QE2 - The Final Voyage Timewatch

In 1967, at John Brown's Yard in Glasgow,

a newly-built ship launched a remarkable 40-year love story.

The QE2 captured the heart of the nation.

An empress of the seas, she became a great British icon

and the most famous liner in the world.

The marketing slogan in the 60s when this ship came out,

was, "Ships have been boring too long".

The QE2 has got the most magnificent bow profile.

The ship has got extremely elegant hull lines.

The QE2 was state of the art design and technology,

and she quickly established herself as the stylish and fashionable way to cross the Atlantic.

It was right at the cutting edge and rather than being some vintage piece that you'd see

in some Austin Powers movie, it's cool 60s, as opposed to cheesy 60s, and that's the important thing.

She was so cool that the top stars of the day couldn't get enough.

They all wanted to be seen on the QE2.

Pure scale, pure engineering, pure grace, pure balance.

A floating piece of symmetry.

I don't think you can help but feel proud to be British

with something that is so... beautiful, so iconic.

To be aboard the Queen, I should have been living in steerage.

But there I was in first class and I loved it all.

The legendary lady has established some impressive records during her four decades of service.

She has sailed more than 5.5 million miles,

carried more than 2.5 million passengers and crossed the Atlantic a staggering 800 times.

She has also survived terrorists threats and war.

She'll be sadly missed by a lot of the people who went on her,

certainly the boys who sailed on her to war, because it holds our last real abiding memories of our friends.

Timewatch joins the 2,700 crew and passengers on board as the QE2

leaves Britain for the last time and glides gracefully into retirement.

FOG HORN SOUNDS

On November 11th 2008, Britain's most famous ship

cast off from her home port of Southampton for the very last time.

The QE2 has been in and out of the port over 700 times, in her 40 year career.

Her final voyage from Southampton to Dubai will take 16 days,

calling at Lisbon and Gibraltar,

then across the Mediterranean Sea to Rome and Naples.

From there she'll head south to the island of Malta

and on to Alexandria in Egypt,

before negotiating the Suez Canal one last time.

Her final resting place will be Dubai

where she will be converted to a floating hotel.

Tickets for the final voyage sold out in just 35 minutes.

For the 1,700 passengers lucky enough to get one, they can look forward to two weeks of luxury,

elegance, relaxation and some of the finest dining afloat on what has become the nation's favourite ship.

Ladies and gentlemen, the master of the QE2, Captain Ian McNaught.

APPLAUSE

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the Queen's Room. As always on the QE2, it's my personal

pleasure and privilege to welcome you on board for this final voyage.

What a great send-off from the city of Southampton. I hope you enjoyed that.

APPLAUSE

Not a dry eye in the house, I think. A very special evening indeed

and a fitting end to the last home port call for this ship.

Anyway, on behalf of not just us here on the dance floor but all 1,000 who

make up the ship's company of this, the most famous ship in the world,

all I'm going to say is, enjoy this great ship because there never will be another one, so enjoy it.

For the passengers and crew, this journey brings to an end a long and eventful relationship

with what many call the most beautiful ship in the world.

I think really it's all a question of scale.

And it's quite difficult to appreciate the scale

when you're so close.

But then you get, for the first time, to look down a corridor and then you realise she's really big.

Because the corridors are like streets.

I think it's one of the post-war symbols of Britain.

It ranks as one of those things

that people recognise and stood a little taller when they saw it

sailing across the world. "Ooh, look, the QE2!"

Probably the most important word that for me sums up the QE2 is glamorous.

I walk on and it's like putting on an old pair of slippers.

You feel comfortable with it.

Probably because we know our way round

but we know everything about the ship, or a lot about the ship.

Perhaps more than some people. But I always feel at home.

What is special about QE2 is, of course, its mystique.

It was actually built and formed in a period

when there was still a great deal of romance attached

to the transatlantic liners.

People feel personally involved with the ship for some reason,

there's like a magic spell cast upon them when they come here.

It comes over everyone.

The story of the QE2 begins in the early 1960s.

She was a state of the art vessel, a masterpiece of British engineering.

The specially designed turbines and twin propellers would make her one of the fastest ships afloat.

But few people realised that the QE2 came close to not making it off the drawing board.

For a while it appeared that it might remain a dream in the designers' minds.

It was the dawn of the space age and the Cunard's two big liners, Queen Elizabeth

and Queen Mary, were coming to the end of their working lives.

A replacement would soon be urgently needed.

There was a big debate about what the role of this new ship

was going to be and there were Commons committees and all sorts.

