Background
In 1878, Samuel Cunard's British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company was reorganised into limited company and offically named Cunard. This capitalisation allowed it to use shareholder money to build larger, more expensive ships. A new policy to this end was put into effect by Cunard's new chairman, John Burns, and announced in the London Times.
Launched on 1 March 1881, Servia was the first of Cunard's new breed of ocean liners. She was the second largest ship in the world at 515 feet long and 52.1 feet wide, surpassed only by Brunel's SS Great Eastern. With her design and construction guided by admirality specifications, Servia had many features that satisfied the requirements for her to be placed placed high on the admiralty's reserve list of the armed auxilliary cruisers, where she could be called into service in times of war.
Read more about this topic: RMS Servia
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)