Nelson, thou needst not fear!
Thy sons and heirs are here,
And shall not shame their sire.
William Watson.
With the war now over, and after five years, during which the public mind has been accustomed to emergency arrangements of all sorts, nothing is more difficult than to reconstruct the enormous and unprecedented activities that were called so suddenly into being in the first war weeks of 1914; and in these the Cunard Company had a typical and vitally important part to play. Of the number of navigating officers in their employment, namely 163, no fewer than 139 were in the Royal Naval Reserve, and as such were immediately mobilised, being instructed to report themselves for naval duty upon their arrival in a British port; and by the end of the year 131 of these officers had actually done so. Nor was this the least of the problems that the Company had to face, in that, at a time when not only every reliable officer and man was worth his weight in gold to them, so large a proportion of their best and most highly trained servants had thus to be yielded up to the senior service.
“Mauretania” escorted by Destroyers
In the latest agreement arrived at with the Government in 1903, the whole of the Cunard Fleet was, in time of war, to be placed at its disposal, and there was considerable uncertainty at first as to the various purposes to which the ships might be allocated. In the present chapter we shall confine ourselves to dealing with those of the Cunard vessels that were commandeered by the Admiralty for strictly combatant purposes, of which the more important were the Aquitania, Caronia, Laconia, Campania, and Carmania; and since the Campania had only just passed from Cunard control, it may be well, perhaps, in view of her distinguished and lengthy service under the Company’s flag to deal with her first. She became a seaplane carrier; after having at first however, taken a large share in repatriating Americans stranded in the British Isles owing to the exigencies of war. Her after funnel was removed and a smaller one put abreast of the forward funnel; and this alteration, together with the dazzle paint with which she was at a later date covered, rendered her almost unrecognisable even to the old Cunarders who had been familiar with her for many years. Throughout the war she was fortunate in escaping injury both from enemy gunfire and submarine attack, and her honourable career only came to an end at the conclusion of the armistice, when she was accidentally sunk in collision with H.M.S. Revenge in the Firth of Forth.
Turning now to the other vessels, the Aquitania and Caronia, these were fully dismantled and fitted out as armed cruisers in the first days of August, 1915. This, of course, meant the ruthless stripping out of all their luxurious fittings and those splendid appointments to which reference has been made in the last chapter; and for all these articles storage had to be found on shore at the shortest notice. Some idea of the work involved in this conversion can best be gathered perhaps, by realising that no less than 5,000 men were employed upon this herculean task, and that more than 2,000 waggon loads of fittings were taken ashore from these two liners. While these two ships were thus being fitted, yet a third, the Carmania, arrived in port to be similarly transformed; and a brief account of what took place on board this famous vessel may be taken, perhaps, as typical of what occurred in all three.
