Page Captain Hornblower

After more than two weeks of paralyzing idleness, Britain's trains were running again. But settlement of the railway strike gave the Eden government little more relief than that of a householder who puts out a fire in the living room only to find his front yard engulfed by a flood. Allowed to move freely through the countryside once more, huge piles of export freight and armies of overseas-bound passengers found themselves stopped short at Britain's shores by a 25-day-old dockers' strike and a wildcat walkout of seamen manning the Commonwealth's huge passenger vessels.

One after another, the Cunard Line's Britannic, Mauretania and Saxonia and the Canadian Pacific's Empress of Australia and Empress of Scotland missed their sailing dates as a result of the seamen's and stewards' demand for a shorter work week--44 hours as opposed to what they call the 56-70 hours now demanded of them. As the week drew on, the strikers immobilized the biggest prize of all, the Queen Mary. Fuming with indignation because the shipowners had pooh-poohed the likelihood of a strike until they were comfortably settled in their cabins, hundreds of the Mary's passengers, many of them U.S. tourists, were bundled off the ship and deposited back in London, to stand holding wilted flowers and half-empty champagne bottles in Waterloo Station. "I'm going to see my Congressman about all this as soon as I get back home," growled one vacationing New Jerseyite. Cunard got busy placing its passengers on transatlantic planes, filling up all scheduled flights and chartering special planes when necessary.

Many sea passengers were suddenly confronted with expensive excess-baggage fees on the planes. Far more tragically stranded were hundreds of outward-bound British emigrants, many of whom had sold all they possessed and spent a futile fortnight fighting their way across a strikebound country only to come to a full stop at the gateway. Short of funds in the emergency, many signed on at the Labor Exchange for temporary jobs.

At week's end, as the Queen Elizabeth headed in from New York to face the fate of her great sister ship, the government tried to end the seamen's wildcat strike by voiding their exemption from military service. One frustrated passenger on the Queen Mary could only think of what his favorite hero would have done under the circumstances. "Captain Hornblower," huffed his creator, bestselling Novelist C. S. Forester, "would have shoved all the strikers in irons."

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