Social history lessons on ship ......Cunard Heritage

As you can see from previous posts I have recently got back from 10 days on QM2, and throughout the ship there are various posters and displays about the history of both the ship and Cunard Line as well as displays showing the many 'famous' people who have used Cunard ships over the years.

The mosaic of Sir Samuel Cunard is made up of little images of many of the ships from the Cunard fleet, as you can see from the image across.

There is a long history and many ships have sailed under the Cunard name, but this week when reading the paper I read a story about the loss of life on the Lancastria in 1940 while she was acting as a troop ship.

She must be one of the ships in the mosaic, but not sure where so I thought I'd look for some background. What I did find was this Cunard Heritage site, great background about all the ships and history of the company.

A Dubai fire sale?

With the problems in the financial markets over the last year or so, the fate of QE2 is still uncertain. The old lady is now one of a number of Dubai-owned assets which are being prepared for sale as part of there huge fund-raising exercise.

QE2 was purchased by Dubai World from Cunard three years ago for $100m, and they had plans to turn her into a luxury floating hotel, berthed at the man-made Palm Jumeirah island.

However, as property values have fallen and with the company having a significant debt burden, they have been unable to put their ambitious plans into action. To reduce the debt burden Dubai World’s advisers, led by Deloitte, are expected to present the asset sale proposal to its main creditors in the coming months.

QE2 is the world’s most loved ocean liner, many people have stories and memories of the ship. She spent 35 years as the Cunard flagship, travelled over 5.6 million nautical miles doing 25 World Cruises and cossing the Atlantic 803 times, acted as a trrop ship during the Falklands war and carried over 2.5 million guests.

What would you do with such an institution? Queen Mary is berthed in Long Beach as a tourist attraction/hotel. So I think that perhaps the QE2 should become the centrepeice of a Maritime Museum somewher in the UK.

See the link on cruises.co.uk