Everybody, every man and dog

had a view of what the ship should be and there were those who

wanted a Queen Elizabeth replacement or a Queen Mary replacement and those who wanted a cruise ship.

Originally Cunard wanted a pure-bred ocean liner like The United States or The France or any of these other

large post-war flagships

but with the advent of jet air travel there had to be a re-think.

Cunard came up with a clever solution.

Their new liner would have two roles.

In the summer, it would sail the north Atlantic route to New York,

but in winter it would be a cruise ship, taking in destinations

such as the Mediterranean, the Caribbean

and eventually round the world.

That simple brief had a huge impact on the design of the ship.

They wanted it to go through the Panama Canal

and they wanted it to go across the Atlantic, and to some extent the two requirements are incompatible.

So they had this problem, they wanted it to go through the Panama Canal,

it had to fit through that, but it had to be tough enough, strong enough

and big enough to handle the Atlantic, when it got rough because even in the summer you get storms.

And the demands of being both a cruise ship

and a transatlantic liner, would define how the new ship would look.

As QE2 was to be a combined ocean liner and cruise ship,

she should have a kind of yacht-like appearance.

She was also going to be somewhat smaller than the existing Cunard flagships but taller as well.

So it was very important that she wouldn't appear top heavy.

Therefore the hull lines, the paintwork, the superstructure

details had to be very, very carefully thought through.

In the summer of 1964, Cunard put the construction of the ship out to tender.

All the big shipyards of the day were invited to pitch for the work.

Among them, the famous names of Harland and Wolff in Belfast, Cammell Laird in Liverpool,

Swan Hunter on the Tyne and the troubled John Brown's shipyard on the Clyde.

John Brown's bid was typical of a contractor who was struggling.

It was cheaper than everybody else's and it turned out that there was actually no profit margin,

and that's a problem for any big project if there's no profit margin.

People always underestimate costs so there's always a budgetary issue at the back of it.

And the second thing was that John Brown's put in a bid for completion

in May '68, when everybody else had put in a bid for about November '68.

So they were up against timescale problems and budgetary problems right from day one.

Construction began on the new vessel in 1965.

In engineering terms, the ship introduced many innovations.

The most controversial was to build the entire superstructure out of aluminium.

The decision to use aluminium in the way they did as a big structural...

It was part of the structural strength of the ship,

was a big, big call.

My Dad's neck was on the block if it hadn't worked.

He knew it was going to shorten the life of the ship

because aluminium has a limited life just as it does on aeroplanes.

But it's lasted 40 years and it's done pretty well.

But it wasn't just the radical use of new materials that caught the imagination.

The ship was designed to take people's breath away.

The QE2 has got the most magnificent bow profile.

The ship has got extremely elegant hull lines.

Because, of course, she was primarily an ocean liner.

She had to cut through the water as efficiently as possible and with as little motion as possible.

So she's got a very slender entry and then the bow soars up towards the forward mooring deck.

She's got a whale back above that, that is to say that the lines of the bow sweep up

towards the superstructure creating a kind of knife-edge sheer

which gives her a very dynamic appearance.

She is very symmetrical.

The proportions are brilliant.

However she was designed, and I'm sure it took years of preparation,

the lines and the symmetry they do hold you,

they are pleasing, they put you at ease.

With symmetry, it's a way of nature saying,

"All is well with the world".

The wonderful thing, I think, about the QE2 is its shape.

It's immediately recognisable and it immediately says... "cruise liner"

as opposed to so many of the holiday cruise ships,

which really are just floating tower blocks.

Whereas the QE2 had those beautiful lines,

the kind of lines that you could quite see a yacht designer

sitting down at a desk drawing what, for him or her,

was the perfection of shape to cut through the water.

FOG HORN SOUNDS

At noon our position was 46 degrees,

40 minutes north and 007 degrees 37 minutes west,

which places us some 265 nautical miles west

of the French port of La Rochelle.

Among the 1,700 passengers on board

are QE2 die-hards Bob Andrews and Frances Spires.

For them, the final voyage is a chance to look back over a 20-year love affair with the ship.

My first feeling was I felt so proud that I was going to be on her

because she does look like a Queen, in my opinion.

Her lines are beautiful, she's just stunning and every time you see her

if you go ashore and you see her sitting there, I get goose bumps.

It makes you feel proud to look back at her and think, "Gosh, I'm on that".

We affectionately call her "the old rust-bucket" but it's just a colloquial thing we use,

but she's far from that. Everyone bangs on about the new ships

that have super swimming pools and all the rest of it.

