Authors: Greg King
Queenstown had long been a point of embarkation for many, principally steerage passengers leaving their homeland in the hope of better lives in America.
Titanic
had called here on her maiden voyage, collecting hundreds of émigrés before sailing to oblivion. Now, shocked survivors of another doomed liner slowly shuffled into the city as the night wore on, shaking, dazed, eyes downcast, clothing wet and torn. As James Brooks came ashore, he thrust his hand into his trouser pocket and found that he had only four cents.
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Another passenger, too, searched in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled, damp piece of paper: it was a New York City newspaper, carrying the German notice bolded in black.
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An exhausted Harold Boulton had promptly downed six whiskey and sodas at his hotel; “I was not a drinking man,” he later said, but “I gulped them down.” He was sure that the alcohol saved his life.
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A fortunate few, like Amy Pearl, Rita Jolivet, and Laura Ryerson, stayed with Vice Admiral Coke at his private residence; others found beds at the Imperial Hotel or cheap lodging houses. The largest number, though, went to the forty-three-room Queen’s Hotel, owned ironically by a German immigrant who wisely hid in his cellar that night for fear of retribution.
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It was, thought Margaret Mackworth, “by far the dirtiest place I have ever seen,” while her father bluntly told the proprietor that it was a “damned dog kennel.”
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It was now crowded with the displaced and distressed. Dorothy Conner calmly walked up to the front desk and asked for a private room and a bath. The attendant stared at her in disbelief. If she wanted a room, she could stay, but she would have to share with other survivors. Along with a small bowl of lukewarm water in which to wash and a bottle of cold lemon soda came a lecture on her selfishness.
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People crowded in as best as they could, “a curious, heterogeneous party of complete strangers,” recalled Margaret Mackworth, “whom this great catastrophe had shaken into a temporarily close intimacy.”
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At the Imperial Hotel, Belle Naish looked after Robert Kay. Still uncertain about her husband’s fate, she could only wait. To help take her mind off her anxiety, she sat with Robert and taught him the Lord’s Prayer.
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“All night,” said Michael Byrne, “delirious survivors were moaning in their sleep and crying, ‘Captain, save us!’” Carl Foss had collapsed from shock and exposure, and was carried to his temporary lodgings.
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“You’re badly hurt,” an officer told Robert Timmis, “your head is bashed in.” Timmis would eventually lose the sight in his other eye from injuries sustained in the sinking.
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Robinson Pirie couldn’t understand why he was covered “by a coat of black tar,” the mixture of coal and oil that had swirled around the sinking ship. Though he scrubbed and scrubbed at his Queenstown hotel, he thought he would never again get clean. Like many other survivors, his actions were almost mechanical: shock and exposure left them unable to do much more than simply follow routine motions.
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Isaac Lehmann complained not only of the arrival at Queenstown—“the arrangement for the reception of the survivors was just as hard and difficult as it was to get saved from the
Lusitania
”—but also grumbled that he received “no attention at all” at the Queen’s Hotel.
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David Thomas and Howard Fisher, wrapped in blankets at the hotel, were trying to sleep in the lounge when a boisterous fellow survivor burst in. Not only had he survived, but so had his wife and child, and he insisted that everyone celebrate his good fortune by singing and drinking the night away. When the men refused, he shouted, “Drink with me, and I’ll shut up!” Fisher just wanted him to go away, but finally Thomas reached across the table, grabbed the bottle of whiskey, and toasted the man. Seemingly satisfied, he calmed down and allowed the men to sleep. “It was the one humorous incident of that tragic day,” Fisher recalled.
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Early reports of survivors were garbled and often wrong. Lady Mackworth, one newspaper reported, “is hovering between life and death.”
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Many survivors sent short, reassuring cables to friends and relatives. “Safe and well,” Timmis cabled to his wife in Texas.
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Charles Lauriat reported that he was “safe and sound, and suffering from no after shock.”
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“Saved,” ran the terse telegram from George Kessler to his brother-in-law. “Unharmed. In water three hours.”
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The champagne merchant seemed stunned; when cornered by a reporter, Kessler rubbed his forehead thoughtfully and slowly said, “How I escaped, why I escaped—is a miracle. It’s God’s mercy. I cannot believe it happened. It is more like a nightmare.”
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Saturday, May 8, was “a beautiful morning,” remembered Charles Lauriat. The sun “was shining warmly, and hardly a breath of air was stirring.”
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Dawn revealed a sickly sight: a cluster of white lifeboats, bobbing quietly in the harbor. Curious crowds gathered around them. A few smiled and posed for photographs with the macabre debris of disaster; adventuresome young boys scampered over their hulls at play.
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Six lifeboats: all that remained of the mighty
Lusitania
.
