NONFICTION - Dec. 24, 1995

QUEEN MARY by James Steele. (Phaidon: $59.95; 192 pp.) The Queen Mary crossed the Atlantic a thousand times before it rounded the Horn and came to rest in Long Beach. James Seele, an architectural historian, gives a lively account of the ship’s construction in the 1930s, its heyday as the world’s fastest liner and its wartime role ferrying Churchill, his generals and a million troops unscathed through submarine-infested waters. He dwells on its glamour as the precursor of the Concorde and draws a veil over the indignities it has endured since it was grounded and became, officially, a building. He quotes Evelyn Waugh’s disparaging comment that the public rooms were “huge without any splendor, as though they had been designed for a railway coach and preposterously magnified.” Lord Burgley, the Olympic athlete, sprinted the quarter-mile circuit of the ship in 58 seconds in full evening dress. Most passengers preferred gentle exercise on an electric horse in the gymnasium or a relaxing hour in the smoking room, which Cunard Lines described as “such a comfy, cosy place, so ‘oakish’ and so English.” Those comforts vanished when as many as 15,700 troops were packed on board, sleeping in shifts on bunks that were seven deep in the empty swimming pool. For five perilous years the gray-camouflaged liner sped between Southampton and New York, using its superior speed to outrun torpedoes.