Authors: Greg King
In the First Class Dining Saloon, after a program that included “The Blue Danube,”
Lusitania
’s band had just ended a vigorous encore of “Tipperary” to entertain the diners.
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Cellist Handel Hawkins immediately stopped; although passengers rushed toward the exits, he saw “no panic.”
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Most diners seemed stunned: the shock was so severe that glass in portholes—at least those that were closed—shattered and showered over the carpet.
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“It all happened so quickly,” Josephine Burnside said, “that I can hardly remember it.”
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“I had just finished making a collection for the musicians,” Josephine Brandell recalled, “and sat down to finish my lunch.” The explosion convulsed the ship, and everyone “rushed for the stairs. I heard someone shouting to be calm.” But Josephine was “simply horrified with fright.”
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Francis Jenkins, sharing her table, recalled how she clung to him as they made their way to the deck. “This,” he said, “took perhaps some five minutes, as the boat listed very badly.”
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Robert Timmis, having enjoyed his cocktails with Ralph Moodie, was paying his bill when the torpedo hit. “It was not a severe blow,” he remembered. “It was more a penetrating thrust, as though the torpedo must have gone through the ship.”
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“They have got us!” Moodie cried out. As they fled the room, a steward shouted, “Steady, gentlemen, steady!” The list made ascending the Grand Staircase difficult, and Timmis helped a lady climb to the deck, one hand on the railing and the other holding her tight against his side. On reaching A Deck, Timmis struggled to his cabin: he found a lifebelt—there had been two, but another passenger had opened the door and taken the second.
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Dorothy Conner and Howard Fisher had just finished their squab when they heard “a rather dull sound, like a soft blast, a slight shock,” as he recalled. “What is that?” Dorothy cried out. “That,” he told her, “is what we came after, a torpedo! We must go on deck!” To Fisher, it seemed as if “everyone” was “pouring forward” in an attempt to reach the deck. “Everything was confusion,” and he didn’t see any officers to direct passengers.
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Soon, Margaret Mackworth ran up, asking if she could remain with them until she found her father.
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The second sitting in
Lusitania
’s Second Class Dining Saloon was just beginning when the explosions came. Phoebe Amory, clad in her raincoat, saw a steward put a bowl of soup before her; this didn’t appeal to her. Instead, “It occurred to me that I would like a salad.” She was just about to ask the steward to switch out the two dishes “when there came the most terrible crash, which seemed to tear everything to pieces, and to rend the ship asunder.”
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Young Barbara Anderson remembered being with her mother, Emily, on the upper level of the Second Class Dining Saloon. “I got out of my chair,” she recalled, “and stood next to my mother and looked down through the railing at all those people having lunch at the long tables.”
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Curiously she had no memory of the explosions, merely that “great chaos” erupted in the room; unaware of the danger, she still clutched her spoon engraved
Lusitania
. Apparently assistant purser William Harkness spotted Emily struggling to carry her daughter through the crowd; he hoisted the girl in his arms and led them up and out onto the deck near the stern.
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Carl Foss was trying to enjoy his lunch; after spotting what he took for a submarine earlier, though, he was “keyed up” and found it difficult to relax. Suddenly, he heard “a heavy, dull sound, which was followed by a violent trembling.” He thought that the explosion had “a deadening effect” on his fellow travelers: they “seemed to be stunned by the shock.”
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Instinct kicked in and, “in a more or less orderly and calm way,” passengers ran to their cabins to retrieve lifebelts or made their ways out onto the deck.
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A few tables away, William Meriheina “felt a heavy explosion up forward, near the First Cabin section, a grinding and a ripping. The boat immediately lurched to the side.” Passengers quickly left the room—he saw “very little panic; individuals moaned and cried,” but there was “just the suggestion of a rush for the exits.” Meriheina ran toward his cabin but abruptly stopped when he saw water flooding through open portholes; instead, he opened an adjacent cabin door, took out lifebelts, and headed for the deck.
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“There was a rush for the stairs,” Phoebe Amory recalled, as the Second Class Dining Saloon suddenly emptied. She had to push her way through slower groups ascending the staircase as the cry went up, “We have been torpedoed!” “I realized for the first time that we were doomed,” she said. An officer kept shouting, “Keep cool!” as passengers pushed and struggled up the tilting stairs; Phoebe fell three times before finally reaching the top. By this time, the list was so heavy “I feared that we were turning over.”
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At the moment of impact, Ian Holbourn had quickly glanced across the Second Class Dining Saloon; young Avis Dolphin sat with nurse Hilda Ellis and Sarah Smith, looking on in bewilderment as plates, silver, and crystal slid from the tables and smashed against the carpet.
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He struggled over to Avis and picked her up in his arms, saying, “Don’t panic, come to my cabin. I’ll find you some lifejackets.”
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Having found three lifebelts, Holbourn, Avis recalled, “put me in one, and put one on Hilda and tried to force Miss Smith to take one, but she wouldn’t, because she said he had a wife and three children. So he put it on himself.”
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As they stood by the railing, Avis recalled, Holbourn pointed “out the distant land to me” and told her that it was Ireland.
