Photo by John Shearer at Invision via Cunard Facebook
Despite their drastic age difference they are and always will be sisters. And yesterday, for the first time since the MS Queen Elizabeth was completed in 2010, the 77 year-old RMS Queen Mary had a rendezvous with her youngest sibling.
Beginning in 1947, the RMS Queen Elizabeth and Long Beach’s own Cunarder Queen Mary, the line’s “Grand Dame,” would crisscross each other along their North Atlantic routes for twenty years when bouncing between Shouthampton, United Kingdom, and New York City. Their last meeting was on September 25 in 1967 when the Queens made their last voyage.
The RMS Queen Mary was eventually sold to Long Beach that year while the RMS Queen Elizabeth was sold to Hong Kong. The latter was sadly destroyed in 1972 when an odd and still-unknown fire set the ship ablaze, capsizing due to the water used to fight the fire.
In 2010, the Cunard line introduced its newest ship, the MS Queen Elizabeth, a 92,000 ton giant who accomodates over 2,000 passengers built and named in honor of the lost RMS Queen Elizabeth.
The oldest and youngest siblings in the Cunard line–with the Queen Mary completed in 1936 and the Queen Elizabeth just three years ago–offered a plethora of onlookers in the Long Beach harbor the chance to see nautical history Tuesday night as the Queen Mary opened its doors to the public for the meeting. At 7:45PM, the two Queens finally met one another, adding another royal rendezvous to the list of Queen meetings over the last few years, including the previous meetings of the Queen Mary and the Cunard Princess, the Queen Mary 2 and the Queen Victoria.
Video courtesy of Long Beach Post reader James Brooks
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