The crew and staff needed to keep things running smoothly.
The RMS Queen Victoria entered service in 1926, following a nearly three-year build that began in 1923 at the John Brown and Company Shipyards of Clydebank in Scotland. The shipyard also built the RMS Aquitania and the RMS Lusitania.
The Queen Victoria is just over or just under 1,000 feet in length, depending if one counts the flagpole on the fantail of the vessel. She stands 175 feet tall from keel to the top of one of her three funnels and has twelve decks.
The Queen Victoria was built as ships changed the dirty and inefficient burning of coal to heat boilers to fuel oil instead. The steam generated by the boilers turned giant turbines that in turn spun the three propeller drive shafts. Burning one imperial gallon of Bunker C grade fuel oil generated enough boiler steam to move the Queen Victoria forward approximately eleven feet.
Passenger complement, all classes, was over 2,100. Crew complement was 700.
Like all the major liners, the Queen Victoria possessed machine refrigerated cold rooms for foodstuff storage, the latest Marconi radio-telegraphy transceivers, a shopping promenade that would not have looked out of place on the Strand in London, swimming pools, movie theaters that also doubled as lecture or entertainment halls, bars and restaurants, a fully equipped surgery, a gymnasium, hair dressers and barbers, a library, kennels, and more – in short, everything needed to keep passengers happy during their five days at sea on a trans-Atlantic crossing.
Queen Victoria carried over 27,000 pieces of china ware of all sorts, plus the accompanying linens such as tablecloths and napkins, plus silver service. Added up it amounted to nearly a half million pieces. An idea of foodstuffs carried on a voyage can be garnered by this list for a trans-Atlantic sailing of the RMS Queen Mary in 1936:
All of the material above and more added together to achieve a Gross Registered Tonnage weight for the Queen Victoria of 78,000 tons, with a service speed of 24 knots (or just over 27 ½ miles per hour).
The RMS Queen Victoria resembled the RMS Queen Mary which is permanently docked at Long Beach, California. The deck plans shown here are for the RMS Queen Victoria but are also representative of the RMS Queen Mary.
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