Authors: Greg King
When she eventually did return to America, Belle threw herself into work. The
Kansas City Star
reported that she “perhaps put in a higher average of hours per day in Red Cross work than any other Kansas City woman.” She tried to do as most other
Lusitania
survivors did despite the traumatic event and losses: get on with life. When her brothers-in-law raised a monument to her husband in Birmingham, Belle implored them to omit any reference to
Lusitania,
saying, “We’d better not perpetuate hate.” By the end of the war, she was philosophical, though like many, she personally blamed the by then former Kaiser Wilhelm II for the disaster. A reporter who interviewed her, noting her sad face, quoted her as saying, “The worst punishment I could wish for the Kaiser is that he might know for just one hour the dread of being alone when he is eighty. I wouldn’t have him killed, but I would have him put where he never again could have the power to accomplish evil.” Theodate visited her in Kansas City, and Belle kept in touch with young Robert Kay, whom she had looked after in the hours and days following the sinking.
(
71
)
Pope was so grateful to the woman who had literally saved her life that she gave Belle a generous pension.
(
72
)
Belle, in turn, used this and money she was awarded in the wake of the sinking to establish a ninety-acre camp for Boy Scouts in memory of her lost husband, Theodore, outside Kansas City. She died in 1950 at the age of eighty-six.
(
73
)
Nineteen-year-old William Adams had searched for his father, Arthur, in Queenstown, but to no avail. As he had wished, he joined the British Army to fight in the Great War, living until 1986. Annie Adams had the comfort of knowing that the body of her husband, Henry, was found two weeks after the disaster. Once identified, she brought him back to his village in England for burial. She died in 1923. James Brooks duly returned to America, eventually receiving some $6,000 in compensation for the sinking.
(
74
)
In the last year of his life, he assisted authors Adolph and Mary Hoehling in researching their book about the disaster. He mused about a possible motion picture of the tragedy, insisting that “no stars” were needed, “no glamour girls or actresses with legs and big busts. I like,” he confided, “the latter two items, but not in a picture of the sinking!” Above all, he thought, there should be “no heroes” and no focus on Captain Turner, whom he continued to hold largely responsible for the tragedy.
(
75
)
Brooks died in 1956.
Fittingly, one of
Lusitania
’s youngest passengers aboard her final, fatal voyage was also the last survivor to die. Warren and Amy Pearl survived, as did their two youngest children, Stuart and Audrey, but daughters Susan and Amy, along with their nanny, Greta Lorenson, were lost and their bodies were never found. Warren Pearl died in 1952, while his wife died in 1964. Audrey enjoyed something of an enchanted life, as if Fate was atoning for the misery the
Lusitania
tragedy had caused her family. She attended prestigious schools, was presented at Buckingham Palace as a debutante before Queen Mary, and enjoyed a mad rush of parties, balls, and skiing holidays at St. Moritz with American ambassador Joseph Kennedy’s energetic and entertaining clan before World War II erupted. Audrey then devoted herself to charitable work with the Red Cross. She drove an ambulance before taking a position with the United States embassy, working in London for the governments in exile of several occupied European countries. In 1946, she married Hugh Lawson-Johnston, a wealthy aristocratic scion whose grandfather had invented Bovril, the meat extract, in a lavish society ceremony before a thousand guests at the exclusive St. Margaret’s, Westminster. The couple had three daughters and, in time, ten grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Throughout the years, Audrey maintained a close friendship with Alice Lines Drury (her married name), her former nurse and the woman who had held her small body to hers and, with five-year-old Stuart clinging to her skirt, fought her way up the slanting stairs to a lifeboat and thus saved their lives when
Lusitania
sank. They remained friends until Alice’s death in 1997 at the age of one hundred. Although too young to remember her time aboard
Lusitania,
Audrey gave endless interviews about the disaster. She’d crossed the Atlantic many times since May 1915 but said, “The one voyage everyone wants to hear about is the one I don’t remember.”
(
76
)
In 2004, she returned to Kinsale, standing on the bluff above the beach where many victims had washed ashore.
(
77
)
“I never blamed the sea,” Audrey once said of the
Lusitania
tragedy, “because it wasn’t the sea’s fault. It was the Germans’ fault.”
(
78
)
“I hope I’m living up to worth being saved,” Audrey commented in her last years.
(
79
)
On January 11, 2011, Audrey Lawson-Johnston died at the age of ninety-five, the last of those who had been aboard
Lusitania
on her final, fatal voyage.
Captain William Turner never escaped the widespread perception that his actions had, in part, been responsible for
Lusitania
’s sinking and the attendant loss of life. He was, said his son Norman, “very bitter” about the experience, and especially about the British government’s accusations of negligence.
(
80
)
After the tragedy, Turner returned to sea; the former captain of such magnificent liners as
Lusitania,
Mauretania,
and
Aquitania
was now reduced to the helm of a small Cunard freighter. His next commission, the former Cunard liner
Ivernia,
had been requisitioned as a troop transport; in an almost unbelievable turn of events, it was torpedoed on New Year’s Day 1917. Thirty-six people perished, but Turner again survived. In 1919, he finally retired from the sea.
(
81
)
Turner spent his last days pottering about the garden of his home just outside Liverpool, habitually shooting at the seagulls he had grown to hate since his experience in the water after
Lusitania
was sunk.
(
82
)
In 1932, hearing that Turner was suffering from incurable cancer,
Lusitania
’s former junior third officer, Albert Bestic, visited him. He found Turner still bitter about his treatment; the former captain complained that he had not received “a fair deal.”
(
83
)
Turner died in June of the following year at the age of seventy-seven.
Bestic survived another thirty years. He lived long enough to have the extraordinary experience of seeing the once beautiful
Lusitania
in documentary footage of the wreck taken by divers in 1962 before his death later that year.
