Fanfares and fireworks herald QM2 launch

Seventy years of seafaring were linked today as, amid fanfares and fireworks, the Queen officially named the Queen Mary 2.

Before 2,000 guests seated in a quayside marquee in Southampton, the naming by the Queen followed the launch by her grandmother Queen Mary of the first Queen Mary ship on Clydeside in 1934.

The first Queen Mary vessel was considered immense at 81,000 tonnes, but today the Queen named a ship almost twice that size.

Following the great tradition of ship launches, the Queen today simply said: “I name this ship Queen Mary 2. May God bless her and all who sail in her.”

To loud applause the Queen then pressed the button and the champagne bottle successfully smashed against the side of the 150,000-tonne, £550m (€790m) QM2 as tickertape rained down on the 2,000 guests.

Earlier the Queen, dressed in a cerise-coloured outfit with a cerise and purple hat had toured parts of the 1,132ft-long vessel, which will now become Cunard’s great flagship in succession to the QE2 which the Queen launched in 1967.

Accompanied by Cunard president Pamela Conover, the Queen had arrived in the opulent grand lobby of the 233ft-high vessel together with the Duke of Edinburgh.

She visited the planetarium, the library, the bridge and one of the pool areas on the ship before the naming ceremony.

The arrival of the QM2 in Southampton was coloured by the tragedy last November when 15 people were killed when a gang plank collapsed as they were boarding the vessel in the St Nazaire shipyard in western France where it was built.

The Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Rev Michael Scott-Joynt, speaking in French for part of the prayers at the ceremony today, asked that the 15 dead be remembered.

Before the naming, attended by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and Transport Secretary Alistair Darling, the guests saw pop singer Heather Small performing her song Proud followed by a spectacular version of Amazing Grace by opera singer Lesley Garrett with pipe music from pipe major Jim Motherwell, who has just retired as the Queen’s personal piper.

Ms Conover told guests that this was the launch of the first true transatlantic liner for 37 years and that such vessels were “the thread which runs through Cunard’s history”.

The Queen and guests then watched film not only of the Queen Mary launch but of the launch of the first Queen Elizabeth by the Queen Mother, as well as film of the 1967 QE2 launch.

Accompanying the Queen on her tour was the QM2’s master commodore Ronald Warwick, 63, who was formally master of the QE2 which had also had as her first master the commodore’s father, the late William Warwick.