BILLED - with some justification as 'the greatest ship the world had seen' - this stirring sight is the Queen Mary in 1934.
She is being towed to the fitting-out basin after her launch by her namesake, in September that year from the John Brown shipyard, in Clydebank.
Legend has it that the ship was to have been named the Victoria, but Queen Mary, the consort of King George V, heard a rumour it was to be named after her and was so delighted that no-one dared put the formidable old lady right!
A trail of smoke from the tug shows the power of the smaller vessel, but the sheer scale of the ocean liner is awesome even by modern standards. After years of Atlantic crossings, then wartime service, she was finally retired in 1967 and is now a hotel in California.
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