The "Cunard Red" color has an interesting history. In the 1830s, Robert Napier, a British shipping engineer who improved and developed the steamships that would become the first of the Cunard line, was faced with a dilemma. The heat in the smokestacks reached such high temperatures that conventional paints of the day would bubble and peal off. The painters developed a clever solution. A mixture of bright ochre and buttermilk was applied. With the heat of the smokestacks, the paint mixture literally "cooked" onto the stacks and stayed put. The resulting orange/red color, accented with a broad black band at the top of each stack and black lines on the flanges, was to become Napier's trademark and, later, the identifying mark of all Cunard liners. The tradition remained, even though paint manufacturers had discovered a way to delete the buttermilk from the formula long before the
Queen Mary was launched!
