HISTORY OF CUNARD: 'AQUITANIA'

Here is another chapter in the history of Cunard, cdelebrating its 175th year in 2015.

From Cunard

In 1915 the British Government War Office requested that Mauretania and Aquitania be made available to transport three divisions of troops to the Mediterranean where the Allied armies were heavily involved in the ill-fated Gallipoli expedition.

Painted black (including her funnels) Aquitania left Liverpool on 18 May 1915 for Mudros with over 5,000 troops of the 13th Division. She left Liverpool again on 3 July, again with over 5,000 troops, including much of the 11th (Northern Division) and two days out Aquitania was fired upon by a submarine, possibly Austrian, but fortunately the torpedo missed by some fifty feet astern. Aquitania reached Mudros on 10 July. During the next three months she made a number of trooping voyages between Liverpool and Mudros and conveyed around 30,000 troops. The troops delighted in the “ample accommodations” found on Aquitania and recalled adequate breakfasts of porridge, eggs and bacon and a whole pint of coffee as well as sports and parades on deck being the order of the day.


In late August 1915, with casualties from the Gallipoli Campaign mounting, the Government announced that "owing to the increased requirements for hospital ships in connection with the Dardanelles operations it has been decided to fit the Aquitania as a hospital ship".

The work was carried out in Southampton and the cost of the conversion and equipping her for hospital duties was £63,000. The Carolean Smoking Room was converted into a large ward, as where several other public rooms. The liner became HMHS (His Majesty's Hospital Ship) Aquitania and was repainted in the internationally-accepted hospital ship colour scheme of buff funnels, with a white hull, a broad green band and red crosses. On 4 September 1915 she set sail for Mudros where casualties were transferred from smaller vessels. Many of those casualties would have sailed to war on Aquitania.

From then until 1916 Aquitania carried 25,000 wounded home.

By February 1916 it was decided to lay-up Aquitania as by then the final evacuation of Allied troops in January that year had reduced the requirement for hospital ships. Aquitania would retain her hospital fittings in case - a sensible move as when White Star's Britannic (sister to Titanic) was mined and sank off Mudros on 21 November 1916, Aquitania was ordered to the Mediterranean to replace her. She left Southampton empty on 7 December and returned in January where she was laid up again.

Aquitania's hospital ship days were over and she would embark on troop carrying duties across the Atlantic once the Americans had entered the war.

Sir Samuel Cunard

The oddest thing about the founding of Cunard in 1839 is that the company was ever formed by a man like Samuel Cunard at all.

To begin with, a Canadian of American parentage does not seem the classic candidate to establish a British icon. And a man so unremittingly prudent, conservative, cautious, austere – and, let’s face it, old – equally doesn’t seem the man to take such huge economic risks or to push the edges of known technology that the founding of the company entailed.

By the time he came to set up the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, as Cunard’s company was originally known, Samuel Cunard was already a prosperous businessman and significant figure in Nova Scotia. He was comfortably settled, with his children around him, a comfortable retirement in the cosy glow of local esteem seemed to lie ahead rather than the creation of a commercial revolution.

Cunard gambled everything he had to set up, 3,000 miles from home, a highly speculative and enormously risky venture uncomfortably close to the forefront of known technology. To do it, he even uprooted himself from his native Nova Scotia and took up residence in London. It all seems markedly out of character with everything he’d done before, and with everything he did afterwards when the company settled down to be a singularly cautious and conservative company in the mould of the founder.