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Luxury Ferry. Grey and ghostlike in her war paint and swifter than any but the fastest warships (an average speed: 30 knots), the Queen Mary whipped around the Cape of Good Hope and up to Suez, turned up again & again in Boston and in Manhattan's North River, was sighted by Allied sailormen in ports and anchorages around the world. By the end of her war service she had carried 765,000 Allied troops to & from battle areas.
After V-E day the Mary carried U.S. and Canadian troops home again, a division at a time, topped off her war services by carrying G.I. brides and babies—2,500 at a time.
The Captain. Master of the Queen Mary in war, and in her return to peacetime service, is Captain Cyril Gordon Illingworth, 64. The Captain does things the way he learned that they should be done as a cadet (at one shilling a month) in white-hulled, white-topped, square-rigged ships, "with no steam at all." First of his family to follow the sea, he left his Lake District home for the long (about 100 days each way) run through the clean seas that lie between Liverpool's dirty Mersey and Rangoon's dirty Irrawaddy. Out with salt and back with rice, Captain Illingworth remembers now. "It was a hard life and a good life," he says, "and I like to think there will never be a better way of learning this trade. We used to say, 'When I leave the sea and go into steam—' "
After seven years of sail, he went into steam with the Cunard Line in 1910. In World War I, he served at Jutland, in H.M.S. Valiant, went back to Cunard when the war was over. He fondly remembers the Scythia, where he made the crew hop to their tasks. They gave him a handsome desk set when he left. Said the spokesman for the presentation committee: "You ran us hard, sir, but it's all in the way it's done."
As executive officer of the Berengaria, Illingworth's morning duty was to see that everything was shipshape. His special aversion was "Irish pennants"—ends of rope hanging where no end of rope should hang. "Bosun, what's that rope end dangling there for?" Illingworth would say. "Sorry, sir," the boatswain would answer, sending Seaman Brown to cut the end off. One morning, from a porthole, Illingworth spied two members of the crew, arms loaded with rope ends, tying them here & there to prepare a sort of treasure hunt for him. When he appeared for inspection, he spotted the first. The boatswain solemnly dispatched Brown to cut it. "Why Brown?" barked Illingworth. "Send the man who tied it there while I was watching him a half hour ago." Telling this story, Illingworth last week bounded about his quarters illustratively tying a handkerchief here, sticking a piece of paper there, until the bright, paneled room seemed aflutter with Irish pennants.