A FIREMAN in the engine room of the RSM Queen Mary, John Fleming remembers a particularly stormy Atlantic crossing returning from New York one December in the 1950s.

" I'm not a religious person but I started to pray," he says." There were waves about five storeys high and we could see an American destroyer in the distance.

"One minute it was there, the next it was gone as we went away down in the trough of the waves and came back up on the crest. It was unbelievable. I prayed if I ever got back to land I would never go back to sea again. I did, of course."

The lure of working on the iconic ocean liner was too much of a pull for the young man from Motherwell who was just in his early 20s and saving up to get married to his sweetheart Jean.

"The biggest surprise I got when I went to join the ship was when we turned into the docks and saw the size of her, it was unbelievable. You got a real kick from the fact the ship was made in Scotland," he says.

John, now 83 and living in New Stevenston, worked the graveyard watch in the engine room, stripped to the waist because of the fierce heat generated by the 24 boilers.

"It was the only ship you went down in a lift to the engine room. They used to bring visitors down at night and one time a woman asked a boy, 'Where is the coal?'," says John.

"He told her it was an oil burner and when she asked what kind of oil he told her it was castor oil. He could have lost a day's wages for that."

Though the celebrities and Hollywood stars who sailed on the liner were many decks above enjoying the ship's luxurious first class facilities, one one crossing John remembers American actress Joan Crawford ventured below to present the crew with two barrels of beer.

"She had lovely sandy hair and stayed for a while in the Pig and Whistle, the mess we would gather in, to talk to crew.

"After the two barrels of beer were nearly emptied the master of arms quickly took her away."

For engine room crew like John, their quarters were below the water line where they slept eight to a cabin. It was like sleeping in a submarine, he says.

The conditions aboard ship couldn't have been more difficult for third engineer Joe Perkins in the 1960s.

The 82-year-old from Newcastle, who moved to Arran when he retired, was in a cabin on the boat deck, previously used by cabin class passengers.

Before the war, engineers were in quarters on the water line. That all changed when unions called for improved conditions.

" The accommodation was great. They were well decorated and I remember there was a lot of veneered panelling," he says.

"It was convenient to feed us from the first class galley. The menus would be put in the engineers' mess and luxury items which were for first class passengers were scored through with a pen," he laughs.

"So you couldn't have the caviar or truffles when they were on the menu. We had a good relationship with the stewards so if you fancied something like that I'm sure he could get you it."

When the liner docked at Pier 90 in New York harbour, he got his watch off, working four hours on and eight hours off. Time Square was just a 10-minute walk away.

Life at sea was a world away from other ships he had sailed on.

"The Queen Mary was always kept immaculate and clean. Because of the number of engineers we had everything was kept in perfect order," he says.

"On other ships we had field days when you would do your normal work and then if something was wrong you were called out on a field day. We never had any field days on the Queen Mary.

"For 11 months of the year the route was Southampton to Cherbourg and New York. Every January she went in for repair at Southampton, they did everything from removing carpets to parts of the boiler."

A few years before he sailed on the Queen when he was qualified as a chief engineer, Joe had the chance to sail on the liner as a passenger when he was going to New York to meet another ship.

Because he had a chief's ticket was entitled to travel first class but when he learned that meant he would have to wear his dress blues uniform every evening he declined, and opted to travel in cabin class, or second class, instead.

It was in 1967 in the last few months of the liner's seafaring life when Alan Blackwood was a junior third officer. At the time the Queen Mary was the largest ship he had been on.

A stand-by deck officer he would routinely be in charge of the ship's security for 12 hours at a time, keeping an eye out for crew members who donned their best bib and tucker to mix with the passengers. Something that was strictly off limits.

"We had an innate skill in being able to discriminate who was a passenger and who was crew," he says.

" It was a bit of a fiction but we were supposed to carry a little black book and note the names of those caught with younger, usually American, female passengers."

New officers were advised to never think of putting the engine room telegraphs on to a crash stop because at this late stage in the ship's life it meant the worn-out top of the boilers could be blown off.

" If you got into a potential collision situation – in the middle of the Atlantic we were ripping along at 31/32 knots, that's nearly 40mph in a whacking great girder about a fifth of a mile long – you had to be careful what you were doing," he says.

"Imagine holding a big plank of wood over your shoulder and trying to walk through dense woodland swinging it about - that was the same effect you would have on a ship of that length.

"Because of our speed we were encouraged to try to avoid ships rather than get into close encounters with them. If we did the need might be to do a crash stop."