Aquatania Tapestries

John Brown and Company of Clydebank was a British marine engineering and shipbuilding firm. It built many notable and world-famous ships including RMS Lusitania, RMS Aquitania, HMS Hood, HMS Repulse, RMS Queen Mary, RMS Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Elizabeth 2. At its height, from 1900 to the 1950s, it was one of the most highly regarded, and internationally famous, shipbuilding companies in the world. However thereafter, along with other UK shipbuilders, John Brown's found it increasingly difficult to compete with the emerging shipyards in Eastern Europe and the far East. In 1968 John Brown's merged with other Clydeside shipyards to form the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders consortium, but that collapsed in 1971.

RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner that was sunk on 7 May 1915 by a German U-boat 11 miles (18 km) off the southern coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 passengers and crew. The sinking occurred about two years before the United States declaration of war on Germany. Although the Lusitania sinking was a major factor in building support for a war, war was eventually declared only after the Imperial German Government resumed the use of unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping in an attempt to break the transatlantic supply chain from the USA to Britain, and after the Zimmermann Telegram.