Country house parties by the swimming pool, big band dances in the ballroom, and a bowling green and croquet lawn on the Games Deck – these are some of the attractions which Cunard hopes will re-create the golden age of cruising on board their newest liner, the Queen Elizabeth.
The new ship, which will make her maiden voyage in October 2010, has an Art Deco feel throughout, as my early preview illustration showed last week.
Cunard’s aim, according to president and managing director, Carol Marlow, is to evoke the era of the first RMS Queen Elizabeth, which sailed from 1940 until 1968,
So the new Queen Elizabeth will be a floating theme park of nostalgia, its £2 million of specially-commissioned art work including a vast marquetry picture in the central triple-height lobby, and an art deco sculpture in the shopping arcade.
Even the globe to be installed in the library will show the countries of the world as they were in the 1930s.
The ship is being built at Trieste, in north-east Italy, at a cost of £365 million. The QE2, the world’s most famous ocean liner which retired last year, was launched in Glasgow in 1967 and cost £25.5 million to build.
At 964.5 feet long and 90,400 gross tons, Elizabeth will be the second biggest ship to enter Cunard’s fleet. She will carry 2,092 passengers in her 1,046 cabins – or staterooms, as Cunard prefers to call them – plus almost 1,000 crew.
Ms Marlow expects passengers to continue the Cunard tradition of dressing formally for dinner, and also hopes there will be stripy blazers and boaters for those poolside parties.
She is also determined that Queen Elizabeth will not suffer the same indignity which befell sister ship Queen Victoria when she was named by the Duchess of Cornwall in December 2007.
“It is our firm intention to make sure the Champagne bottle smashes,” she said.
Queen Elizabeth’s maiden voyage, to the Canary Islands, will leave Southampton on October 12, 2010. Travel agents will have the cruise on general sale from April 2, and previous Cunard passengers can make their bookings a day earlier.
Nostalgia for the ’30s and ’40s? If my knowledge of history is correct, the 1930s was the time of the Great Depression, and we were at war in the 1940s. Sounds like fun