S A Oranje at Southampton
by Published on 11th May 2016 10:31 AM
Mon May 9th At sea – in the Bay of Biscay: Final day on the splendid Queen Elizabeth: Last details, packing, front desk corrections and, for myself, the last of 7 talks. Feelings of impending separation, leaving a familiar world, are also apparent throughout the ship – and especially among the full world cruise passengers, who have been aboard for four months & altogether logged some 39,000 miles. In mid afternoon, in a French mist (well, after all we are off the west coast of France), the Queen Mary 2 sweeps past and the Queen Victoria is a mere two miles behind.
Floods of memories! John & his wife Val from Lancashire have been away for 127 days – out from Southampton to Sydney in January on P&O's Aurora, 2 nights in Australia and then 65 days on this ship. He told me, "This is our last day, our last night, our last dinner. I get more & more sentimental as I get older [he's 69] and this ship has become part of my life, my home, my sense of the familiar. I felt downright depressed today. I actually cried several times. I don't want to leave the Queen Elizabeth! We had adventures ashore, met so many wonderful people onboard, and I kept a detailed dairy and took time to look into myself, to see who I am. Yes, ships are special – they really engulf you, become part of you."
Steaming to Capetown: Now living as she says in the "heart of London," Corzette is a very interesting lady. Tall, elegant & dressed with the highest taste and style, she has lived in Paris, "commuted" to India a dozen times (with her first husband, she told me), lived in Florida (for three years) and in Arizona (for eleven years and with her third husband). But hark, she was, in the late Sixties, also a junior purser on the old Union Castle Line. She served on the S A Oranje and, the flagship, the Windsor Castle. She well recited their old routing: Southampton via Las Palmas or Madeira to Capetown, Port Elizabeth, East London and Durban. It was called the Cape Mail Express and, even then with her sense of style and pure glamour, she was assigned to first class duties. "We carried about 200 passengers in first class [with another 500 or so in less expensive, lower-deck tourist class], but sometimes we'd have 100, even less in first. The trade was slowly fading by the late Sixties. British and South African Airways had arrived and turned it from 14 days by ship to 14 hours by air. Just about everyone was defecting or so it seemed. But we still had some of the top-drawer business people sailing as well as South African government officials. In winter, there were also wealthy tourists in first class, people going on long holidays for two and three months, and often staying the whole time at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Capetown. The ships were well known to them. They'd sail year after year, winter after winter. They were escaping the dreary, dark English winters, of course. We also had some great and memorable characters. One lady slept, according to her stewardess, with all of her valuable jewelry still on. Another, a man, asked if we could build him a new wooden leg during the voyage. Old Princess Alice [Queen Victoria's last surviving granddaughter] used to spend the day in a deck chair aboard the Windsor Castle while 'smothered' in steamer rugs. A very tiny, very elderly lady, she'd almost disappear. And there was one elderly couple I recall. They'd stand in the ship's foyer, but both under open umbrellas. When gently probed, their answer was always the same and always quite firm: 'They were in the park, feeding the birds and, of course, it might rain!'"
(photo shows the S A Oranje at Southampton; operated by South Africa's Safmarine Lines in her later years, she had been the Pretoria Castle of Union Castle in her previous life)
Last edited by Doc Vernon; 11th May 2016 at 10:33 AM.
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