We never actually held the trophy as such though the Mauritania
had held it for a number of years and then the Queen Mary held it
for a number more 'til the United States came along. As I mentioned
earlier, I was a junior officer on board the Queen Mary when we
actually broke the record. To do this we had to maintain a very
high speed throughout the voyage. The difficulties of navigating in
the ... ships in fog in those pre-war days were absolutely
tremendous because there was no radar or anything to detect the
presence of other ships, so the only way you could tell there was
another ship in the area when you actually heard the siren. Of
course with the tremendous amount of noise wind speed over the
decks of the Queen's doing 30/32 knots, the whistle of the wind
through the rigging and the noise and that sort, it was very very
hard to hear a ship's siren and if we were in waters where we were
likely to encounter shipping, we always slowed down to 20 knots in
order to reduce the wind speed, and then we posted lookouts, we had
one on the focsle, one in the crows nest, and one on each side of
the wing of the bridge. The Captain took one side of the bridge and
the senior officer watched the other and everybody listened
intently for another ship's siren, and all you could do if you
heard a siren, you decided which bow it was on. If it was on the
starboard bow we turned 45 degrees to port, held that course for 12
minutes and then resumed your course again. The thing was that I've
often said that the two Queens ... well, the one Queen in the
pre-war days, we were really risking our professional career on the
mathematical unlikeliness of two large ships arriving at the same
point on the Atlantic at such a course as to avoid collision.
