RMS Queen Elizabeth (Classic Liners)

With an Andrew Britton book, one will likely get a very personal photo journal mixed with a few photos from other collections. This is wonderful, because most of his photos are in colour. There are not that many reprints from the interiors of Queen Elizabeth in this book, but more than his book on Mauretania (Green Goddess), and what is there is quite nice.The written history is mostly at the first part of this book, which is brief but adequate. There is the history of the ship's construction and launching with her immediate war time service, preceding her maiden voyage as a passenger liner years ahead. It then follows into the memories of her years with a plethora of photos of her in various ports, docking, leaving, on her decks, at sea, with many layouts of menus, programmes, hand written items from the Captain, letters, baggage tags, a headline, but no cutaways. On the last page, there is a wonderful reprint of the painting of the fleet of liners that hung at Pier 92 in New York, which I have seen many times sailing on Queen Elizabeth 2.I have a couple of other larger and more illustrious books on Queen Elizabeth, and this personal record rounds out my collection nicely.

Thus new book by Andrew Britton in the Classic Liner series is fantastic. Loaded with exterior shots, a good deal of which are in color. There is also a nice section of photos of her public rooms in color, however that section is small compared to the vast amount of exterior shots. There are also photos of menus and daily program of events. Commodore Marr contributed a section along with Officer Bert Jackson and Trimmer Joe Webb. These men provide fascinating first hand accounts of life aboard the Superliner. This is really a great book that I am thoroughly enjoying. I have only found two mistakes so far. One is simply a misdated photo, the other is a rather common mistake where a shot of Mauretania (II) is substituted for Queen Elizabeth. This is a well written, very interesting book and I thoroughly recommend it.

RMS QE and RMS Mauretania were both bought as gifts for my husband who served on the QE and was Chief Engineer on the Mauretania in the 1960's. He is thrilled with both books and it is hard work to drag them away from him to do other things. He is especially intrigued by the memorabilia Andrew Britton managed to accumulate in the illustrations, including a personalized invitation to cocktails signed by himself - "whoever would keep something like that all this time??" He is a hard man to buy gifts for - but these books are definitely winners!

To be short and sweet.......this is a book full of exterior photographs (over and over and over). There are (literally)only a handful of photographs covering the interior in this book. For years, all we have seen are detailed photographs of both the interior and exterior of the QM and I had been looking forward to the same here.....but NOT! Save your money if you are looking for a balance between interior and exterior photographs of the QE. There are less than (5) pages of the interior. All written descriptions, as well as a majority of the photographs can be found online. I've been waiting for nothing.

I love the history and photos of this great old liner which was before my time.

These books by Andrew Britton are really great for exterior shots - they're beautifully done - but rather short on interior shots - the same with his "Mauretania (II)" book - as I said the books are wonderful for tons of exterior shots - I just wish there had been more interior shots of her accommodations.

I enjoyed this book. All in all this volume in my opinion, is a welcome and refreshing change from much of what is currently being offered to the ocean liner aficionado. It was however a little disappointing to see some of the errors as regards the labelling photographs in the sister title on the Mauretania carried over to this. Indeed even in this book on page 105, the funnels depicted belong in fact to Mauretania. However without hesitation, notwithstanding the errors which appear to have evaded the proof readers pencil, I would recommend this book to anyone with any interest in passenger liners.

This was bought as a present and is great value for money and a lovely gift, the photo's are brilliant and my father was really impressed with it.

WANTED BOOK AS THIS WAS MY FIRST SHIP I SAILED ON AS A BELL BOY

The Queen Elizabeth liner was 11 ft. longer and some 4000 tons heavier than the older Queen Mary and remained the largest liner in the world for 56 years.Like the author I am also indebted to the late Colin Walker because without his encouragement we would not have had this beautiful book on the Queen Elizabeth in color. This color book ( there are less than 50pp in black and white ) is all the more to be appreciated because of the ship's genre which is 1945. Very few color images would have been available in those days, yet we have a beautiful color record of the ship today, more than 75 years later.The ship was named in honor of Queen Elizabeth later known as the Queen Mother. On 27 September 1938, the day of the ship's launch by the Queen, the liner started to slide into the water because Her Majesty had pressed the launch button too soon. Reacting swiftly, she managed to smash the bottle of Australian red wine over the liner's bow by cutting the red, white and blue ribbons just before the hull slid out of reach, and the ship was finally launched.The two Queens' high speeds enabled them to outrun German U-boats during the war when they had acted as troopships. The Queen Elizabeth was faster than the Queen Mary, having achieved a maximum speed of 32kt in trials compared to her sibling's 28.5kt However, the Queen Elizabeth was not permitted to operate faster than the Queen Mary by Cunard White Star chairman Sir Percy Bates who maintained that he did not want the Queens to compete with each other. Therefore the Queen Elizabeth's service speed was reduced to 28.5kt With half the number of boilers as the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth achieved the same power output and the same speed as the former. Her generators delivered 10,000 kw/hour of electricity, enough to power a city of 150,000 people.It was depressing to have to read the chapter on C.Y. Tung knowing what was to follow.Where the book's color photos are concerned I couldn't ask for more. Inevitably, there are a couple of flaws in the book. The type font is too small and there is a printing blooper on the top of pp24. It is not clear how much the Queen Elizabeth cost to build and how much Cunard paid for her. The log books and other documents and memorabilia are clearly reproduced and are legible to the extent possible. I am so pleased with this book by Andrew Britton that I have ordered his book on the SS United States in the same series. I only wish he had written the book on the France/ Norway as well, as the person who has written it has spoiled it for everyone.