Thursday, August 19, 2010

Floating Wreck: HMS Queen Elizabeth 1 Hong Kong 1972

Floating Wreck: Queen Elizabeth 1, Hong Kong Harbor 1972
A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.

This image gets a lot of traffic and is also located here on flickr with a second image taken a few seconds later as we took off from Kai Tak.


Another old liner photo but this time a more ignominious end to the star of the Cunard line RMS Queen Elizabeth rather than the one I posted of the USS United States. The Queen Elizabeth had been sold by Cunard and was being refit in Hong Kong as a floating university. The work was almost completed when a fire broke out and the ship was completely destroyed. The ship then lay on its side in the harbor as seen here for months while the owners haggled with the insurance company over what to do with it. This image was taken six months after the fire (and I wasn't on this trip) but I recall seeing the wreck several months later (October) when I visited Hong Kong on my way back to New Zealand.

Join me on Flickr

In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.

I now have an iPad version of this book for sale ($4.99) on the Blurb site which you can find here: STORE

I have to say, even on the iPad the book looks pretty good.

1 comment:

Roger Morell USS SAN JOSE AFS 7 said...

I was on.the USS San Jose in Hong kong Harbor a week before the QE1 caught fire. It was a beautiful site in the harbor. Very sad that it was lost