Sir, - I feel it would be remiss of me, in my new-found role as know-all, to ignore a gremlin which made its appearance in your article on a new hostelry in Cobh, based on the liner RMS Titanic The Irish Times, August 19). In it, a spokesman for the new venture describes the Mauretania as the former's sister ship, when it was actually the stablemate of another famous liner with an equally tragic connection with Cork - the Lusitania.
The White Star Line, owners and operators of the Titanic, always favoured names with an -ic appendage for their ships - Titanic, Olympic, Brittanic, Laurentic, Oceanic, Teutonic, Majestic, Germanic. Cunard, on the other hand, preferred appelations ending in -a - Lusitania, Mauritania, Aquitania, Brittania, Servia, Persia, Asia, Canada, Europa, Niagara. The custom ended in the early 1930s with the laying of a keel for a new, state-of-the-art, 80,773-ton, three-funnel liner - Cunarder 534, which, it was intended, was to be called the Queen Victoria.Royal consent being needed for such a venture, the monarch of the time, George V, was invited to a banquet at the Cunard Headquarters at which, in a post-prandial speech, the chairman informed the King of the company's intention of naming the new liner after "the greatest Queen this country has ever known", and asking his permission to do so. The King agreed wholeheartedly, and added that "he couldn't wait to get back to the Palace to tell Her Majesty".
It slowly dawned on the board of directors that His Majesty had got the plot completely wrong; so, faced with the choice of ending a long-standing tradition or having their heads chopped off, they decided that tradition had to go,and so, the RMS Queen Mary was christened. - Yours, etc.,
D.K. Henderson,[
Castle Avenue,
Clontarf,
Dublin 3.