If anyone has ever wondered why the Royal Family is always on hand for a big ship-naming ceremony, the answer became obvious when the Queen went to Southampton to do the honours for the new P&O cruise liner Britannia: they are such fun.
What put such a smile on the Queen’s face? Was it the exploding bottle of English wine, the flying shards of glass - or just the Duke of Edinburgh being on coruscating form?
It was during a brief ceremony on board the 141,000-ton Britannia - the largest liner serving the British market, carrying 3,600 passengers - in which the Queen signed the mount for a photographic portrait of her that the Duke showed he was on top form. As she applied her signature the duke took one look, saw that there was just a white space where the picture would go, and announced to general laughter: “It’s not a very good likeness.”
This was a day that saw the 88-year-old Queen not only smiling throughout, but even tapping her feet in time to the music of the Band of the Royal Marines.
It was the wine, however, that really impressed her. Instead of champagne, the ship was being launched with a Nebuchadnezzar – 15 litres, or 20 bottles’ worth – of English sparkling wine from the Wiston Estate Winery near Pulborough, West Sussex.
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Heaven knows what they put into their wine in Pulborough, but when it struck the side of the ship it exploded with an almighty bang, sending one hefty shard of glass speeding to within a few feet of where the Queen was sitting.
P&O, fortunately, seem to know what they are doing, and there was a plastic screen to protect the Queen from the flying glass. All the same, it was quite a moment; the Queen clearly thought so. When she met a line-up of chefs later including Marco Pierre White, she told them with a tone of astonishment: “It exploded!”
Olly Smith, Britannia’s wine expert, replied: “It did, didn’t it, Ma’am? Spectacularly.”
She was, clearly, on sprightly form. On being introduced to French pastry chef Eric Lanlard (“We have to have a Frenchman to make the cakes,” said David Dingle, chairman of owners Carnival UK), she promptly said: “Bienvenu.”
The TV chef James Martin, one of a number of celebrity chefs who will be offering classes for passengers, told the Queen how Britannia’s chefs will be baking all their own bread on board, prompting the Queen to reminisce: “The first time I ever saw white bread was on board the old Queen Elizabeth. It was rather fascinating.”
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That the naming ceremony should prove such a happy occasion for the Queen – clearly, she is not a woman who tires of uttering the words “God bless her and all who sail in her” – was almost a surprise, as the name Britannia would, one might think, prompt only wistful memories of the royal yacht which served her for more than 40 years.
Unlike the day Britannia was decommissioned, however, there were no damp eyes today, and her presence there – and the fact that P&O Cruises’ life president Lord Sterling is a good friend of hers – were evidence that discreet conversations were had between cruise line and Buckingham Palace to check that it was acceptable to revive the name.
The only tears, perhaps, might have been at the warm-up man Rob Brydon’s truly terrible jokes beforehand. Sample: Britannia will be off soon to the Mediteranean, the Norwegian fjords, the Baltic Sea and the Canary Islands, he said, “taking more trips than Madonna at an award ceremony”.
As he said, the naming ceremony was an occasion on which “an absolute fortune” had been spent – “which explains why there was no money left for a proper comedian.”
The Queen’s arrival, timed for the end of the naming ceremony, meant that she missed Brydon: she also missed a performance by a troupe of Strictly dancers. But then perhaps she is not a Strictly fan.
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The 1,082-ft long new addition to the P&O Cruises fleet is capable of carrying more than 3,600 passengers and 1,350 crew, Britannia is the largest cruise ship designed specifically for the British holiday market.
Boasting 15 passenger decks, 13 bars and 13 places to eat, the £473 million ship has a three-tier atrium, a 936-seater theatre, four swimming pools, and a multi-million pound art collection.
Sailing from Southampton during the summer and operating from the Caribbean in the winter, Britannia will visit 57 ports in 31 countries in its first year, sailing more than 90,000 miles.
This will be the third P&O ship to be named Britannia. The first entered service in 1835 for P&O’s predecessor company, The General Steam Navigation Co.
The second Britannia entered service in 1887 and was built in Greenock in Scotland. Winston Churchill sailed on P&O’s second Britannia in 1888, on his way to the North West frontier.