Dubai, November 1977. The city is a boom town, with the World Trade Centre about to become the tallest building in the Middle East and work advancing on both the port at Jebel Ali and the Drydocks at Port Rashid.
The focus of this photograph is the massive road-roller compacting a parking area on the waterfront at Dubai Creek. The story, however, is the white passenger ship moored in the background.
The SS Patricia was launched at the Swan Hunter shipyards in Newcastle on Tyne in November 1950 and went into service the following year as a summer passenger ferry between Gothenburg in Sweden and the London port of Tilbury. In the winters she would cruise the Caribbean. Too big for a ferry, she was sold as a luxury cruise ship to a German company in 1957, and renamed the SS Ariadne, working everything from the fjords of Scandinavia to the islands of the West Indies. Three years later, she was sold again, to a Florida shipping company to cruise down from Miami as far as Mexico. !n 1972, the ship became part of a Greek company and operated out of the Bahamas, now renamed the SS Bon Vivant. This is the name visible on the stern of the ship in this image. In 1976, the ship was sold ot a Panama company and taken to Dubai to operate as a floating hotel. Dubai was desperately short of hotel rooms at the time, and this seemed a quick and easy solution,
The experiment does not seem to have been profitable. Just a few weeks after this photograph was taken, the Bon Vivant was off for a refit and a rename, the SS Ariane.
For the next five years, she operated mostly in the eastern Mediterranean, including Turkey, Egypt, Israel and the Greek Islands. After mothballing in Greece from 1982 to 1989, the ship sailed to Singapore to become the grandly titled SS Empress Katerina, operating an accommodation ship in Vietnam and later as a floating barracks in the Philippines.
Her last voyage was in 1997. After 46 years and five name changes, the ship arrived at the breakers yards at Alang in Bangladesh for destruction. It is worth noting that much of the steel from ship-breaking is used for rebar, the steel rods that reinforces concrete in modern buildings. It is possible then, that something of the Bon Vivant is still in Dubai.
* James Langton