When we first came on here it had about five pools and they've removed all but two of them now

but having said that, it's still a wonderful, wonderful ship and it's a real class liner.

Bob runs his own sawmill and Frances is a former world Latin American dance champion.

It's their 42nd voyage, and like many of the QE2 regulars, it's an experience they never tire of.

They're seasoned travellers and they know all her discreet charms.

On this ship, you can sunbathe aft so when you're sailing, particularly on sea days,

when you're sailing, if you're laying there out on deck,

you can see the wake and you can see the movement of her stern

and it's just fabulous, just laying there just simply watching that.

As well as the beautiful lines of the ship, the original interiors were just as stunning.

The accommodation was of a standard never seen before on a British liner.

'The moment you enter the world of QE2, you're conscious that this is an altogether different ship.

'There's colour...'

'..style...'

We associate cruises with middle-aged cheese

with some kind of cheesy easy-listening crooners being on it.

And then everything about the whole way that the QE2 was presented

was clearly done with real design savvy

from the designers they chose who were at the cutting edge and world famous designers too,

using Conran fabrics to actually thinking about the user in a way

that we don't often. Even today we struggle to think about the users.

This ship was a radical change.

It really was a ship of the 60s and the marketing slogan in the 60s

when the ship came out was, "Ships have been boring too long"

and there's a picture of the QE2.

And it really was a massive step forward so it was the first modern passenger liner in the world.

But for the new ship to get to this stage she first had to go

through a painful and disruptive construction period.

Delays, strikes and technical challenges made for a painful birth.

There were a lot of difficulties at that yard at the time.

There were a lot of difficulties in the British shipbuilding industry.

First of all, there were so many different trades.

And there were a lot of minor labour disputes and when one trade was in dispute

the other trades couldn't get at the work that they were supposed to do

and that sort of thing.

Furthermore, I think one has to recognise that many of the men knew

that when the ship was finished there wouldn't be any more jobs.

John Brown's didn't have a very big order book

and they... were not anxious to finish the job.

The shipyard admitted in early 1967 that the new ship was already six months behind schedule.

In the summer of that year, all the major trades working on the new ship went on strike.

It was disastrous for Cunard and for the Government.

I remember going up at five o'clock one morning in the shipyard and some

question of absenteeism was raised

and one guy shouted at me, "Well, if you had to work in the cold,

"early in the morning in January with no covered place to do your work, you'd have the same problem"

and it was a very valid point, you see.

The Trade Unions were made up of very, very skilled people and were treated...

Well, really ignored, or when anything happened

they were the cause of the trouble and it made me very angry, that.

What people don't realise or don't emphasise, QE2 was built by the workforce,

it wasn't built by the managing directors, or by the bank,

or by the Government, and these guys were the most highly skilled people

in the world and very little reference has been made in the coverage to the steel workers,

the welders, the shipwrights, the people who actually built the ship.

Despite the setbacks, the new ship was launched on September 20th 1967.

Launch days were like Hogmanay.

When the QE2 was launched there were parties in the streets,

people were simply delighted that they'd got the ship

to the appropriate level of completion for launching on time.

Now up until that point she was known under her code name of Q4

and there was great anticipation as to what the ship would eventually be named.

Because she was a direct replacement for the retired Queen Elizabeth

the decision had been taken to also call the new ship Queen Elizabeth.

However when the time for the naming ceremony arrived, Her Majesty surprised everyone.

I name this ship Queen Elizabeth the second.

Some people in Scotland weren't particularly happy about that

because of course our present Queen is only Queen Elizabeth the first, north of the border.

May God bless her and all who sail in her.

But Cunard got round this situation

simply by giving the vessel the number two in Arabic,

so she became the QE2, Queen Elizabeth 2, much more modern and much more snappy.

As the newly-christened QE2 slipped into the Clyde

she carried the hopes of Cunard and their attempts to revolutionise the passenger liner industry.

40 years on, it's fair to say

that the experiment was a resounding success.

'A very good morning, ladies and gentlemen,

'this is the officer of the watch speaking from the bridge.

'This is to advise all passengers on the open deck

'that in approximately two minutes time,

'the ship's whistles will be sounded to indicate noon.'

It's a beautiful morning in Lisbon for the QE2's first port of call on her final voyage.

For Captain McNaught and his crew, it's a time of intense concentration as they guide the 70,000 tonne ship

through a delicate yet graceful manoeuvre to her berth on the quayside.

