Un Essai: le SS Princesse Elisabeth de 1905

Un Essai: le SS Princesse Elisabeth de 1905


Construit par Cockerill en 1905, il est le tout premier navire belge à turbines. Preuve supplémentaire qu'il fut un temps où la Belgique était à la pointe de la technologie (pour rappel: c'est en cette même année 1905 que la Royal navy lance de Dreadnought, son premier cuirassé à turbine, qui va révolutionner l'architecture navale et la guerre sur mer...). Toutes les informations à propos du Princesse Elisabeth sont disponibles sur le magnifique site de Eddy Lannoo consacré à 'nos' malles et ferry-boats: http://users.telenet.be/eddy.lannoo/151.htm

Avec un peu de matière première donc, beaucoup d'imagination et plus encore de fantaisie, voici ce que cela peut donner:


sachant que la doc est rare, essentiellement des cartes postales, et qu'il semble que chez Delcampe comme chez Simplon par exemple, le classement et l'identification des bateaux sont pour le moins aléatoires et approximatifs...

Mais, parlant de cartes postales, il en existe des 'colorisées':



sans oublier celles qui avaient déjà été postées par Réginald:

https://i.servimg.com/u/f67/15/57/21/04/les-ma12.jpg
https://i.servimg.com/u/f67/15/57/21/04/les-ma13.jpg
https://i.servimg.com/u/f67/15/57/21/04/les-ma14.jpg

et par Roger :

https://i.servimg.com/u/f60/16/00/80/23/aquare10.jpg

ce dont je les remercie l'un et l'autre

il y a donc moyen de s'amuser avec ses 'magicolor' jusqu'à obtenir une synthèse plus ou moins plausible et/ou vraissemblable de ce que cela donnait dans la réalité:


Attention, je rappelle qu'il ne s'agit nullement d'un profil authentique, mais d'une interprétation toute personnelle. De plus, c'est un essai: manifestement, je ne suis pas encore de taille à m'attaquer au Great Eastern


Je vous souhaite une douce nuit

BP

The Wreck of RMS Queen Elizabeth – Hong Kong Harbor


RMS Queen Elizabeth was an ocean liner operated by the Cunard Line. With her running mate Queen Mary, she provided luxury liner service between Southampton, the United Kingdom, and New York City, the United States, via Cherbourg, France. She was also contracted for over twenty years to carry the Royal Mail as the second half of the two ships’ weekly express service.



While being constructed, in the mid-1930s by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, Scotland, she was known as Hull 552 but when launched, on 27 September 1938, she was named in honour of Queen Elizabeth, who was then Queen Consort to King George VI and in 1952 became the Queen Mother. With a design that improved upon that of Queen Mary,Queen Elizabeth was a slightly larger ship, the largest passenger liner ever built at that time and for fifty-six years thereafter. She also has the distinction of being the largest-ever riveted ship by gross tonnage. She first entered service in February 1940 as a troopship in World War II, and it was not until October 1946 that she served in her intended role as an ocean liner.

With the decline in the popularity of the transatlantic route, both ships were replaced by Queen Elizabeth 2 in 1969. Queen Mary was retired from service on 9 December 1967, and was sold to the city of Long Beach, California, US. Queen Elizabeth was sold to a succession of buyers, most of whom had adventurous and unsuccessful plans for her. Finally she was sold to a Hong Kong businessmen, Tung Chao Yung, who intended to convert her into a floating university cruise ship. In 1972, while undergoing refurbishment in Hong Kong harbour, she caught fire under mysterious circumstances and was capsized by the water used to fight the fire. In 1973, her wreck was deemed an obstruction, and she was partially scrapped where she lay.

Queen Elizabeth left the port of New York on 13 November 1940 for Singapore to receive her troopship conversion. After two stops to refuel and replenish her stores in Trinidad and Cape Town, she arrived in Singapore’s Naval Docks where she was fitted with anti-aircraft guns, and her hull repainted black, although her superstructure remained grey.
“British troops arrive in the Middle East having been transported by the liner

As a troopship, Queen Elizabeth left Singapore on 11 February, and initially she carried Australian troops to operating theatres in Asia and Africa. After 1942, the two Queens were relocated to the North Atlantic for the transportation of American troops to Europe. Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary were used as troop transports during the war. Their high speeds allowed them to outrun hazards, foremostly German U-boats, allowing them to typically travel without a convoy. During her war service as a troopship Queen Elizabeth carried more than 750,000 troops, and she also sailed some 500,000 miles (800,000 km). Her captains during this period were the aforementioned John Townley, Ernest Fall, Cyril Gordon Illinsworth, Charles Ford, and James Bisset.

Following the end of World War II, her running mate Queen Mary remained in her wartime role and grey appearance, except for her funnels, which were repainted in the company’s colours. For another year she did military service, returning troops and G.I. brides to the United States.

In 1959, the ship made an appearance in the British satirical Eastman Color comedy film The Mouse That Roared starring Peter Sellers and Jean Seberg. While a troupe of invading men from a fictional European country cross the Atlantic to ‘war’ with the United States on a tow boat, they meet and pass the far larger Queen Elizabeth, and learn that New York City is closed due to an air raid drill. The men on the tow boat respond by loosing arrows at the two officers speaking from near the ocean liner’s bridge.

Queen Elizabeth 1966
Inchgreen Drydock Greenock

The ship ran aground on a sandbank off Southampton on 14 April 1947, and was re-floated the following day. On 29 July 1959, she was in a collision with the American cargo ship American Hunter in foggy conditions in New York Harbour and was holed above the waterline.