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At her husband’s prompting, Belle Naish had gone out onto the Second Class promenade to enjoy the view of Ireland when “the shock of the explosion shook the vessel.”
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“I saw a great volume of dirty water rise,” she remembered. “It was filled with broken iron and splinters of wood.” The first thing she noticed was “the deepest, most awful silence.” Everyone seemed stunned. Then, as people began to realize what had happened, “the air was filled with curses. The Germans were damned in shrieks.” Her one desperate thought was to reach her husband, but the rush of passengers up the stairs and out onto the decks slowed her progress. Finally, she got to the cabin, where Theodore tied a lifebelt over her shoulders and helped her back up to the deck; although she had practiced taking the same route through the ship, the list and panic were so confusing that Belle lost her way and finally came out on the port side of the Boat Deck.
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In her cabin, nurse Alice Lines was looking after baby Audrey and five-year-old Stuart, two of the four children of Warren and Amy Pearl. “While I was feeding her,” she said, “there was a terrific bang—instinct told me what it was—I just picked up the shawl and the baby with it.” Stuart immediately burst into tears, sobbing, “I don’t want to be drowned, I don’t want to be drowned!”
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“I had difficulty in standing,” Alice recalled, as she tried to make her way through the liner, the baby in her arms and the little boy holding fast to her skirt.
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“No matter what happens,” she told Stuart, “hang on to me. If I fall down, hang on to me. Don’t let go.”
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Holding Audrey, and with Stuart clutching her skirt, she made her way along the corridor and up the staircase, where she met Greta Lorenson, nanny to Amy and Susan Pearl. “What shall I do?” Greta cried out. Alice told her to watch after the children but the rushing crowd soon separated the two women.
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Young Virginia Loney had also been in her cabin. “I had no idea what had happened, but joined in the rush for the deck. There, everything was in confusion.” She found her father, who “went down to get some lifebelts, and returned with a number, which he distributed around, but did not keep one himself.”
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The impact had hurled Rita Jolivet about her cabin on D Deck, amidst breaking glass and flying toiletries. “Well,” she said to herself, “the Germans have got us this time!”
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Although she had largely ignored worried talk about a possible submarine attack, Rita
had
thought ahead: she told Harold Boulton that she had packed a small, pearl-handled pistol with her belongings. If something happened and she found herself in the water, she would shoot herself rather than drown.
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She quickly grabbed the pistol, pushed it into her purse, and peered into the corridor: a woman was hastily tying on a lifebelt, and Rita grabbed one from her own cabin before making her perilous way up four flights of tilting stairs.
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On deck, she found her brother-in-law, George Vernon, standing with Charles Frohman and Alfred Vanderbilt. “I didn’t think they would do it!” Frohman muttered.
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The impresario seemed unusually calm and “magnificently courageous” as he nursed a cigar. “Stay where you are,” he warned them. “This is going to be a close call. We shall have more chances here than by rushing for the boats.”
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Back at
Lusitania
’s Veranda Café, Harold Boulton saw “confusion everywhere” in the first minute following the explosions. The shock was overwhelming: even those passengers who had feared the worst seemed stunned now that it had actually come. Boulton wanted his lifebelt, and he wanted to find his friend Frederic Lassetter and his mother; finding their cabin empty, Boulton ran to his own stateroom only to find the door open: another panicked passenger had rifled through the room, taking his lifebelt. The list was so great that Boulton could only walk down the corridor with one foot on the floor and one on the wall; he found a steward at the end of the passage handing out lifebelts, took one, and made his way back to the deck. Once he stumbled and fell by the listing Grand Staircase, landing at the feet of several women. To cover his embarrassment, he asked if he could do anything to help. “Not a thing,” came the reply. “We are not going to get excited, but remain calm and stay here. The Captain says the
Lusitania
cannot sink.”
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Boulton wasn’t convinced. At 2:14
P.M.,
Lusitania
’s power suddenly failed: cabins and corridors were plunged into darkness as screams and cries for help echoed through the liner.
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As Boulton ran past the Grand Staircase, he said he saw a horrific scene: passengers trapped between floors in one of the First Class elevators when the power failed.
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The attendants had run off, and panicked travelers had apparently rushed into at least one of the lifts.
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Gates designed to open only when the car was in place now trapped passengers in an ornate cage.
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The gates rattled and shook as “the most distressing cries” for help filled the air, but no one could force open the grilles.
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Boulton could do nothing; running past, he knew that these unfortunate passengers would be “drowned like rats.”
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Leslie Morton had gone on duty at noon that Friday, taking up his place on the foredeck of
Lusitania
’s starboard bow as an extra lookout.
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At 2:10, he spotted “a thin streak of foam making for the ship at a rapid speed” some five hundred yards in the distance, followed by the wake of what he took to be a second torpedo. “Torpedoes coming on the starboard side!” he shouted through his megaphone.
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Morton was supposed to wait until his warning had been acknowledged; instead, he was racing across the deck to tell his brother John when he felt “a shock all over the ship. It shook me off my feet.”
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This “tremendous explosion,” he recalled, was “followed instantly by a second one.”
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