The pilot boat will come out and then he'll embark on the port side.

Once he's on board we'll speed up a little bit to about eight or nine knots

and we'll make our way to the centre of the bridge where you can see the tugs waiting for us.

After we've gone underneath the bridge, because it's a flood tide,

we'll turn the ship round in the middle of the river and then come back onto the berth

which is just on the other side of the bridge.

The Master of the QE2, Captain Ian McNaught, has been with Cunard for nearly 22 years.

He's been the ship's captain since 2003.

There is no day when you think, "Oh, gosh, I wish I wasn't here",

I don't think that ever happens, to be honest.

So I think people do hold this ship in great esteem and in great fondness as well

and they've seen it from its birth and here it is at the end of its working career as a liner,

so I think there is this nostalgia for it.

Each time QE2 puts into port, it's a big event.

People all over the world are attracted by the beautiful lines of the ship.

And it's always been that way, ever since her first transatlantic voyage to New York back in 1969.

She made that first crossing in just a little over four days

and a flotilla of small craft were waiting to greet

the new queen of the seas as she was escorted to her berth.

New York Mayor John Lindsay declared it QE2 Day in the city

and the love affair with this beautiful ship had begun.

MUSIC: "20th Century Boy" by T Rex

# Ow!

# Ah!

# Friends say it's fine

# Friends say it's good

# Everybody says it's just like Rock and Roll

# Ah!

# Ah!

# I move like a cat

# Charge like a ram

# Sting like a bee

# Babe, I wanna be your man... #

The QE2 attracted stars from the beginning.

Peter Sellers, Lynn Redgrave and Ringo Starr were among the first big names to get on board.

Later, David Bowie, Rod Stewart

and Hollywood legend Tony Curtis all sampled the QE2 experience.

I enjoyed the ship itself.

I remember going on little tours of it, we'd be in the hallways

of the corridors at topside and first class,

beautiful finished wood, you know,

polished every day and then we'd go on one section that went down some stairs...

..then another hallway, then some more stairs

and the next thing you know you could tell the difference of the class.

It's quintessentially English, it's almost snobby in the sense

there's a deck for people who pay a certain amount of money, a deck for people who pay and then below deck.

Whereas if you go on most modern liners you all dine

in six or seven dining rooms but they're for everybody.

So in that way it's a very British ship.

The upper classes, the middle classes and the lower classes,

they clearly still believe in. However much you laugh about it, they still believe in it.

One of the things that created the passion on the QE2

by people who've been repeat visitors year in and year out,

is the fact that when they went on board,

you know, it was like joining a family.

And they had this remarkable ability for either knowing your name or quickly remembering your name.

So they would greet you as though you were coming back into a rather exclusive club.

That's what it was in many ways.

I don't think you can help but feel proud to be British

with something that is so beautiful, so iconic,

so... perfect in every way.

From a passenger's point of view there are so many things that made the QE2 perfection.

From an engineer's point of view it made it perfection, they did something that was very very special.

The man charged with ensuring that all the celebrities who sample the pleasures of the QE2

have a five star stay is hotel manager, John Duffy.

Good evening.

He has been on the QE2 for 27 years.

This is the top suite.

People in the past who have stayed up here are people like Rod Stewart,

quite regularly on transatlantics,

David Bowie, George C Scott, Dean Martin and his entourage stayed up here.

It's a very exclusive area, it's not a walk-through area at all,

so it's very, very quiet and passengers can be very much alone up here.

Up in the penthouses we have butler service and obviously it's a very personalised service up here

which can include unpacking, packing facilities for the guests

and just about on-call all the day for whatever the guest requires.

If we go through here, it's a private dining area if guests so wish

and up the stairs here, we have a lounge area

and a winter garden and out to the forward balcony.

The ship itself is so loved by so many people that going around the ship you can feel

how the passengers are feeling very sad at this time

because it's going. This is where they've always come to for their vacations, for their holidays.

For some of them it's even been their winter home, they've done the world cruise year after year after year,

and the fact that it's going is very emotional really to these people.

FOG HORN SOUNDS

'This is the bridge. Good morning ladies and gentlemen, in approximately 15 minutes' time,

'all water-tight doors on decks five, six, seven and eight will be closed for testing purposes.'

As her career progressed, the QE2 became a very traditional ocean liner

and one of her most eagerly awaited events happens every afternoon at precisely 4 o'clock.

There's places in the world which are famous for afternoon tea,

Reid's in Madeira, The Ritz in London and the QE2 at sea.

