The champagne bottle wobbled on its perch above the bow of the Queen Victoria. Having pushed the button that was to send it smashing into the side of the new Cunard ocean liner in the naming ceremony in Southampton yesterday, the Duchess of Cornwall stood on stage and waited.

Clutching plastic Union Jacks, an audience of two thousand waited with her: loyal passengers, celebrities, the great and the good from the cruise liner world and John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister. There was a grinding sound. At last the bottle tumbled down, only to bounce off the hull and dangle, still unbroken.

There were groans in the auditorium. A staff member involved in the ceremony swore loudly.

Seconds later a man appeared on the deck holding aloft a second bottle of Veuve Clicquot, which he smashed over the side. Fireworks exploded, the ship’s horn sounded, Sir Derek Jacobi, dressed as the adventurer Phileas Fogg, hailed a “wonderful” naming ceremony, and three tenors sang Nessun Dorma, but above them all the unbroken bottle hung teasingly, a seafaring symbol of bad luck.

Superstitious onlookers needed only to glance a little farther down the dock to the Aurora, the P&O cruiser named by the Princess Royal in 2000 at another ceremony where the bottle did not break. The Aurorabroke down on her maiden voyage. Three years later its passengers were plagued by a virus, then in 2005, its engines failed.

The unbroken bottle was the first hitch in what had been a momentous day for the Duchess. All of Cunard’s previous “Queen” ships – the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, the QE2 and the Queen Mary 2 – have been named by a British Queen. The Duchess of Cornwall’s precise prospects are still unclear in that regard, but yesterday, for a day at least, she was playing a role previously reserved for a Queen.

The ship waiting to meet her, fresh from the Fincantieri Shipyard in Venice, was the 90,000-tonne Queen Victoria. Carol Marlow, President of the Cunard Line, described it as the peer of the floating palaces designed in the twilight years of Queen Victoria’s reign, that would lay the foundations for the modern cruise liner. The ship’s interiors are art deco and faintly colonial, the restaurants occasionally resemble a set from a BBC production of Poirot.

Pondering a burnt cream tart in the ship’s Britannia restaurant, Alan Whicker, the veteran broadcaster who showcased the delights of cruise holidays to millions, told The Times: “It’s considerably more attractive than the Queen Mary 2.”

John Prescott, who once worked on a cruise liner, was equally enthusiastic. “It looks fabulous,” he told The Times. “It brings back memories, except that this time I’m eating the meal instead of serving it.”

Arriving on board just after 1pm, the Duchess, escorted by her husband the Prince of Wales, was shown to the bridge, where she appeared to take great pleasure in sounding the ship’s whistle, which blasted a horn through the dock.

Dressed in a sky-blue coat, she inspected the theatre, that, for the first time on a passenger vessel, includes West End-style boxes, and met the cast of the musical revue Victoriana, that was staged last night.

After lunch the couple arrived in the Royal Box of a larger theatre on the dock, which gave onto the hulking mass of the ship’s bow, for the naming ceremony. The Rev Andrew Huckett, Port Chaplain, was optimistic that all would be well.

“Having said that, I remember when Princess Anne was here once and the bottle didn’t break, for the Aurora.”

Half an hour later, history repeated itself. A spokesman for Cunard said: “We were delighted with the ceremony.” He added, a little philosophically: “Sometimes champagne bottles don’t break.” Tomorrow the Queen Victoria will set sail on her fully booked maiden voyage to the Baltic. The Duchess will no doubt be hoping that the £300 million vessel can shake off the curse of the unbroken bottle.

Vital statistics

90,000 tonnes – the weight of the Queen Victoria

£300m her cost

2,014 number of passengers she can carry, with 1,001 crew 16 decks on the ship, She is 215ft high, with 179ft of that above the waterline

25mph top speed

351,000 bottles of wine and champagne consumed in a year by the ship’s passengers. They are also expected to get through nearly one million teabags, more than 59,000lbs of coffee, more than 1.5 million eggs, nearly 372,000 packs of breakfast cereal and nearly 13,000lb of smoked salmon

Source: PA

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