Authors: Greg King
Robert Timmis returned to Texas, where he soon lost the sight in his good eye after having been struck in the face by wreckage during
Lusitania
’s sinking. He died in 1939.
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Robinson Pirie died in 1920; Charles Jeffery returned to Wisconsin; in a strange twist of fate, he hired fellow
Lusitania
survivor William Meriheina to promote his line of cars. Jeffery eventually sold his automobile company to Charles Nash, and it later merged with American Motors Corporation. Jeffery died in 1935.
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As for the inventive Meriheina, he left a legacy enjoyed around the world, having perfected—using the name William Heina—the car radio. He died in 1976.
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By a strange twist of fate, the
Lusitania
tragedy continued to bring survivors together in unexpected ways. Having lost not only her young son but her mother as well, Trixie Witherbee refused to discuss her experiences aboard
Lusitania
: the memories were simply too agonizing. Within a year, she suffered a nervous breakdown; to recuperate, she stayed with the family of fellow survivor Rita Jolivet outside London. Here, she met and fell in love with Rita’s brother Alfred. “That horrible Witherbee woman!” was Rita’s verdict on learning of the romance between her brother and the still married Trixie.
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After divorcing her husband, Trixie married Alfred Jolivet in 1919; a year later, Trixie gave birth to their son, Lawrence. In the 1920s, Trixie decided not to seek monetary damages from Germany for the loss of her son. “It is my deepest wish,” she wrote, “that the tragic death of my little son is not turned into profit or made a matter of money consideration.” Eventually, the Jolivets moved to Canada; Alfred died in 1958 but Trixie outlived her second husband by nearly two decades, dying in 1977 at the age of eighty-seven.
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A little more than two months after the sinking, Rita Jolivet’s now widowed sister, Inez Vernon, dressed in an evening gown, put her jewelry on, knelt in prayer, and put a bullet through her head in despair.
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As for Rita, she continued her theatrical career: in 1916, a visiting Harold Boulton went to see her in a Broadway production, recalling that her lifebelt from
Lusitania
had been hung outside the theater to advertise her presence.
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Later that year, Rita married Italian aristocrat Count Giuseppe de Cippico, though the union soon ended in divorce.
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Then, in the 1920s, Rita began visiting Lady Allan in Montreal, and Marguerite introduced her to her husband’s cousin, Captain James Bryce Allan. In 1928, they married in Paris and moved to his Scottish castle. For the next forty years, Rita mingled with politicians and aristocrats, fully enjoying her privileged life.
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She died in Nice in 1971 after attempting to prove her vigor by dancing a jig. “Oh well,” Trixie commented of her sister-in-law’s death, “she
would
go like that.”
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Although Rita announced that she was retiring from films on wedding Count de Cippico, the allure of the screen, coupled with her disintegrating marriage, proved too enticing. She made a number of motion pictures throughout the first half of the 1920s in America, France, and Italy, until finally abandoning acting in 1926. Many of those who had endured the
Lusitania
disaster used their survival to arouse public indignation against Germany and plead for relief funds. Some, like Phoebe Amory, wrote books and gave speeches. Being an actress, Rita recognized the propaganda value in such actions. She, too, joined in selling Liberty Bonds, but her principal contribution to public awareness of the dastardly Germans was a 1918 film called
Lest We Forget
. Said to have cost a quarter million dollars and with a cast of a thousand extras, it had been produced with the cooperation of the United States Navy and Army, the latter supplying some three hundred soldiers for one battle scene. Rita, naturally enough, starred as the heroine, a young French opera singer named Rita Heriot caught up in the dangers of the war. After narrowly escaping a German firing squad, Heriot sails aboard
Lusitania
and survives the sinking, to be reunited at the end with her lost love, a soldier she believed to have been killed in action. The American government allowed Rita to film the
Lusitania
scenes aboard the impounded German liner
Martha Washington
in Hoboken, New Jersey, lending a certain verisimilitude to the endeavor. The film, which the government endorsed for its “outstanding examples of patriotic ideals,” proved a hit in a nation now at war with Germany. Sadly, this epic, starring one of
Lusitania
’s survivors, is now lost to history.
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Rita’s fellow actress aboard
Lusitania,
Josephine Brandell, was left traumatized by the sinking and soon retired from the stage. In 1920 she married John Lawson-Johnston, whose nephew, in another of those twists of fate peculiar to
Lusitania,
later wed one of her youngest survivors, Audrey Pearl. Divorcing Lawson-Johnston in a few years, Josephine wed George Repton, a captain in the Irish Guards Regiment, in 1929. For fourteen years they were happily married, until Repton’s unexpected death in 1943. Two years later, Josephine entered into another marriage, with Beresford Bingham, 8th Earl of Annesley, which made Josephine a countess. After his death in 1957, the countess returned to New York, where she died in 1977.
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Charles Frohman’s death aboard
Lusitania
left the theatrical world stunned. “Expressions of sorrow were heard on all sides in the theatre district yesterday over the fate of Charles Frohman,” the
New York Times
reported two days after the tragedy. His brother, Daniel, was reportedly in shock, while fellow impresario David Belasco lauded his “dear old friend” as the person who “did more for the theatre than any other man.”
