(See Cover) Rule, Brit-ann-ya,
Britannya rule the waves!
Britons nevernevernever
Shall be slaves!
Over the dingy Southampton docks loomed the three gigantic orange stacks, the coruscating white superstructure of the Queen Mary, Captain Illingworth, Master. Her 1,020-ft. length and her towering height dwarfed the battered buildings of the blitzed waterfront. The tugs chugged alongside. Antlike figures made fast the tossed lines. The town band, percussive and perspiring, panted with bravura through the Merry Widow Waltz, Pomp & Circumstance, and struck up the great invocation: Rule, Britannia! Through the mist in some watchers' eyes the colossal Cunarder wavered moltenly. Even Colonel Blimp blew his nose with a Tory blast prolonged by the boom of the great ship's sirens, which are pitched two octaves below middle A and audible ten miles across the downs. On decks and dock, the handkerchiefs fluttered, bon voyage bouquets were waved. The farewells grew fainter across the widening water.
Out in the stream the tugs cast off. The Queen Mary, carrying 1,883 passengers, was on her own, on one of the most momentous of her many momentous voyages—her first run 'as a luxury liner since World War II. As the Isle of Wight fell astern, and she glided majestically past the coast of England, the Queen was not only steaming for New York but out of an all but vanished age—an age of which she had once been a sumptuous symbol, and whose splendor (and profits sorely needed by Britons) she was making a gallant attempt to recapture.
Family Voyage. All across the Atlantic the weather was on the side of Britannia. The smooth sea was just what Captain Illingworth ordered. Most of the nights were lit by a theatrically mellow moon. But as the shoreline died away, the passengers had little to look at but themselves. The few inveterate voyagers among them recognized that nothing about the Queen Mary had changed quite so much as her passengers. The prewar glitter of the salon list was dimmed. Gone were the orchids and the ermine. Few British escapists, yearning after the fleshpots of Manhattan night life, rubbed magnificent elbows with U.S. escapists returning home from the fleshpots of Europe. Few colossal deals would be consummated in the hushed and paneled smoking room.
No sooner did the first sun come out than children came out too, in swarms. Scores of the deck promenaders and loungers in the deck chairs were the parents of British girls who had married American servicemen. They were going on a visit rather than a voyage. It was a family outing.
Many first-class passengers had scarcely been out of Britain before. A lawyer whose hobby is the antiquities of London looked forward to meeting the governor of Georgia, with whom his American son-in-law was acquainted. "Do you suppose," he wondered, "that it would be indelicate of me to ask His Excellency—is that right, do you call him His Excellency?—what that mixup was all about that time they seemed to have several governors of Georgia? Would he mind discussing it?"