QE2's longest-serving passenger seeks new home

Beatrice Muller is looking for a new home. Ideally, it should be within easy reach of shops, a ballroom and a community of committed duplicate bridge players. She does not need much space, nor is she fixed on any particular location. Indeed, her chief wish is that her new home be perpetually floating over the ocean between one location and the next.

In other words, she is looking for a new home that is almost exactly like her present one: a cabin on board the Queen Elizabeth 2, in which she has lived for the past nine years.

In November the ship will make its final voyage to Dubai to be moored beside a man-made island in the shape of a palm tree, and recast as a floating hotel. Even at the age of 89, Mrs Muller refuses to contemplate such a stationary life. “What would I want to do that for?” she said this week, while her home was moored at Southampton. “I was married to a wonderful man for 57 years. I have done my penal servitude – I want to travel.”


Photo from here.

Cruise holidays had never appealed to her until 1995, when she stepped on board the QE2 with her husband, Bob. Both were smitten, and returned year after year.In 1999 her husband died on board. Mrs Muller, from New Jersey, had no grandchildren and most of her friends had died or moved to France. She had far more friends on the QE2 and her two sons suggested that she live there.

She sold almost all of her landlocked possessions and moved into a small, windowless cabin permanently. “My sons are delighted I’m here and safe and out of their hair,” she said. The rates – about £3,500 a month – compared favourably with a Florida retirement home. “It’s far more pleasant,” she said. “They don’t organise you like senior citizens’ homes must do, and I’m hard to organise.”

“I’m looking for a new home at sea,” she said. It is a tight market. “The only liner left in the world is the Queen Mary 2. The Victoria is lovely but she’s not built to go as far as these ocean liners – she’s not as strong.”