We probably do... in fact I know we do far more

than they do because we can do about 1,000 on any one afternoon at sea.

But it's still very well served and very well presented and passengers really do love it.

At four o'clock or just about,

the doors are opened and they're allowed to come in and they come in with their trays, white gloves,

with their trays, come along, say, "Hello" to you,

"Good afternoon, how are you today? Would you like tea, coffee?"

Off they go out the back and come along with their teapots and then they come to you and you pass

them your cup, or they will actually go and pick your cup up for you, fill your cup, back on the table.

They serve all the hot drinks first

and then they'll come round with the platters of sandwiches.

And then after that, there's the delicious cakes.

HER HUSBAND LAUGHS

-The too-delicious cakes.

-Not forgetting the scones.

Not forgetting the scones with the jam which most people have to have,

and the cakes change, every day there's something different.

Their job is to make you relaxed and at ease

and to enjoy the whole afternoon tea experience.

Although life on the QE2 is all about elegance, grace and endless pampering for the passengers,

it hasn't been like that through her entire career.

In 1982, life for the ocean liner changed dramatically as she received a signal to return to Southampton

for a completely different sort of mission.

"Your vessel, Queen Elizabeth 2, is requisitioned by the Secretary of State for Trade

"under the Requisitioning of Ships order 1982

"and you are accordingly required to place her at his disposal forthwith."

Six weeks into the Falklands Conflict, with the country relying

on her speed and potential as a troop carrier,

the QE2 was taken out of commercial service and sent to war.

I don't think requisitioning the QE2 was as big a deal then

as it is thought to be now.

But it still caused some comment,

not least by Margaret Thatcher.

She, I think, was rather surprised and not perhaps best pleased

when she discovered that the military felt that they hadn't got enough troops down there.

She'd always been worried whether we'd have enough troops and equipment to do the job.

They came to her and said, "We really have to reinforce, and quickly,

"and we're proposing to take up the QE2 from trade", as the phrase has it.

She does say in her memoirs that she did query whether it was wise to send such

a prominent and well-known and indeed you might say beloved ship

down on a military mission.

All future sailings were cancelled by Cunard,

as there was no way of predicting how long the conflict might last.

Work began immediately on transforming the famous ocean liner into a troop ship.

They chopped big parts of the stern off

to accommodate helicopter landing platforms,

which were lifted on and welded in place.

On the foredeck, we had a helicopter landing platform as well.

We loaded hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of ammunition down in the foredeck.

We built a secret radio room for the intelligence reports coming in from Whitehall.

We covered over the carpets with hardboard, took a lot of the valuables away.

They even took the caviar away. I don't know why, but they did.

3,000 soldiers boarded the QE2 for the journey to the South Atlantic.

Some of them would not return.

For others, it would change the rest of their lives.

I can't actually remember the point at which we found out

we were gonna be sailing to the Falklands on the QE2,

apart from when we arrived in Southampton.

There was this huge ship, huge to us, because we'd only been involved

with military ships at this point and we'd never seen anything of the size or of the majestic beauty of her.

She really was a lovely ship to behold.

The QE2 set sail from Southampton on May 12th 1982.

She took just 16 days to reach her destination in the South Atlantic.

You didn't have an awful lot of free time until the evenings

because obviously, if you give soldiers too much free time, they'll get up to mischief... and we did,

I suppose. We found where the beer was all hidden and found an access to that and a way back again,

which upset a lot of people, because blokes were getting drunk then, and that always can lead to problems.

But, on the whole, our time was filled and we were never that bored

and we had a pretty good time going down.

More than 70% of QE2's crew volunteered to go with the ship.

Used to serving passengers, they now found themselves going to war.

I think the Argentines were looking for us, definitely.

As luck has it, when we moved on down to South Georgia, a lot of cloud

and fog came in so we were lucky we weren't seen from the skies.

We wasn't allowed to use radar

because they could pick up the signal and recognise who we was,

so we actually went through ice fields without radar.

And everybody rushed outside. It was freezing cold outside,

but everybody's standing there in sweatshirts.

You're just looking at these wonderful...

They're almost these ice cathedrals and they were crystal blue.

It was just spectacular.

You sailed through in millpond calm. The only thing making waves was us.

But the reality of the war left those in charge under no illusions

as to just how serious a target the QE2 was.

I'm sure that if the Argentine had sunk

and if they could have done, my guess is they would,

but I don't think they had the resources once the Belgrano had gone.

If they could have sunk it, they'd have received a boost,

but that was the risk that had to be taken.

