This Is Your Life: Robert Arnott

Captain Robert ARNOTT RD RNR (1923-2015)

THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Robert Arnott, Master of the QE2, was surprised by Eamonn Andrews as he was about to make a speech to his passengers in The Queen's Room on board the Cunard liner QE2, from where the programme was then recorded.

Robert, who was born in Australia but grew up in Lancashire, joined the Merchant Navy in 1940 as a midshipman with the Liverpool-based Blue Funnel Line. After wartime service in the Indian Ocean, Robert joined the Cunard Line in 1947 as a first mate and, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, served in and commanded numerous Cunard passenger and cargo ships.

He achieved his Master's certificate in 1950 and was commissioned into the Royal Naval Reserve in 1953. Having joined the QE2 as chief officer before its launch in 1967, he was appointed staff captain in 1972, before being promoted to the liner's Master in October 1976, becoming known affectionately as 'Captain Bob'.

"My goodness gracious me!"

programme details...

Edition No: 471
Subject No: 467
Broadcast date: Wed 14 Dec 1977
Broadcast time: 7.00-7.30pm
Recorded: Sun 18 Sep 1977
Venue: The Queen's Room, onboard the QE2
Series: 18
Edition: 4
Code name: Duke

on the guest list...

Joan - wife
Gill - daughter
John - brother-in-law
Roger - son
Jan - daughter
David - son-in-law
Katie - daughter
Elsie - mother
Fred - father
Ron Jollie
Jack Hardman
Val Cross
Desmond Stewart
Lt Cmd James Scott
Capt Mortimer Hehir
Moira Anderson
Dr Stuart McDonald
Joe Loss
Capt Peter Jackson
Jack Marland
Tony Kinsella
Dr John Hayling
Sister Deborah Creed
Frank Matthews
Roger Chapman

production team...

Researcher: John Viner
Writers: Tom Brennand, Roy Bottomley
Director: Terry Yarwood
Producer: Jack Crawshaw

names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life

related pages...

Life on the Ocean Wave

adventurers of the high seas

Timeline

the show's fifty year history

Moira Anderson

Joe Loss

Screenshots of Robert Arnott This Is Your Life

Robert Arnott recalls his experience of This Is Your Life in his autobiography, Captain of the Queen...

Seven hundred passengers had eagerly volunteered for unpaid service as the audience in a television variety spectacular to be recorded in the QE2's Queen's Room during our crossing from Cherbourg to Southampton. After a spell of heavy weather in the Atlantic, we were late in docking at the French port, and now there was further delay caused by getting heavy TV trucks and cameras aboard, which I needed about as much as I needed a hole in the QE2's bulbous bow.

When Cruise Director Mike Constance asked me to introduce the show, I refused point-blank. "Let the staff captain do it," I said irritably. "My job is here on the bridge, not hamming it up below while the ship's crossing crowded shipping lanes."

But I was already written into the script, grumbled Mike, and an international "mystery star" would be topping the bill and I was scheduled to introduce "her". It would be marvellous publicity for the ship, for Cunard and, it seemed, for everyone this side of the Iron Curtain.

"Oh, all right then, I'll do it, under protest," I said, "but if we hit fog in the Channel, I'm straight back onto the bridge."

Mike's face broke into a relieved smile. "Thank you very much, Captain. You've no idea how happy this will make everyone from the TV company."

An hour later, I walked out under the hot glare of television cameras into the centre of the packed Queen's Room. I glanced at the script that had just been thrust into my hand. It didn't say who the mysterious top-of-the-bill would be. Either Shirley Bassey or Moira Anderson, I had heard someone say.

I picked up the microphone. "And now ..." My words were drowned in an explosion of applause. Perhaps I was more popular than I had imagined. I beamed, and waited for the clapping to subside. It didn't, and a large red album was thrust in front of me by a huge fist that materialised from behind my back. The fist's owner declared in an Irish brogue, "Captain Robert Arnott, Master of the QE2, this is your life." The ecstatic audience, I immediately realised, had recognised Eamonn Andrews creeping up on me. Oh well.

The spadework that led to my being press-ganged into the hot seat of This Is Your Life had begun some three months earlier, when a cloak-and-dagger man from Thames Television arrived in Fleetwood and headed for the Arnott abode. Eventually he emerged with notebooks bulging with details such as how much I weighed at birth, blow-by-blow descriptions of my schooldays and my career at sea, plus lists of chums and shipmates scattered around the world. Joan, my mother and father, our children, and dozens of family friends were sworn to secrecy as they searched their memories at the behest of the television researchers. A mutual vow to "Keep it all from Bob" explained the strange glances, the whisperings, and the hurriedly terminated telephone calls that had bedevilled me for weeks.

More machinations were in hand as I brought the QE2 into Cherbourg from New York. A tall, slim, red-head, her face eclipsed by dark glasses, came aboard just ahead of a burly, bruiser of a man whose craggy features were half hidden by gold-rim spectacles and an Edwardian moustache. The disguised duo were, of course, Joan, complete with theatrical Titian topping, and Eamonn himself. My son Roger also walked shamelessly up the gangplank sporting an alien hairstyle and a stick-on moustache, and his sisters too were camouflaged in way-out wigs and exotic plumage. Even my parents had joined the fancy-dress parade. French customs finally officially approved the plot by stamping a false Cunard-prepared passenger list to cover the QE2's short-haul stowaways.

Few of my crew were in on the secret, and Staff Captain John Hall was the chief "mutineer", his job being to keep me busy while the Arnott family cast was being smuggled on board. Joan knew that one of my favourite ploys is to set off on a walkabout around the ship without warning, and there is no doubt that I would have recognised Joan in a head-one collision in a companionway, wig or no wig. To avoid such a meeting my staff captain raised an incessant stream of what I considered to be remarkably inane queries on the state of Channel shipping - designed to confine me to the bridge.

The TV people were lucky inasmuch as I wouldn't have gone to the theatre at any price if there had been fog about. But the Channel's early autumn skies were crystal clear and the TV trap was sprung on me exactly as planned. It was a pleasant enough ordeal. Eamonn brought on old school chums, introduced filmed interviews with friends and shipmates from all over the world, including Captain Mortimer Hehir and Captain Peter Jackson. And then, of course, there was the whole Arnott clan. Dad told the remarkable story of meeting me by pure chance in a war-time Calcutta street, and Mum talked of our early days in Australia. Show-biz friends, including Joe Loss and Moira Anderson, added their anecdotes, and finally Eamonn handed me the red, leather-bound book he had been reading from. As soon as the cameras stopped filming, he asked me for it back. It then contained only typewritten script, but a couple of weeks later I received from Thames TV the completed volume, packed with photographs, titled "Captain Robert Arnott, RD, RNR, This Is Your Life." The celebration party in my cabin after the recording continued until six in the morning, and I got very little sleep that night. At Southampton, Joan and her fellow conspirators went ashore looking exactly like themselves, Thames TV's make-up department having re-possessed the wigs, false moustaches, ostrich feathers and assorted pairs of dark glasses. Our managing director, John Mitchell, came aboard after we docked to present clocks and watches to lots of crew and hotel staff with twenty-five years' service, then we sailed the following day to New York.

Series 18 subjects