DURING the 1920s and early 1930s the White Star Line operated the world's biggest passenger liner, the 56,550-ton Majestic, known to her crew as "the Magic Stick".

She was on White Star Line's prestige service between Southampton and New York during the era before the coming of bigger ships such as Normandie and Queen Mary.

Among the regular passengers were many millionaires and VIPs of that period who wined and dined their way across the Atlantic, usually refusing to travel in any other ship.

Majestic was not a British-built liner. She was originally a German ship and her first name was Bismark, after Otto von Bismarck, who became the founder and first Chancellor of the German Empire.

She was acquired by White Star, making her maiden voyage from Southampton on May 10, 1922.

Between 1922 and 1936 Majestic made 207 Atlantic return voyages, steaming some 1,250,000 miles. She survived the 1934 Cunard and White Star merger, but in 1936 she was withdrawn ahead of the arrival of Queen Mary.

The liner was fitted out by Vosper Thornycroft at Southampton as a boys' training ship and given a new name, HMS Caledonia.

She left Southampton for Rosyth in April 1937 to begin her new career but caught fire in 1939 and sank. The hull was raised after the Second World War and scrapped.