For most, it had been a long, unnerving night. Charles Lauriat had secured a room at the Imperial, but restlessly wandered the streets of Queenstown until passing into “a dead, dreamless sleep.” His landlady dried his clothing and shoes, served him whiskey made by her grandfather, and fed him breakfast before Lauriat set off through the town. Knowing that many survivors were “practically destitute,” he went to the local bank and presented a waterlogged check for £40 to a rather startled cashier. “He told me he didn’t know me,” Lauriat recalled, “and I told him that didn’t make any difference, I didn’t know him. He said he couldn’t guarantee my signature, but I told him that I thought my signature was as good as his money. I produced my soaked passport and showed him my autograph.” Lauriat explained that he needed the money for “twelve half-starved, half-naked Americans that had to be fed and clothed.” The clerk remained unmoved. Finally, Lauriat told him that he would not leave the bank until he had his funds. Although the man grumbled that he would “probably lose his job,” he eventually gave Lauriat his money and the Boston bookseller promptly distributed it among his fellow survivors, divided “into as small fractions as possible” to help as many as he could.
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Unknown to Lauriat, orders from American Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan had come instructing consul Wesley Frost to “care for bodies of the dead, to give all help to the sick, and to aid the survivors who lost all cash.”
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Frost went to the local bank, retrieved several hundred pounds, and spent the next few days loaning it out to American survivors.
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Even so, Isaac Lehmann was still disgruntled. Feeling that he was receiving “very little” attention from authorities, “I decided the best thing to do was to get out of Queenstown as quick as possible.”
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Survivors, clad in borrowed clothing, wandered the streets in a daze from hospital to hospital, searching for missing friends and relatives. Hearing that a woman identified as Mrs. Hammond was in a hospital, Ogden Hammond rushed to see her. Instead of his wife, Mary, he found a stranger, Canadian passenger Kathleen Hammond, who had lost her husband in the sinking. Not knowing what else to do, Hammond generously gave Kathleen money for clothing and her return passage.
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Warren Pearl found his wife, Amy, along with nurse Alice Lines and his two youngest children, Stuart and Audrey. There was, though, no trace of the other two children, Amy and Susan. “Two were gone,” he commented philosophically, “but I thank God that so many of my family were saved, especially when I recall that whole families have perished.”
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Josephine Burnside spent that Saturday in the Queenstown Cunard office, sobbing. “I fear my daughter is lost!” she cried. “I have not seen her since the torpedo struck the
Lusitania
. I know she must have gone. The Lord alone can tell how I was saved.” A reporter noted that she was “almost fainting” as she persisted in a “futile effort to obtain reassuring information.”
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Avis Dolphin had been put into a bed at the Queen’s Hotel with a glass of hot milk the previous evening: “it was lovely,” she remembered. Ian Holbourn found her the next morning, and soon she had new shoes and a hat to replace those she had lost. Even after taking a bath, she couldn’t get the engine oil and grime that had covered the sea when
Lusitania
went down out of her hair. But, she wrote to her mother, she thought that she had “escaped very nicely. A few bruises is all I have, and I can’t feel those unless I press them very hard. I haven’t got a cold or anything.”
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Theodate Pope had been so weak that sailors carried her from the quay to a motorcar, which took her to “a third-rate hotel.” There, she spent a restless night. “All night long, men kept coming into our room, snapping on the lights, bringing children for us to identify, taking telegrams, getting our names for the list of survivors,” and making any number of requests. “I kept expecting Mr. Friend to appear, looking for me,” she recalled, but he had been lost.
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Late that Saturday morning, Dorothy Conner came to see Margaret Mackworth at the Queen’s Hotel. Dorothy still wore the same fawn-colored tweed suit she had dressed in the previous day; it looked, Margaret recalled, “as smart and well-tailored as if it had just come out of the shop.” Later, a woman asked Lady Mackworth and other ladies what they needed in the way of underclothing and personal items, and soon returned from Cork with the gifts.
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Most often, hospital and hotel searches failed. Queenstown, the
New York Times
reported, was “now a vast morgue.”
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Survivors fearfully took to the three temporary morgues at the City Hall, a shed at the Cunard Quay, and a disused chandlery on the harbor. All night long and into morning, bodies continued to wash up along the Irish coast. “The scenes among the debris cast up from the wreck were so excruciating as to defy description,” recalled Wesley Frost. “Drowned bodies of women and children were numerous, and many had been mangled or disfigured in the surge and grinding of the wreckage so as to stain the ocean with blood.”
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Shattered survivors passed down these grim rows of corpses, the eerie silence broken only by an occasional cry or sob. Dim lights revealed mangled, bloated bodies, limbs twisted and mouths contorted in silent screams; some women still clutched the lifeless bodies of infants in their arms.
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Many corpses lacked shoes, “evidence of a hurried attempt to free themselves of impeding attire,” the
New York Times
reported.
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Attendants had gone through pockets looking for papers; watches and jewelry lay in little piles atop each of the bodies, in the hope that someone would be able to identify a friend or relative.
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To Oliver Bernard, the victims “looked like battered, bruised, broken dolls” resembling some macabre illustration by Gustave Doré. Body after body, the “trophies of war” took on a “horrible, lifeless uniformity.”
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He saw “a heap, literally a heap, of babies” on the floor. “They were almost naked, and their poor little bodies were bruised and cut. Some of them were purple, while some were almost black and others were yellow. It was a terrible sight.”
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