In 1941 the U.S.A entered the war and in the months that followed she joined her sister ship (Queen Mary), taking American troops to Australia and from there, to the Middle East where the desert war was in full swing. Winston Churchill stated that the two queens had helped shorten the war in Europe by at least a year and further stated, ”To those who brought these two great ships into existence, the world owes a debt that will not be easy to measure. She was released from war

duty in March 1946 and underwent an extensive refit to carry her new Cunard colours for the first time. The Queen Mother, with her two teenage daughters, went aboard during her acceptance trials - (Twenty years later one of her daughters would give her own name to the QE2). She finally left on her maiden passenger voyage in October the same year and began a 20 year career of trans Atlantic crossings.
During the mid to late 1960s, as the number of people crossing the Atlantic began to decline, Cunard began offering her for more cruises. Unfortunately, she lacked many of the essentials expected of a cruise ship and even the addition of a swimming pool and central air conditioning in 1965 proved too little, too late and the great ship continued to lose money. She made her final Atlantic crossing on 5th November 1968. At the time she had already been sold to a group of Philadelphia businessmen for a large sum. After this she sailed to Port Everglades and was opened to the public in February 1969. By the end of the year she had been closed down by the local authorities as a fire hazard and was losing money.
The Queen Elizabeth was then sold to a group of businessmen headed by Mr. C.Y. Tung and renamed Seawise University. The plan was to convert her into a floating university. During the refit in Hong Kong much of her original interiors were removed and new machinery and furnishings were added. By early January 1971 most of the conversion work had been completed with the notable exception that the ship’s fire suppression systems had not been activated. As a result, when the fire broke out on the 9th January the small band of workers were in no position to combat the flames as they tore through the interiors of the ship, consuming the luxurious woodwork that had made her one of the more elegant ships at sea.

        As you can see from the photos here a number of fireboats did eventually arrive but by that time they were no longer in a position to stop the blaze. As the fire weakened the interior support structure of the ship the water pumped onto the upper decks caused the ship to eventually capsize onto her starboard side.
        The exact cause of the fire has never been firmly established, although the expected rumours of arson or insurance fraud have been cited by conspiracy buffs.
         The last time the QE1 was used was as the MI6 headquarters in the James Bond film ‘The Man With The Golden Gun.’

On 29th April 1972 Douglas Faulkner Woolley received the ownership and salvage rights to the Queen Elizabeth from C.Y. Tung. The salvage and repatriation of the QE1 will not be easy as she must be made seaworthy and repatriated from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom as soon as possible. Long Beech has the Queen Mary and the United Kingdom will have the Queen Elizabeth 1.
It is the intention of Mr. Woolley and the team at Seawise Salvors to resurrect the QE1 project, make her seaworthy and return her to England for restoration to her former glory, then put her on public for all to enjoy. The Queen Elizabeth 1as part of of our history will be where she belongs and the project used to raise her will be used as a test of what may need to be done to raise the Titanic at a later date.