Together with the Queen Mary, and in competition with SS United States, the Queen Elizabeth dominated the transatlantic passenger trade until their fortunes began to decline with the advent of the faster and more economical jet airliner in the late 1950s. As passenger numbers declined, the Queens became uneconomic to operate in the face of rising fuel and labour cost.



Final years

In 1968, Queen Elizabeth was sold to a group of American businessmen from a company called The Queen Corporation (which was 85% owned by Cunard and 15% by them). The new company intended to operate the ship as a hotel and tourist attraction in Port Everglades, Florida, similar to the use of Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. The Elizabeth, as it was now called, actually opened to tourists before the Queen Mary (which opened in 1971) but it was not to last. The climate of southern Florida was much harder on the Queen Elizabeth than the climate of southern California was on the Queen Mary. Losing money and forced to close after being declared a fire hazard, the ship was sold at auction in 1970 to Hong Kong tycoon C.Y. Tung.

1972: The wreck of Seawise University, the former Queen Elizabeth.

Tung, head of the Orient Overseas Line, intended to convert the vessel into a university for the World Campus Afloat program (later reformed and renamed as Semester at Sea). Following the tradition of the Orient Overseas Line, the ship was renamed Seawise University, as a play on Tung’s initials.


Near the completion of the £5 million conversion, the vessel caught fire on 9 January 1972. There is some suspicion that the fires were set deliberately, as several blazes broke out simultaneously throughout the ship. The fact that C.Y. Tung had acquired the vessel for $3.5 million, and had insured it for $8 million, led some to speculate that the inferno was part of a fraud to collect on the insurance claim. Others speculated that the fires were the result of a conflict between Tung, a Chinese Nationalist, and Communist-dominated ship construction unions.

The ship was completely destroyed by the fire, and the water sprayed on her by fireboats caused the burnt wreck to capsize and sink in Hong Kong Victoria Harbour. The vessel was finally declared a shipping hazard and dismantled for scrap between 1974 and 1975. Portions of the hull that were not salvaged were left at the bottom of the bay. The keel and boilers remained at the bottom of the harbour and the area was marked as “Foul” on local sea charts warning ships not to try to anchor there. It is estimated that around 40–50% of the wreck was still on the seabed. In the late 1990s, the final remains of the wreck were buried during land reclamation for the construction of Container Terminal 9. Position of wreck: 22°19.717′N 114°06.733′E. The Queen Elizabeth is surpassed only by the Costa Concordia in 2012 as the largest passenger shipwreck.

SS Seawise University Ex RMS Queen Elizabeth on fire 9 January 1972

After the fire, Tung had one of the liner’s anchors and the metal letters “Q” and “E” from the name on the bow placed in front of the office building at Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, California, US that was intended to be the headquarters of the Seawise University venture, where they remain to this day. Two of the ship’s fire warning system brass plaques were recovered by a dredger and these are now on display at The Aberdeen Boat Club in Hong Kong within a display area about the ship. The charred remnants of her last ensign were cut from the flag pole and framed in 1972, and still adorn the wall of the officers’ mess of marine police HQ in Hong Kong. Parker Pen Company produced a special edition of 5,000 pens made from material recovered from the wreck in a presentation box and these are highly collectable.

Following the demise of Queen Elizabeth, the largest passenger ship in active service became SS France, which was longer but had less tonnage than the Cunard liner.

Seawise University/RMS Queen Elizabeth wreck

1973-05-005 “Seawise University” Photographed in Hong Kong in 1973

1973-04-098 “Seawise University” Photographed in Hong Kong in 1973


RMS Queen Elizabeth – Did you know?
•Queen Elizabeth, wife of George VI and later the Queen Mother, after whom the ship was named, launched the liner herself on September 27, 1938.
•Her maiden voyage to New York was planned for April 24, 1940, but the date was postponed due to the war. She was moved to Singapore via New York, where she was refitted for troop-carrying purposes.
•The ship finally made her first commercial crossing from Southampton to New York on October 16, 1946. Commanding the ship was Commodore James Bisset, who 34 years earlier had been second officer on the Carpathia when it rescued survivors of the Titanic.
•At 83,000 tons, RMS Queen Elizabeth, marginally bigger than the Queen Mary (seen in the foreground of the picture below), was the largest ship in the world when launched. No larger passenger ship was built for another 56 years

Dwindling profits and the construction of the more economical QE2 meant that the Queen Elizabeth made her final transatlantic trip in October 1968.  She was first sold for $7,750,000 for use as a floating hotel in the Everglades, Florida, but was never used as such.
•After the fire, the wreck was declared a shipping hazard and dismantled for scrap – but not before it appeared in the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun, in which it housed MI6’s secret Hong Kong headquarters.
•The Parker Pen Company produced a special edition of 5,000 pens made from material recovered from the wreck, which were sold in presentation boxes.

on a même tourné un James Bond sur le bateau

The charred wreck was featured in the 1974 James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun, as a covert headquarters for MI6.




To accommodate for the capsized liner’s continuous lean, the Secret Service apparently constructed new floors, ramps, staircases and bookshelves, making for excellent clashing wallpaper patterns, bizarrely distorted corridors,and staircases upon staircases.


The wreck of the RMS Queen Elizabeh made for one of the more interesting film locations and sets when used as a covert MI6 headquarters in the 1974 Bond film ‘The Man with the Golden Gun’

L O Excellent sujet Thierry voici l'endroit de l'épave du RMS Queen Elisabeth (voir carte marine)

Salut

L O Et pour les spécialistes Notice to Mariners (et oui)



Pos.22° 19' 717 N   114° 06' 733 E

Salut  

merci VALKIRI pour le complément d'info