Lost on the Lusitania
On 1st May 1915, my father’s uncle, Tertius Selwyn Warner, was one of the 1,959 passengers and crew on board RMS Lusitania as she sailed from New York’s Pier 54 and began her voyage home to England. Above cheering crowds and fond farewells, the strains of “Tipperary” played by the ship’s band rivalled the Royal Welsh Male Singers on the same deck singing “The Star Spangled Banner”. The cream of society mingled with other passengers and crew.
As the liner steamed gracefully out of the docks, smoke belched from the four giant red and black funnels, darkening the bright spring sky as Manhattan fell behind. In the six days that followed, as the 32,000-ton liner steered towards England, life on board went on as usual. At the captain’s party a lady sang with feeling Irving Berlin’s lyrics, “When I leave the world behind”. The world was in fact looking at any news there was about the Lusitania and worrying about U-boats and the ship’s safety.
By early morning on the seventh day of the journey (7th May), in a dawn fog and at a reduced speed of 18 knots to save coal, the liner received seven messages. The one at 0005 read: “Take Liverpool Pilot At Bar And Avoid Headlands. Pass Harbours At Full Speed. Steer Mid Channel Course. Submarines Off Fastnet”.
As the morning drew on, the fog lifted and by 11am bright sunshine warmed the decks. The passengers were happily unaware of any sinister messages as they headed for the South Irish coastline. Some were busy in their cabins packing, ready to disembark the following morning, some were getting ready for lunch.
At 1.30pm Captain Turner was searching the skyline for position and at 1.40pm, approximately 270 miles from Liverpool, the cry of a seagull announced land. On the horizon the Old Head of Kinsale loomed and from 67 degrees east the helmsman swung the Lusitania once more to 87 degrees.
By 2pm diners from the first sitting were walking or lying in chairs on the sunlit decks and in the first class dining room the orchestra played Strauss’s haunting “Blue Danube Waltz”. On the Promenade Deck someone sighted a “porpoise” glistening in the water, but on the bridge the experienced eye of Captain Turner recognised the tell-tale wake of a torpedo skimming the sea’s glassy surface. It had been fired from a range of 750 yards and struck through 7/8th inch thick steel on the starboard side, right behind the bridge.
From his periscope in U-boat 20, Kapitanleutenant Walther Schweiger watched. The detonation rocked his submarine and blew the bulbs from the control room lights. A second explosion was heard and smoke enveloped the Lusitania.
A group of Irish schoolchildren and a few other observers near the lighthouse at Kinsale saw the liner majestically round Seven Heads Point. They heard a heavy rumble and saw steam and smoke shoot into the air.
At the second sitting in the Lusitania’s second class dining room a young man waited for a spoon with which to eat his ice cream. Dr. Carl Foss of New York, travelling with a group of physicians to join the Red Cross, spilt his coffee as the sound of a loud boom vibrated crockery from the tables. A group of young men were playing poker and drinking whisky until the lights went out. The liner lurched heavily. A mother and baby were thrown to the floor.
The second class dining room was on D deck; the four propellers underneath fell silent. Passengers in the lift were halted between floors and their cries were heard as mothers snatched babies from their afternoon cradles. Scrambling up tilting stairways women screamed. Trapped below in the baggage room experienced seamen were lost. Acrid
smoke filled the engine room while water cascaded into the boiler room and into the bottom of the ship and the hold where boxes of cheese and raw furs were stored with 700 tubs of butter, 17 cases of hardware and cargo listed for Kitchener’s Voluntary Army.
Back in the second class dining room a number of men shuttered portholes in the darkness, sliding heavy brass bolts into position as passengers were assisted onto one of the nine decks. On the Marconi Deck, frenzied passengers ran in all directions in search of family, friends and lifejackets.
The Lusitania listed heavily to starboard, diving deeper at the bow while 60 people took refuge in a lifeboat suspended by davits over the side. The hasty launching crushed and spilt their bodies into the sea.
Within 18 minutes the green Atlantic was blackened with survivors clinging to wreckage floating alongside hundreds of bodies; some remained in the water for seven hours until help arrived. A New York wine merchant was one of 50 people clinging to a collapsible boat; after seven duckings beneath the icy waves, only three people remained.