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His body, washed ashore on the Irish coast, was embalmed and shipped back to New York City, where on May 25 a lavish funeral took place at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue that, said the
New York Times,
“assumed the proportions of a public demonstration” as the “tears flowed freely.”
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His coffin carried a bouquet of violets from his rumored love, actress Maude Adams. She had collapsed on hearing of the sinking, but bravely if tearfully carried on in a production of her latest play the same evening.
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Elaborate memorials also marked the passing of Elbert and Alice Hubbard. On learning of the sinking, his son had insisted, “My father’s not dead, nor Alice Hubbard. The news they are is false. They must have been saved!” Yet soon enough the devastating confirmation arrived, and the flags at his Roycroft Colony in East Aurora were lowered in respect.
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Their memorial in New York City opened with the mournful sounds of Chopin’s “Funeral March”; ironically, the couple had enjoyed the same piece at a Roycroft concert just before sailing—a rather grim selection at a bon voyage party. The service in New York was filled with “applause and laughter,” and ended with a call to action: “We trust Uncle Sam,” declared a speaker, “trust in the rightness of his purpose. Let us arm him so that he can enforce good behavior if need be, and so that no foreigners can use the Stars and Stripes as a carpet!”
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Hubbard left an estate of $397,845—a sum substantial enough to continue his beloved colony to the present day.
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For
Lusitania
’s two most prominent surviving female bohemians, Margaret Mackworth and Theodate Pope, life was never to be the same. After years of unhappiness in her marriage and struggles for suffrage, Lady Mackworth emerged from the disaster confident and assured. Floating half-conscious amidst a sea of wreckage while awaiting rescue, she had pondered her life and felt as though “something” was caring for her.
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This sense led her to fully embrace the Christian faith about which her skeptical father had seemed so ambivalent. It also strengthened her determination in life. “I had got through this test without disgracing myself,” she wrote. “I had found that, when the moment came, I could control my fear.” The sinking of the
Lusitania,
she said, “altered my view of myself.”
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David Thomas, her father, went on to become minister of food control during the last years of the Great War, charged with introducing and supervising rationing. Although successful, the work left him tired, and in 1918 he died at the age of sixty-two.
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The title of Baron Rhondda, which he had been given in 1917, now passed, through a previous special remainder, to his only daughter, Margaret, who became viscountess. Ever her father’s daughter, Margaret easily assumed control of his companies and took over as chairman for a number of other endeavors. Her campaign for women’s suffrage continued until 1918, when Great Britain finally agreed that women over thirty would be allowed the right to vote.
With one campaign won, Margaret embarked on another. In 1922, she divorced her husband, Humphrey, on the grounds of “statutory desertion and adultery,” and tried to test this equalization of the sexes with a practical endeavor, attempting—as a member of the Peerage—to take a seat in the House of Lords.
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The government refused to acquiesce, denying her a place in the chamber. Infuriated, she took to the pages of
Time and Tide,
a magazine she had founded to promote feminist and liberal ideals. Contributors included Nancy, Lady Astor—another dedicated feminist—as well as George Bernard Shaw, Emma Goldman, George Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, and Rebecca West, although with the passage of time it began to reflect Margaret’s increasingly conservative political views. Its first editor, Helen Archdale, apparently also became Margaret’s lover, and the two lived together for many years. In another peculiar twist Margaret became close friends with fellow activist Doris Stevens, whose husband, Dudley Field Malone, had actually approved
Lusitania
’s cargo on her last voyage as a Port of New York inspector.
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Margaret, Viscountess Rhondda, lauded by the
Times
as “a truly exceptional woman,” died of cancer in 1958 in a London hospital.
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Theodate Pope, too, emerged from the
Lusitania
tragedy a changed woman. After days of anxious waiting in Queenstown, there was no sign of her maid, Emily Robinson, or of Edwin Friend. Theodate finally admitted to herself that both had been lost and “cried my heart out.” Novelist Henry James assured her of his “tenderest love and blessing,” writing, “You have been through more than is knowable or conceivable.”
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Theodate worried constantly about Friend’s widow, Marjorie, who was then pregnant with her late husband’s child. “I really think she should not hear the details,” she warned her mother, adding, “it might have such a bad effect on her and the baby.”
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In September 1915, Marjorie gave birth to a daughter, who was mentally deficient and was later institutionalized. Theodate repeatedly attempted to contact Friend through séances, but her life was moving away from the esoteric. On the eve of the first anniversary of
Lusitania
’s sinking, she did something she had always pointedly avoided, marrying diplomat John Riddle, whose intelligence, breeding, and travels matched her own. Thereafter, she threw herself into her architectural work, designing Avon Old Farms School and working on restoration of Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace in New York City. She died in 1946. Hill-Stead, the house she had so carefully crafted and helped design for her parents, is today recognized as one of the most important and influential Colonial Revival structures in America.
Theodate never forgot
Lusitania
survivor Belle Naish, the woman who had spotted her crumpled in a cold heap after being pulled apparently lifeless from the sea and insisted that sailors attempt to revive her. After the sinking, Belle traveled on to England, staying with her husband’s brothers. “She suffered so greatly from the shock and exposure,” one newspaper in her home of Kansas City reported, “that she has been unable to send any definite particulars of her husband’s death to relatives and friends in America.”
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