London - Once royalty and celebrities sipped cocktails on her immaculate decks. But how times have changed for the QE2...
Now, workmen in shorts and T-shirts cooking a pig over a barbecue made from half an oil drum is more the norm.
Below decks, the bars and dining rooms of Cunard’s former flagship are dirty and dingy too as she is seemingly left to rot in obscurity in a Middle East port.
Photographs show how the latest plan for the world’s most famous liner – whose passengers included the Queen, George W Bush, Nelson Mandela and Hollywood legends including Ginger Rogers and Debbie Reynolds – appear to have stalled.
The QE2 has spent the past six years docked in Dubai awaiting renovation. Last year it was announced she was to return to the seas and was scheduled to depart in October 2013 and sail to China.
She was then to be converted into a £60-million 400-suite floating hotel before travelling to her final destination, a yet to be announced Asian city, at the end of this year.
The plan also involved revamping the ballroom, seven restaurants, ten lounges and cinema. But she has yet to set sail, and her sorry state has angered former crew and campaigners who want her to be restored to her old splendour.
Louis de Sousa, 43, of Bitzen, Germany, who was a bartender on the QE2 for nine years in the 1990s and received these photos of her from workers he befriended on Facebook, said: “The ship is an icon, but she’s just sitting there rotting.
“It would have been better if she’d just gone to the scrapyard then we could have kept our good memories. Seeing her like this makes me feel sad.” He described the pig roast photos, taken in 2012 in Dubai’s Port Rashid, as “disrespectful”.
The other photos which Mr de Sousa – who remembers functions on the QE2 attended by Lady Thatcher and Rod Stewart – sent to the Daily Mail were taken between June this year and last week.
Rob Lightbody, 42, of Glasgow, who runs the world’s most popular QE2 website, said: “They keep making all these announcements about what’s going to happen to her, then it just goes silent and now she’s just sitting there.
“She is the last of her type – British built, British designed, and originally British crewed. She is in the wrong place. Most people in Dubai don’t even know she’s there, nor do they care.”
Alan Snelson, a photographer who worked on the ship, told arabianbusiness.com: “If no viable plan can be put in place by her owners then they should release her to someone who can save her before the damage is irreversible.”
The 963ft ship carried almost 2.5million passengers and completed more than 700 Atlantic crossings following her launch from the John Brown shipyard in Clydebank in 1967.
The QE2’s home port was then Southampton for 40 years until she left for the last time in November 2008 after being sold to Dubai for £70-million.
No one from the Oceanic Group, which unveiled the plans to “transform the QE2 into a luxurious heritage five-star hotel” last year, was available to comment. - Daily Mail