On Liners' List, 20 0ctober 2009, Doug Newman writes :On QE2 I think it was essential to have a proper deck plan (showing the configuration of each cabin) or else you really had no idea what you were getting. Later QE2 deck plans just showed all these little zigzag shapes in various colors, which made absolutely no sense at all unless you had a "real" deck plan or you were a total obsessive nerd like me and had practically memorized the whole bloody thing.
One interesting thing though is that even at the end no cabin category ever contained both former first-class and tourist-class cabins, with one exception, category MI, the sole category of inside singles. Otherwise, C2 and above (and CA, the Caronia single grade) was ex-first-class, while C3 and below was ex-tourist-class.
Up until some point in the mid-1990s the first/tourist (er, make that "Transatlantic Class") divide was actually maintained so that what was a first-class cabin when the ship was built still was (albeit now divided up between Queens Grill/Princess Grill/Columbia, all still considered first class) and all the original tourist-class cabins were still "Transatlantic Class" and assigned to Mauretania. Siphoning off all those cabins for the Grills over the years must have created an extraordinary amount of excess space in Columbia, but then they rectified this by moving a lot of ex-tourist-class cabins to what was by now Caronia (but back in the original location of Columbia by then ... I think), which wound up creating some pretty expensive and pretty poor cabins. C5, the lowest Caronia grade, must have had the most enormous variations of any, an incredible mix of tiny cabins all the way forward on Two and Three Decks, huge ones down on unfashionable Four Deck and finally some decent cabins on Two and Three Decks aft that were neither tiny nor in undesirable locations.
In between these two basic schemes there also was, for a year or two following the 1994 refit (in the same period when the old Britannia/Tables of the World/Mauretania was Caronia, and the old Columbia was Mauretania), something inscrutable divided into "Grill Class," "Deluxe Class" (Caronia) and "Premium Class" (Mauretania) but the details of that escape me.
It is interesting though that the "official" two-class divide did not disappear until 1994. The dress code for Mauretania was, for example, totally different from the other dining rooms, never suggesting (as I recall) anything more formal than jacket and tie. That was back before Cunard any illusions that the whole ship was "luxury," a rather amusing concept if you consider whether anyone really thought some of those tiny cabins down on Five Deck were luxurious.
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