(
84
)
Lott Gadd,
Lusitania
’s barber, moved to Detroit, where he operated a salon for many years. He hoped to write a book about his experiences at sea and aboard the
Lusitania,
but died in 1942 before he could finish the project.
(
85
)
Leslie Morton, who had first spotted the torpedo coming at
Lusitania,
did write about his experiences, in a 1968 autobiography published just before his death. King George V decorated Morton with the Silver Board of Trade Medal for Gallantry in recognition of the many survivors he had helped pluck from the sea after the disaster.
(
86
)
“I rather feel that my youth,” he confided, “with a lot of ready wit and impudence at the Inquiry, coupled with my having seen the torpedoes coming and a sympathetic press, earned this honor.”
(
87
)
Morton remained at sea. Three months after the
Lusitania
disaster, he survived the sinking of his next ship,
City of Venice
. He married his wife, Constance, in 1920; having to “choose between my love of the sea” and that of his wife, he finally ended his days on the ocean.
(
88
)
“I personally did not blame Captain Turner,” Morton wrote, “except insomuch that a captain must accept full responsibility for anything and everything that happens to his command or persons thereon.” Privately, he thought that blame for the tragedy “must be laid at the door of the authorities.”
(
89
)
Yet the man who, after spotting the torpedo, had abandoned his post without waiting for acknowledgment from the bridge was sure that “had the ship been swung to starboard immediately upon my report, she would have turned inside the line of the torpedoes” and thus avoided disaster. To the end of his life, Morton was adamant that he had seen two torpedoes that fateful day.
(
90
)
* * *
The sinking of
Lusitania
underlined the brutality of war in a previously unthinkable way. For the first time in the conflict, a large number of civilians were sacrificed as if they were nameless soldiers: brutally and without consideration, underscoring the terrible tragedy of the war itself. And the sinking played out in an unexpected way. Life aboard
Lusitania
was still largely stratified by social class and financial worth, yet what happened in those pivotal eighteen minutes destroyed any illusions about privilege. A few passengers, like Alfred Vanderbilt, rigidly clung to traditional notions of a gentlemen’s code; in doing so, he perished, just as the brightest generation of British and European young men, standing by similar conceptions of tradition, did in trenches across the continent. Death and survival were random: passengers assuming their lives would continue on as normal saw their world turned upside down. Those fortunate enough to get into lifeboats were hurled into the sea and killed; people who remained on deck survived. Lady Allan’s two daughters perished; her two maids survived. The utter randomness of the disaster mocked expectation.
Nearly everyone aboard
Lusitania
knew that she would sail into a declared war zone; knew that German submarines had sunk a passenger liner just a month earlier; and many were also aware of the German notice in the New York newspapers. The possibility that
Lusitania
might be torpedoed was therefore not a surprise.
(
91
)
Yet most passengers dismissed the possible danger, as if such an event was not only impossible but also beyond the realm of imagination. The
Titanic
disaster was cast as a morality play, proof that man’s technological advancements and the sense of security they gave were hollow against the forces of nature and the inexorable will of God.
Lusitania,
for all of its elements of tragedy, more closely resembled an almost unbelievably stunning example of hubris.
If the passengers aboard
Lusitania
were complacent, then so, too, were those charged with keeping them safe. Even without the nagging tendrils of a conspiracy, it is impossible to conclude that the Admiralty did all within its power to protect the liner and its passengers from danger.
Lusitania
was in their hands: their actions over the preceding months, by ignoring international convention, had created the very environment that led to the tragedy. Nor was the Admiralty diligent in guarding the ship. The warnings were clear, and just as clearly they were ignored. Why was there no escort on this particularly dangerous voyage? Cunard, too, proved to be irresponsible: while ensuring that
Lusitania
carried ample lifeboats, the line’s officials refused to assign stations to passengers or even provide them with a drill. It was war, and a wartime crossing through a declared war zone known to be the hunting ground for German submarines certainly called for a higher degree of caution and some sense of heightened danger. Yet no one in charge of
Lusitania
seems to have given the ship and its safety much thought.
The Edwardian Era’s mythology painted Edward Smith and his crew aboard
Titanic
as heroic figures. The captain went down with his ship, his death atoning for whatever navigational mistakes contributed to the disaster. And Smith’s crew had lingered below in the sinking ship, stoking furnaces to keep the lights burning, aware that they would likely not escape. The contrast between the behavior of the crews of
Titanic
and
Lusitania
is stunning. Perhaps the war heightened sensitivities to looming death; then, too,
Lusitania
’s crew were largely a poorly trained, haphazardly drawn bunch with no loyalty to Cunard, the ship, or her captain. Refusing to give away their lifebelts to help passengers and, in at least one instance, actually turning an ax on a terrified passenger, these seamen revealed that their foremost thought was their own preservation.
And ultimately, the man at
Lusitania
’s helm failed miserably in his role. Captain William Turner loved the sea, but he also loved to play by his own rules, as evidenced by his refusal to socialize—as other captains were expected to do—with his passengers. Turner had complained about the condition of the lifeboats before this voyage, but apparently he never bothered to inspect them to see if they were in good condition—an inexcusable lapse considering the danger to which his ship and those on it were to be exposed. He knew that his crew was poorly trained and not proficient in handling the boats, yet he made no effort to provide them with additional instructions during the voyage. Numerous passengers came to Turner with worries about lifebelts and lifeboat drills; Turner dismissed them all, and later lied about it. Even twelve-year-old survivor Avis Dolphin couldn’t believe the way Turner had acted. “The captain had signals three times not to take the usual course,” she wrote, “but as he thought he knew most, he went his own way.”
(
92
)