Showing Her Age
With the Caronia entering her 15th year of service with Cunard, this trend-setting ship was beginning to show signs of her age. With jet air travel getting stronger as it got safer, most passenger shipping companies began feeling the pinch.
There was bound to be a point where the competition looked at the revenues that Caronia had been producing and taking their lead from that. In the meantime, ship production had been made much easier and cheaper with man-made decorative materials and all-welded hull construction becoming the norm.
So, the Caronia was not only facing new competition from the air, there were other liners being built with cruising in mind, and with their more modern and shiny interiors they were making her look a little dated. Her late 1940s art-deco design was giving way to bright, easy to produce and maintain laminates and other benefits of simplified ship construction.
Elsewhere in the Cunard fleet, two ships were taken off the Canadian run and rebuilt with added passenger accommodation replacing cargo space and relaunched as the RMS Franconia and RMS Carmania. They would chase the winter sun Caribbean Cruise traffic from New York and Fort Lauderdale.
The once unique cruising green livery of the Caronia, applied to the RMS Mauretania in 1961, was also applied to these ships which sported such new things as lido-decks, to match trends sought by cruising passengers.
In April of 1964, Sir Basil Smallpeice came from B.O.A.C. to become Chairman of Cunard. It was under him that hard business decisions were taken and a period of severe rationalisation began.
Probably nowhere was this more felt than in Caronia's engine room, where only essential work was to be undertaken. There would be no more fitting of 50 ton pieces of machinery to this ship, which was probably the biggest factor in her dramatic demise after leaving Cunard.
Great World 
Summer Cruise
