Liner (4f/2m).
L/B/D:
901 × 97 (274.6m × 29.6m). Tons:
45,647 grt. Hull:
steel. Comp.:
1st 618, 2nd 614, 3rd 1,998; crew 972. Mach.:
steam turbines, 4 screws; 23 kts. Built:
John Brown & Co., Ltd., Clydebank, Scotland; 1914.
Named for a Roman province in southwestern France, Cunard Line's Aquitania was built to complement the transatlantic service between Liverpool and New York offered by
Lusitania and
Mauretania. It was never intended that she try for the Blue Riband as her older running mates had, but she was half again as large and in time she would be considered the most successful of the great transatlantic liners. Commissioned only three months before the outbreak of World War I, in August 1914 she was requisitioned as an armed merchant cruiser. After she was involved in a collision the same month, the Admiralty decided to put her in service as a troopship and, briefly, as a hospital ship. Laid up for most of 1917, she resumed work as a trooper in 1918.
In June 1919 she reentered the transatlantic passenger trade. During a major overhaul in 1920, her original coal-powered engines were replaced with oil-burning engines and her handsome fittings and furnishings were brought out of storage. Her opulent design included a restaurant in Louis XVI style, a Jacobean smoking lounge modeled on a room in Greenwich Hospital, and a two-deck-high Palladian smoking room. Over the next twenty years she was the most popular ship on the transatlantic run, sailing in tandem with
Berengaria and Mauretania, and she conducted off-season cruises to Mediterranean ports.
From 1936 to 1939 she was paired with Cunard's
Queen Mary. Aquitania was to have retired following completion of
Queen Elizabeth in 1940, but the outbreak of World War II gave her a new lease on life and she was refitted as a troop carrier with a capacity for 7,724 passengers. The only pre-1914 ship to work the whole war in this service, she carried more than 300,000 servicemen chiefly between Australia and Suez and between the United States and Britain. In 1948, she was returned to Cunard and made twenty-five voyages between Southampton and Halifax, carrying immigrants, displaced persons, and returning veterans. In December 1949, she steamed into Southampton at the conclusion of her 443rd transatlantic crossing. After thirty-five years of service, the last of the four-stackers was moved to Faslane and broken up in February 1950.
Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway. Braynard, Lives of the Liners. Shipbuilder and Marine Engine-Builder, The Cunard Quadruple-Screw Atlantic Liner "Aquitania.".
