Gregg Bemis
Millionaire who bought the wreck of the Lusitania and fought decades of legal battles with the Irish State
GREGG Bemis, who has died aged 91, was an American millionaire and owner of the famous Lusitania shipwreck, the luxury passenger liner torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat in 1915 with the loss of 1,200 lives, among them 128 American citizens.
It was the defining act of terrorism against innocent civilians of the early 20th Century, and eventually drew the United States into World War I. Bemis’s interest in the Lusitania had originally been piqued purely by the possibility of making money; he regarded what was left of the stricken ship — and her precious cargo of copper, bronze and silver — as a sound investment which could profitably be sold for scrap. But he quickly came to appreciate the spellbinding allure of her story, and the mystery of how she met her doom.
In particular, he became exercised by the continuing debate over whether the vessel was secretly carrying war supplies from America — still neutral in 1915 — to Britain, nine months after the start of World War I. For the best part of half a century, Bemis devoted himself to trying to establish why the huge ship sank in just 18 minutes and what caused a second explosion, moments after the torpedo hit, reported by surviving passengers.
However, although Bemis subscribed to the widely held conspiracy theory that the British government was anxious to conceal the presence of munitions in the Lusitania’s hold, he never managed to clinch his argument with absolute proof.
The Cunarder was steaming from New York to Liverpool when the torpedo struck at 2pm on May 7, 1915. On both sides of the Atlantic, the sinking was depicted as a heinous crime against non-combatants, and when America finally joined the military alliance against Germany in 1917, the sinking was cited by many as a justification.
Although Bemis controlled the salvage rights to one of the most historically significant shipwrecks of the modern era, his efforts to solve the mystery of why the Lusitania sank so quickly were thwarted by the government here, which regarded the ship as part historic monument and part war grave, a fragile archaeological site that could be desecrated if Bemis had physically altered its remains.
Among the passengers on her last voyage were a number of eminent politicians, artists, academics and businessmen, as well as the Irish art collector Sir Hugh Lane, who was reported to have had with him on board paintings by Titian, Monet and Rubens, each encased in a protective lead tube. This revelation led to the government placing an
“underwater cultural heritage order” on the ship to dissuade treasure hunters, blocking Bemis from bringing artefacts to the surface.
A flamboyant and outspoken figure, Bemis had owned the Lusitania wreck since 1982, buying the salvage rights as an investment and estimating the scrap value of the steel, bronze, and brass on the historic ship at about $12m.
In 2019, he signed the wreck over to a local museum in Kinsale, saying that at his advanced age, “there is only so much more I can do to further this project”.
Farwell Gregg Bemis Jr was born in May, 1928 in Boston, Massachusetts, into a family whose fortune derived from bag-making, and later plastic packaging. After graduating in Economics at Stanford University in 1950, he spent two years on active service in the US marines. He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1954, and over the ensuing 25 years, worked in the top management of three Fortune 500 companies.
Gregg Bemis was married and had five children. He died on May 21, 2020.