The Machines That Built the RMS Queen Mary (1930-1936)

It's the winter of 1932 on the River Clyde, and the largest ship in the world is standing dead silent on the slipway, known only as Hull 534. The RMS Queen Mary is remembered as the record-breaker that beat France's Normandie for the Atlantic Blue Riband. This documentary covers the part almost every retelling skips: how she began as yard number 534 at John Brown and Company in Clydebank, Scotland, her contract signed on the first of December 1930 and her first keel plates laid on the twenty-seventh of December that year, and how the Great Depression froze the money and stopped all work in December 1931. We trace the two and a half years she stood abandoned and rusting on the ways, the roughly 3,000 John Brown men laid off and the as many as 10,000 more thrown out of work at her suppliers across Britain, and the 9.5 million pound government loan that saved her, granted only on the condition that Cunard merge with its old rival the White Star Line, the merger that created Cunard-White Star Line on the tenth of May 1934. We cover the machines and methods of the yard, the hand-riveting that stitched her hull together, the death of shipyard worker Malcolm Aitken at the stern in June 1934, and the launch of the twenty-sixth of September 1934 before a quarter of a million people, when her 35,500-ton hull nearly ran across a Clyde too narrow to hold her and eighteen drag chains weighing some 2,350 tons hauled her to a stop. We finish with the 24 Yarrow boilers and 4 Parsons turbines that gave her 200,000 shaft horsepower, and the Blue Riband she took from the Normandie in 1936 and held for fourteen years. #RMSQueenMary #QueenMary #shipbuilding #Clydebank #JohnBrown #Cunard #oceanliner #maritimehistory #BlueRiband #Hull534 Sources: University of Glasgow Library, "The launch of the 'Queen Mary': ship 534"; Ocean Liners Magazine, "The Day They Stopped Building Queen Mary" (2020); Skeptical Inquirer, "There's Something about Mary" (2022); The Queen Mary (queenmary.com), "Timeline, Stats & Fun Facts"; ssmaritime.com, "RMS Queen Mary"; Wikipedia, "RMS Queen Mary." This video is for educational and historical documentation purposes. All footage is used under Fair Use (17 U.S.C. Section 107) for commentary, criticism, and education. Subscribe for more shipyard documentaries on the machines that built the world's great ships.