As the QE2 neared her destination, the war raged in the South Atlantic.

In a four-day period towards the end of May, three British ships,

HMS Ardent, Antelope and Coventry, were all sunk,

with heavy loss of life.

It was now time for Simon and the soldiers from the QE2

to play their part in the conflict.

We got the shout, "Everybody back to their rooms! Get your kit together!"

Then we were told we were disembarking.

We were gonna jump off the QE2, which is easy when it's going like that.

You judge jumping down onto something coming up to meet you, is relatively straightforward.

Doing it the other way round, jumping off something, going into another vehicle... totally different.

We had our rucksacks, in military parlance, Bergens, and we jumped through the door.

The idea was to catch hold of the rope strop that was hanging down and swing yourself in,

but I missed that and it caught the back of my Bergen and threw me back out the doorway.

HE LAUGHS

It's one of those moments when your life starts to flash before your eyes!

This wonderful big marine who was standing there, I've no idea who he was,

caught hold of my webbing and pulled me back through the doorway.

It was at that point that I was willing to French kiss a marine.

Never before, never since, but it was at that point.

It was a very nervous moment

because there was no way I would have survived. I'd have gone into the water.

We had three minutes maximum in those freezing waters. I'd have been dead.

Three weeks after arriving in the Falklands,

Simon Weston was caught up in one of the worst attacks

on British soldiers during the conflict.

The troop ship Sir Galahad was bombed in Bluff Cove.

Simon suffered 49% burns and very nearly died.

It was just a very, very poignant moment of history for Britain,

because it was our land, fought for, and the war was won.

And I just think that the QE2's part in it was immense

and she...

..she'll be sadly missed by a lot of the people who went on her, certainly the boys who sailed on her to war...

because it holds our last real abiding memories of our friends.

So the luxury liner returns from war, carrying hundreds of survivors

from three British warships sunk in the South Atlantic.

Just as she was the perfect solution for getting troops

down to the war zone, the QE2 also became the ideal way of getting some of the casualties back to Britain.

The world's most famous liner had survived the war and was now on her way home.

On 11th June, as she passed the Needles lighthouse on the Isle of Wight, the Royal Yacht Britannia

came alongside, with the Queen Mother standing on deck to welcome back both the troops and the ship.

It was absolutely incredible to have the Queen Mother come up the river

with us and the Royal Yacht.

You know, it doesn't normally happen!

CHEERING

Well, the amount of heads bobbing up and down, you couldn't see a spare space anywhere on the shore.

It was completely covered with bodies and heads and waving flags.

I mean, it was really outstanding.

Shortly after returning home, it became apparent that the QE2's

exertions in the South Atlantic had taken its toll.

After the Falklands War, of course, she had severe mechanical problems.

During her Falklands service, she'd been driven exceptionally hard.

By the mid-1980s, she was somewhat unreliable.

She suffered numerous mechanical breakdowns.

So the decision was taken that she should be re-engined instead as a diesel electric ship.

On October 20th 1986, the QE2 made her final voyage as a steam liner.

Crossing the Atlantic, she was Cunard's final link in 146 years of steam-powered ships.

The QE2's powerful steam turbines had taken her a total

of over 2.5 million miles, equivalent to 120 times around the world.

'We are currently on a course of 110 degrees,

'making a good speed of 25.5 knots.

'Throughout the rest of the day and evening, we expect to maintain our current south-easterly course,

'making our way across the southern Mediterranean towards Egypt and Alexandria.'

As the QE2 makes her way south across the Mediterranean Sea,

the busiest part of the ship is in full swing.

The kitchens on the QE2 turn out a staggering 7,000 meals a day,

prepared by over 100 chefs.

It's amazing, you know, how smooth this goes.

There's no screaming, no shouting.

We do not shout and scream here.

It's the wrong way to go. Everybody's concentrated.

If you need something, you speak to the chef.

The passengers or guests should not suffer for whatever reason.

If he turns around and says, "I've changed my mind from the sirloin steak. I want the salmon"...

It happens quite often. The passenger looks at the menu and says, "Give me the steak."

Then the other passenger has the salmon.

"That looks good! I should have chosen the salmon."

The waiter says, "It's not a problem".

He says, "I need urgently a salmon".

Here you can see the flow. There's the sous-chef here, then the order comes in.

The vegetable, that comes this, then comes the meat, and it moves on more and then it goes out there.

So you have a flow. It really is a line service. That's what we do.

Doing 7,000-8,000 meals a day, you need to know what you're doing.

How much have you done so far?

-298.

