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Our family emigrated from England to Canada on the Empress of England. I still remember our cabin, which had a porthole. My dad (surely my mother wasn’t involved) set up the ladder between the two top bunks so my brother and I could crawl across instead of just climb up. I was four and my brother was six. I remember where we ate in the tourist class dining room, which was near swinging galley doors—I think they put younger families like ours in such a place to keep us away from adults without kids. I vaguely recall seeing icebergs in the North Atlantic, but maybe that’s my imagination. I remember my dad had used his reel-to-reel tape recorder to interview my brother and sister and me onboard, and we still had Australian/British accents (we had been living in Manly, Australia for a year, after several years in Kumasi, Ghana, and spending summers and holidays in Watford, England). I distinctly remember my sister saying “sea-gows” in that recording (she was three) and saying how she liked seeing birds on the deck. My dad had shipped a Mercedes Benz in the hold for our new life in Canada, along with living room and dining room furniture, which my parents still had until my mother downsized a few years after my dad died in 2014.
After sailing between Newfoundland and Labrador and up the St. Lawrence Seaway, our ship reached Quebec City, where our family became landed immigrants on 25 September 1966. I was four and a half years old. I presume we stayed on the ship until Montreal, its usual destination, but I have no memory of driving from there to Winnipeg, where my dad spent most of his professional life as a professor of architecture at the University of Manitoba (although I do remember the Four Winds Motel where we stayed in Fort Garry until we bought our house at 66 Thatcher Drive near the university).
I’ve never been back to Quebec City since we first arrived in Canada, and I’d love to visit, even though I don’t remember it at all. The next summer I do remember visiting Montreal for Expo 67, especially to see Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, the showcase U.S. pavilion of that Expo, still present in Montreal today, which was partially inspired by the domed roofs of Ashanti natives in Ghana. Bucky had come to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi (where my dad was teaching architecture), apparently to learn from the Ashanti. He gave my dad a signed manuscript of his poems, which my dad gave to me (I need to find it in some box and have it properly appraised, and check the poems against his published books to see if I might have something unique or unpublished). This must have been one of the many things in crates that came with all our belongings all the way across the ocean.
The Empress of England was built in 1956 in Newcastle upon Tyne for Canadian Pacific, and had its maiden voyage in 1957. It was 640 feet long and had a top speed of 20 knots. She had a sister ship, the Empress of Britain, built the year before, specifically for transatlantic voyages in those waning days of ship travel, sailing from Liverpool to Montreal. For our family, crossing the ocean by ship made sense so we could also take a car and furniture. I wonder how much the trip cost for a family of five.
I learned that the Empress of England was renamed as Ocean Monarch in 1970, travelled to and from Australia, and was eventually scrapped (in Taiwan) in 1975. I remember buying my dad some Empress of England memorabilia for Christmas one year, but when we sorted through all my mother’s belongings after she died in 2023, we never found it. My brother still has that reel-to-reel recording, but it was water-damaged around 1998 and we’ve never tried to play it, or any of the other recordings my dad had made chiefly in West Africa. These keepsakes made it across the Atlantic, but apparently not across the years.
—24 January 2025
SS Maritime website (with detailed ship history)
Tourist class dining room on the Empress of England. This does not look like what I remember, or at least not where our family was seated.
A tourist class cabin on the Empress of England. I remember our cabin had four bunks like this (my little sister presumably slept in a crib, with me and my brother in the upper bunks), but the bunks were not as far apart as shown in this particular cabin. In the following image, you can see the ladder up to the top bunk on the right.
Not an actual ticket of ours, but perhaps we had something similar. Amazing to have seen this on eBay with Welsh as the passenger name, sailing from Montreal to England. I do not know what year this might have come from.
The Empress of England passing under the Jacques Cartier Bridge in Montreal on her first visit on 25 April 1957 in Montreal, Quebec.
The Empress of England (foreground) and the Empress of Britain.
I believe our cabin was on Deck B or perhaps Deck C, in the green tourist class (Deck A was first class).
The above is the ship plan for the Ocean Monarch, known as the Empress of England until 1971. This plan is clearer than the previous two Empress of England plans, but is mostly the same. A notable exception is the addition of the top-deck swimming pool, which was part of the 1971 retrofitting.
The Empress of England became known as the Ocean Monarch in 1970 and was retrofitted in 1971. She was scrapped in Taiwan in 1975.
The Ocean Monarch docked by the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
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