On 20 September 1967, at John Brown’s yard in Clydebank, Queen Elizabeth II launched the liner Cunard named Queen Elizabeth 2 — with an Arabic numeral, not “Queen Elizabeth II”. At the ceremony the sovereign said “Queen Elizabeth the Second”. The company kept the QE2 spelling.

The ship replaced the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth generation. The first commercial voyage was in May 1969, not on launch day. Power was steam at first, then, after the early-1980s rebuild, gas turbines.

In 1982, during the Falklands War, QE2 carried British troops. She later returned to the transatlantic run and to cruising. She left Cunard service in 2008 and was converted into a floating hotel in Dubai.

BBC On This Day records the 1967 launch and the naming dispute. A 2017 report, at 50 years, returns to Clydebank, the maiden voyage and the Gulf hotel. Cunard’s marketing page is not the source of this account.

Clydebank built the ship in a shrinking industry. The launch was a public spectacle, not a profit guarantee. Air competition had already changed the Atlantic.

QE2 is not RMS Titanic and not Queen Mary 2. She is one ship, with one date. Confusion with Elizabeth II is exactly the point the BBC noted in 1967.

Fifty-nine years after the launch, the ship sits in Dubai. The anniversary is of a yard and a shipping line, not of monarchy as the central subject.

Image: Trondheim Havn, RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 at Trondheim (2008), CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Source consulted: QE2: 50 years since the Clydebank launch — BBC News.