Curacoa was already an old ship when she died. Built at Pembroke Royal Dockyard during the First World War, launched on 5 May 1917, she was the fourth Royal Navy ship to bear the name - taken from the Dutch island of Curacao, captured by Britain in 1807. She was a C-class light cruiser, 450 feet long, six Yarrow boilers feeding Parsons turbines for 29 knots, five 6-inch guns on the centreline. Her first commander, Captain Barry Domvile, had King George V himself inspect her crew at Harwich in February 1918. She missed most of the Great War, but spent the 1920s and 1930s flagging cruiser squadrons across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, supporting British interests through the Chanak Crisis and the long uneasy peace between the wars.

In 1933 she became a training ship. In July 1939, two months before the world went back to war, she entered Chatham Dockyard for a thorough conversion into an anti-aircraft cruiser. Her old armament came out. Replacements went in: high-angle guns and pom-poms designed to keep German bombers off British convoys. The conversion finished on 24 January 1940. Three months later she was off Norway, escorting troopships during the disastrous Norwegian Campaign and taking damage from German aircraft. For the next two years she escorted convoys around the British Isles. By September 1942 she had radar fitted - Type 285, Type 282, Type 273 - and her AA suite reinforced with five 20mm Oerlikon mounts. She was 25 years old and tired, but she was the kind of ship the Western Approaches needed: not glamorous, but useful.

On the morning of 2 October 1942, Curacoa met the Queen Mary north of Ireland. The liner was on the second leg of one of her wartime crossings - New York to the Clyde, carrying approximately 10,000 American troops of the 29th Infantry Division, the division that would land at Omaha Beach less than two years later. Queen Mary was running at 28.5 knots in a zig-zag evasive pattern, designed to throw off any U-boat attempting to plot a torpedo solution. Curacoa was steaming straight at 25 knots, slower than the liner. As Captain John Boutwood of Curacoa knew, the liner would eventually overtake him.

Each captain believed his ship had right of way. Boutwood thought the liner would alter course around him; Captain Cyril Illingworth of Queen Mary thought the escort should keep clear. At 13:32, during one of the zig-zags, Queen Mary's officer of the watch saw the cruiser closing too rapidly and began to break off the turn to avoid her. Illingworth countermanded him: 'Carry on with the zig-zag. These chaps are used to escorting; they will keep out of your way.' At 14:04, Queen Mary started a starboard turn from a position slightly behind the cruiser, only 400 yards away. Boutwood saw the danger and ordered hard rudder. So did Illingworth. The combined inertia of an 81,000-ton liner moving at almost 29 knots could not be redirected in 400 yards. The bow of Queen Mary struck Curacoa amidships at full speed.

The cruiser was cut in two. The aft section sank almost immediately. Men in the forward end had perhaps two minutes before it followed. Three hundred and thirty-seven officers and sailors went down - young men, mostly, whose names are on the Chatham and Portsmouth Naval Memorials, and whose bodies, those that were recovered, were buried at Chatham and at Ashaig Cemetery on the Isle of Skye. The 101 who lived included Captain Boutwood. Witnesses were sworn to secrecy. The British government did not announce the loss until the war ended. The Admiralty sued Cunard White Star Line. The case dragged on through 1947, with Mr Justice Pilcher initially blaming Curacoa entirely; on appeal, the blame was apportioned two-thirds to the Admiralty, one-third to Cunard. The House of Lords upheld it. Queen Mary - the same Queen Mary - is moored today at Long Beach, California, a museum and hotel. Her bow was rebuilt within days of the collision. The cruiser she struck sits a hundred metres deep in the Atlantic, 20 miles north of Donegal, and is now a protected wreck under UK law: a war grave that no one is allowed to disturb.