-Already?

-Yes.

-Wow! OK.

The real challenge for Bernhard is that this is fine dining at sea.

So, when the QE2 hits stormy weather, he knows exactly what to expect from his chefs and waiters.

If you work on a ship and you are employed, you're a crew member, you're not seasick. It doesn't exist.

You took a job on board and obviously the ship is moving, so you cannot say, "Sorry, I'm seasick".

You have to go and work in a hotel shore side or something.

But it's not a big deal, really, no.

For me as a chef, it looks like very well-organised chaos,

but that's what it should be, you know?

The food is exceptional and the service is exceptional.

You're served by the same person, who takes care of you and who,

over a period of two weeks or ten days, you really get to know.

It's more like a family.

You're all part of a big family.

The evening meal is the highlight of the day.

We've got a lovely table, nice people.

On this ship, of course, it's pretty well collar and tie every night,

DJs probably for half the cruise.

If you wish to dine in a proper dining room or dining hall, you have to dress for dinner.

The food they served me was nice enough.

The waiter would come and put down and stand above me and they had

the menu and I'd say, "I'd like a corned beef sandwich

"with a Pepsi cola and some apple pie".

Then he'd go away and come back, or a supervisor would come back

and say, "Mr Curtis, we don't have any corned beef sandwiches."

I'd say, "What have you got?"

He'd say, "We don't serve sandwiches".

Each time I went to sit down, I made a little game of it.

They enjoyed it and I did too.

FOG HORN SOUNDS

'At noon, our position was 33 degrees, 28 minutes north

'and 22 degrees, 33 minutes east, which places us 38 nautical miles

'north of the Libyan coast.'

One of the highlights of the QE2's final voyage to Dubai, is negotiating the Suez Canal.

She begins her slow passage at dawn, as she makes her way

from the Mediterranean through to the Red Sea.

It's just over 100 miles long,

so it's a leisurely trip that takes most of the day.

'Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is the captain speaking from the bridge. Welcome to the Suez Canal.

'I'm pleased to say that, having made good speed on passage from Alexandria and arriving promptly

'at the canal limit at 2.30 this morning, we were given permission

'to join the first southbound convoy of the day.

'And by 12.30, we should take up position astern of the French

'navy ship Jean De Vienne, a guided missile destroyer, and the two of us will lead the transit for the final

'40 kilometres of the canal, hopefully clearing the canal at around teatime.

'We will update you on our progress, should anything change

'later on in the morning but, for now, enjoy the scenery of the Suez Canal.'

'Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and another glorious day at sea

'as we head east-north-east towards the Arabian Sea.

'Please take great care if you are outside in the sun but do enjoy the conditions

'at the same time and just remember, back in the UK, it's snowing, heavy frosts and minus temperatures.

'Aren't we lucky to be here, on QE2?'

As the QE2 reaches the coast of Somalia, the on-board security team are quietly on alert.

A supertanker had been hijacked by Somali pirates a few days earlier.

These waters are now among the most dangerous in the world.

As the passengers have fun in the sun, the security team keep a keen eye on the ocean.

We sit down, have a look at the area and decide on a plan of action that we're going to

execute while we transit through that area but, in reality, if we look at the trend, they've

all been slow-moving merchant vessels with a low freeboard.

The QE2, it's got the speed, it's got the height above the water, so we're a very low risk, really.

Even so, the crew of the QE2 are taking no chances.

Special high-intensity audio devices are fitted for extra security.

We certainly would be an interesting prize, the premier cruise ship of the world, the QE2.

It would be spectacular but they wouldn't have much of a chance of getting on board the ship,

never mind keeping up with it.

We are being watched from afar.

Help is at hand.

There's always a little concern in the back of our minds.

The safety of the passengers and crew must be my prime concern at all times.

That overrides everything in the ship.

But we will make a safe passage, there's no doubt about it.

Navigating her way through pirate seas off Somalia

isn't the first time the QE2 has had her security threatened.

In 1972, it was feared that the ship could become a target for terrorists.

On the return leg of a transatlantic voyage,

the QE2 had reached the midway point when the New York office of Cunard

received a bomb threat so serious that the elite Special Boat Service,

the SBS, were called in.

The SBS got a call just before midday.

I was told by my boss to go and look for two people

to parachute to a ship at sea.

About an hour later, we were taken out to an aircraft with

its propellers burning and turning, and there we met Robert Williams with his large pile of equipment.

We were bundled into the aircraft and, when we took off, we were told

we were going on a four and a half hour flight to the QE2, mid-Atlantic.

