The Final Voyage of the RMS Queen Mary – 1967

Sacramento station KCRA-TV produced this special report on the Queen Mary’s last voyage, which left Southampton on 31 October 1967 and reached Long Beach on 9 December after rounding Cape Horn. The film, reporter Mike Boyd’s account of the trip, belongs to the Center for Sacramento History, which scanned it from the original 16mm film and placed this timecoded screener on the Internet Archive with permission for online viewing. Some segments are silent.

The footage shows the liner dressed in flags at the dock, scenes on deck and at sea, Captain John Treasure Jones speaking on camera, passengers dancing and dining at farewell parties, and interviews with travellers about the crossing. Toward the end it turns to the ship in Long Beach harbour and to architectural models of the Long Beach waterfront with the liner in place, before a closing report from the dockside.

Nothing in this film is about ghosts, and that is its value. It records the Queen Mary at the moment she stopped being a working ship – before her lower decks were gutted for a museum and before the hotel era in which the famous ghost stories took shape. The crewman most often named in those stories, John Pedder, had died the year before this voyage, in an engine-room accident in 1966.

Watch it alongside the ghost-tour version of the ship: the parties, the crew and the passengers here are the living history that later legends borrow from, and the models glimpsed at the end show how quickly Long Beach meant to turn the liner into a destination.