The Waning Years

    Lord Kylsant also formed a Royal Mail Group subsidary, White Star Line Ltd., that would house all the shares of Oceanic Steam Navigation Company.  The shares in White Star were issued to other members of RMG, but none of them except for the Union-Castle Line paid.

    At the same time, White Star, which had profited £ 1.25 million in the period of 1927-1929, had its money redistributed to other members of RMG, which used the income to pay dividends to their shareholders.  Kylsant also used White Star to acquire the shares in Shaw Savill & Albion which White Star already owned a controlling interest in (so that was wasted money), and to acquire the Commonwealth Line from the Australian government for the high price of £ 1.85 million.

    U.S. Immigration restrictions, the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression the followed soon afterward struck White Star Line's interests hard.  Because of all this, in 1930 White Star showed a loss for the first time, a price of over £ 379,000.  The number of people that crossed transatlantic that same year numbered a lowly 1,000,000.  The finanacial outlook for White Star was not good.  The plans for Oceanic (III) were scrapped.

    RMG then collapsed.  The lines were seperated from another, and White Star fared badly.  It continued to lose money and between 1931 and 1933, the company's deficit mounted to more than £ 850,000.  On 8 March 1933, the Australian Government took back the Commonwealth Line that Kylsant purchased for White Star Ltd., and its ships were sold to Aberdeen and Commonwealth Line for £500,000, mounting to a loss of £ 1,487,807.

    Cunard Line Limited was also in trouble, for the Depression had hit Britain really hard.  Work on Cunard's 1,000 footer, Hull 534 (allegedy named Queen Victoria), had been suspended. In France, the effects were not as severe and Compagnie Generale Transatlantique commisioned a 1,000 foot named President Paul Doumer, later renamed Normandie.  Secretary of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain proposed that Cunard and White Star merge, with White Star being the junior partner, garnering only 38% of the shares.  As an incentive, the merged company would get enough money to finish "Queen Victoria" (which was in the end, was decided to be named Queen Mary to disband with -ia and -ic name endings, as those were typical of Cunard and White Star ships, respectively)  and build a second liner, which would become the Queen Elizabeth.

    Feburary 1934 saw the merger go into effect.  On 15 May that year while steaming in fog in the approaches to New York, Olympic sliced the Nantucket Lightship in half, killing seven of the eleven on the lightship.  The court case decided that Olympic was at fault, and Cunard-White Star was faced with a $500,000 bill for damages.  Cunard-White Star built a lightship to replace the one at Nantucket, which was larger than the previous one, and that remained in service until 1980, when all the other lightships had already vanished.