The Boardroom is on the Boat Deck and it is the mirror image of the Queen’s Grill Lounge (QGL) in both location, size and doorway except the former is port side and the latter starboard. Entry to the QGL was of course restricted to QG passengers, though no check was ever carried out. But because of the Boardroom’s proximity to the QGL it was little used. QG passengers didn’t need it ... they had their own private lounge, and few other passengers felt they had the right to use it, although it was available to all passengers on normal cruises.
Look at
http://www.chriscunard.com/decks-QE2.htm to see its location. The ‘blank’ space forward is the QG galley store and Chef de Cuisine’s 'office' and the larger ‘blank’ space is the QC galley proper.
On the World Cruise (WC) the Boardroom was restricted to World Cruise Club Members who had to show their special card to the ‘concierge’ on duty. On the 2007 WC that person was Carmel Rogers, normally the librarian and the producer of the fabulous Crew (Talent) Show. The Boardroom was a lounge with coffee and newspapers etc., and Carmel ensuring that the WC Club members had any help they needed on and off the ship.
On that Cruise we were working on the Singapore to S’ton leg. Cruise Director was Martin Moss and his assistant was Warren Smith who had been the ballroom dancing instructor in 1997 and worked his way up. Warren is now a CD and they’re both, I believe still working on QM2 and/or QV.
They had recently started to put on a daily 45 min TV show called QE2TV. New each day, it was screened from 8am and repeated all day until about 6pm on ship’s TV. Martin and Warren plugged the day’s events referred to in the daily programme, and punctuated the show with jokes (corny, of course, but it was good QE2 fun). Usually they had a crew member or a lecturer as that day’s guest. The show was recorded at 6pm on the previous evening in the (by then) disused doctor’s surgery room, port side on the little-used aft Two Deck lobby. (see Isabel’s pic looking forward – reply#16). In typical Cunard style, Entertainments department only owned one elderly camera which was used to record the daytime lectures, which were also screened all day long (but not the professionals at the evening entertainment for contractual reasons). At that time the cameraman was Kacey (an ebullient American from Hawaii, whose off-picture guffaws -he was behind the camera- made QE2TV more interesting). He was the video operator (he ran the tapes/DVDs for the daily TV schedules and filmed the aforesaid lectures using that same camera). The video room was where? Three Deck I think. Somewhere midships in the middle service area opposite cabins. Louis do you remember? Anyway, QE2TV was very popular with the passengers, many of whom thought it was transmitted live. Few knew the recording location.
On the opposite (stbd) side of the aft Two Deck lobby is a room which is the mirror image of the surgery.
I had seen it used on quite a few occasions by local immigration officers from the next country to be visited (who boarded the ship in the previous country and lived on board, sometimes for days. A specific example was dep Singapore Weds 21 Mar 2007 arr Cochin India Sun 25 Mar 2007). Peeping in when the door was open, I’d say there were ten Indian officials sitting at the trestle tables (shown in ‘Flagship’s’ pics in Reply #17 above) checking and stamping all passenger and crew passports for days).
When the ship was en route from Walvis Bay to Las Palmas on or about Sat 14 April 2007, the most intriguing use of this room took place. A Ship’s Head of Department meeting was suddenly called (with Ship’s Master, Staff Captain, Captain’s Secretary, Chief Engineer, Cruise Dir, Hotel Manager, Chief Purser, Crew Purser and Exec Chef). This meeting was short notice, unscheduled and not on the Operation Orders of the day. I know this because I was in a morning meeting with Exec Chef Karl Wrinkler, discussing the work schedule we still had left to do. The phone rang in his office and he said he had to attend a meeting “now”.
I don’t know how often that happened or why, but later that same day we were told (by Martin) told the ship was full and the purser urgently needed our cabins, no reason given. We had to disembark at the next port, Las Palmas on the Tuesday, rather than S’ton and we would be flown to Madrid, hotelled there for a couple of days on full board and bar and flown home/taxis etc all, at Cunard’s expense (unlike Cunard). Several other lecturers had to do the same.
We had to return to the ship on Sat 21 April to get our heavy gear from the stores. We learned that our cabin requisition had been unplanned and that they had been needed for some Senior Cunard management and ‘guests’ for embarkation at Las Palmas for “discrete meetings” and that their presence had to be kept from the ears the passengers. It couldn’t be kept from the crew, however, who had by now thought up many a reason for these VIPs who went everywhere on the ship. Selling on or a major refit were theories. But Cunard kept their plans as tight as the location of D-Day. No one on board learned their dreadful secret.
Just two months later on 18 June 2007, when Cunard made that first shock announcement that the ship had been purchased for $100 million by Istithmar, a subsidiary of investment company Dubai World, whose property development company is Nakheel, we put two and two together and the reasons for that sudden meeting and the cabin requisitions became horribly clear.