The crew had searched the ship.

They had come up with six packages which coincided exactly

with what the claim was.

Then we needed to find out as much detail about the ship as possible.

The Cunard office had been told that there were two passengers on board

who, when they got a coded message, would then initiate the bombs on board

and they didn't mind if they died.

Once they found her, the SBS team faced the difficult task of getting

from the Hercules onto the QE2, and there was another problem.

Bomb disposal expert Robert Williams had no formal training for parachute jumping.

Coming down, one was extremely busy getting the harness free,

so you can get out of it as soon as you hit the water.

I believe all of us hit in the troughs, so we immediately went under and quite deep.

Then the wave passed over us, so it actually went virtually black.

We bobbed up. Richard was shouting,

"Where are you?" I shouted, "Over here", and waved,

but I didn't realise waving with two hands was an emergency signal.

A launch was sent from the QE2 to pick up the men.

Once on board, Robert Williams set about trying to establish if there really were bombs on the ship.

The passengers had identified their baggage.

However, there were still a few items that had not been identified.

And Robert then went through the normal procedures

and put a disruptor charge through the baggage and blew the cases open.

Following the operation, the team established that the bomb threat had been a hoax.

There were no bombs on board but it highlighted the fact

that the QE2 was such a famous ship she was seen as a prime target.

Back on board the final voyage, the passengers are preparing for the last leg of the QE2's amazing

40 years at sea, before she begins her new life as a floating hotel in Dubai.

I always feel sad when I have to get off this ship, because I don't want to get off,

end of story, never have, from when I first came on her.

I never want to end the holiday on here.

I just don't want to get off. I want to stay on here for ever.

So I'm gonna feel even worse. I don't know how I'm gonna feel.

I know I'm gonna be very emotional.

It's been part of our life, part of our heritage.

Let's have a check, make sure you're all right...

It's another era, isn't it? We're moving into a new era of cruising.

We're losing the greatest cruise ship ever.

It's not just a ship to us. It's...

-A way of life.

-Yeah.

-It is.

-Our second home.

As the QE2 makes her way to Dubai, there are two other Cunard ships

plying their trade around the world's oceans.

The Queen Mary 2 is the flagship that has taken over QE2's transatlantic tasks.

The other ship is the Queen Victoria.

They'll be joined by a further cruise liner, the new Queen Elizabeth, in 2010.

She'll be a true Cunard Queen. She'll be reminiscent of ocean

liners of the past but with the modern conveniences of a new ship.

She'll have double and triple height spaces, elegance and grandeur, wood and mosaics and marbles.

She'll be a sister ship to Queen Victoria, but with some differences, to give her her own personality.

She really will be another Cunard Queen.

'Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

'Here we are on the final leg of our voyage to Dubai.

'It is exactly 40 years to the day that this ship put to sea.

'Wherever you sail in the future, I do hope you take special and happy memories of this great ship.

'On that note, I shall wish you all a great stay in Dubai and a safe onward journey back home.'

The QE2 has carried millions of passengers around the world in grace and style.

After 40 years' service, the time has come to say goodbye.

As she approaches her final destination, she is escorted

into Dubai by a Royal Navy frigate and, just as on her first voyage, a flotilla of admirers.

The QE2, for me, the memory will be elegance, style, class,

and not all of the liners manage those three.

I really enjoyed it. My father had a tailor's store.

We lived in the back of a tailor's store.

It was very primitive.

So, to be on board the Queen, I should have been living

in steerage, but there I was in first class and I loved it all.

I think, the minute you walk onto the QE2, you get this feeling of glamour,

of being cosseted, of... if you like, another era.

There ain't another one like it.

There isn't going to be another one like it.

It's very, very special.

The people of Dubai give the QE2 a big welcome, just as the people

of Southampton had given her a big send-off 16 days earlier.

The final party on board brings the QE2's life as an ocean liner

to an emotional close.

# For auld lang syne, my dear

# For auld lang syne... #

The day has come. She has served her purpose, she's served it very well.

And it's good that she's going while she's still at the top of her profession.

It is the last great British-built transatlantic liner.

There'll never be another one.

For Captain McNaught, there remains one final duty.

As of 14.05 local meantime, Queen Elizabeth 2, Southampton,

call sign Golf Bravo Tango Tango,

was handed over to Nakheel Dubai

and is now under the management of V Ships Monaco.

All documents and certificates are in good order,

the ship's articles are closed and this log book is now closed.

Signed, Captain A McNaught, Master QE2.

All gone.