Out of nearly 2,000 passengers and crew, 1,198 perished including 94 children. Survivors and dead were reached by various vessels off the Southern Irish coastline and ferried 27 miles to Queenstown (present-day Cobh) where, three days later in the old church cemetery, the first unidentified bodies were buried in mass graves dug by soldiers.
In defiance of the 1907 Hague Convention, the Lusitania had been sunk without warning with no provision for the safety of her passengers and crew. No guns were mounted and no search for contraband cargo was made. In Munich a medal commemorating the sinking was cast and distributed, indicating that such crimes were not merely regarded favourably but given every encouragement.
Some months later bodies were washed ashore, unrecognisably mutilated by sea birds. Advertisements appeared in windows along the Irish coast for survivors, and a lawyer searching for the famous Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt offered a $1,000 reward while Cunard offered $5 for survivors of lesser fame.
To return to my ancestor, Tertius Selwyn Warner, who was born on 17th May 1893, the seventh child of a family of 12 children. His parents, Thomas and Agnes, were bakers. At the age of 17 he is listed as a golfer. The golf club may
have been at Cosby, a village close to his home at Whetstone in Leicestershire as it was opened in 1895.
As the Lusitania sailed, Tertius was just a few days short of his 22nd birthday and occupying a second class cabin. He had left England with his mother some time before to visit relatives in Canada. His brother George, with wife Grace and their one-year-old daughter Prudence Irene, had sailed from Bristol to the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1911. It would be 50 years before they returned to see Tertius’s three sisters, Muriel, Nellie (my grandmother), Nancy and his brother John in 1961.
Tertius had regarded warnings about the sinking of the Lusitania as pure propaganda, and nothing his mother said would deter him from returning home on the ship. He was determined to do his bit and join the army. His mother was too frightened to accompany him and returned home on another vessel.
We know nothing of Tertius’s movements on board the ship except that he was a second class passenger. Was he trapped in the lift? Was he eating in the second class dining room? Was he shuttering portholes? Did he jump 60 feet from the deck into the sea and drown or was he crushed in a lifeboat launch? What was he doing in the last 18 minutes of his life?
Many anonymous names appeared on file: Mrs. Smith’s maid, Mr. Jones’s valet... In the Maritime Record Office in Liverpool the absence of an asterisk by his name denotes that my ancestor was never found.
Mystery surrounded the sinking of the Lusitania for many years as people recorded hearing two explosions, but the German captain maintained that he had only fired one torpedo. In 1994 the BBC television programme Network First showed Dr. Robert Ballard, an American oceanographer in a two-man submarine, tracking the path of the Lusitania’s sinking in order to unravel this mystery which had lain buried on the seabed for almost eight decades.
In 1992 the Daily Telegraph reported the news of Dr. Ballard’s proposal to send satellite pictures, via remote cameras, to the Maritime Museum in Liverpool. For me, viewing the television screen and seeing the Lusitania on the sea floor evoked a mixture of sadness and nostalgia. Dr. Ballard’s project created a fascinating undersea museum and helped unlock long-hidden secrets. Did the German fire more than one torpedo? Was the Lusitania carrying weapons for Kitchener’s army?
Today, we know that Dr. Ballard’s investigation put forward a very credible theory which has haunted the bereaved families down the centuries. Secrets that the Lusitania held in her sepulchre, 320 feet down and 12 miles south of the Old Head of Kinsale, have at last been released. The second explosion, Dr. Ballard believed, seems to have been caused by the single torpedo igniting coal dust in the almost empty bunkers. This evidence dispels the theory that exploding ammunition was the cause.
In Whetstone, the sleepy Leicestershire village of his birth, where in St. Peter’s Church the record of his entry into life can be found, a few words on his mother and father’s tombstone are his memorial: “Tertius Selwyn. Born 17 May 1893. Died 7 May 1916. Lost on the Lusitania. Gone but not forgotten”.
At the time of the inscription the engraver chiselled the incorrect date (1916).
In some strange way, through the skill of Dr. Ballard, seeing the Lusitania on that fascinating television programme has laid his ghost to rest. Yet, every year, on 7th May, I will think of him again and remember all those who lost their lives.