“The Germans must have intended to drown us all.”

Testimonies from Lusitania's sinking

I often write about ships being sunk, often from the point of view of the ship doing the attacking, as a narrative or that of a military ship or at least carrying military personnel but not from a purely civilian ship.

Without a narrative, here are some accounts of the sinking of Lusitania on 7th May 1915.

Alice Lines (18) was a nursery maid to the Pearl family and helped look after their four young children (Stuart 5, Amy 2.5, Susan 1.5 and baby Audrey three months) along with Greta Reuter-Lorenson (21). This is my transcript of her IWM interview (Cat no. 10777) with a few notes in brackets.

I was feeding the baby there was a terrific bang. My instinct told me what it was. The baby was laying on the bed. I just picked the shawl up, she had been laying on the shawl, wrapped her in it like an envelope I tied it round my neck - I didn't think I just did it and I crossed over to Stuart and he was crying;

“I don’t want to be drowned… I don’t want to be drowned… I don’t want to be drowned” He was just old enough to understand there was something wrong.

I said to him “Now darling you are going to be alright. Just do what I tell you. Hang on to me nevermind what happens. If I fall down, don’t let go of me. If you obey me you won’t drown.”

We got up by a flight of stairs and there was another terrific bang, the second torpedo (SM U-20 only fired the one torpedo). The nurse (Greta) was at the top and she called down to me “What shall I do?”

I said “Where’s bunny?” (Amy) and she said “A stewardess had taken her to a lifeboat”

So I said “We are all for ourselves, you look after Susie and don’t worry about anything else just save the child and yourself”

I never saw her anymore.

We eventually managed to get to the top and up to the deck, the lifeboat deck. I was on the Portside and I had to climb to get to the boat. People were falling in on the opposite side and a sailor came and grabbed Stuart and I followed. He threw Stuart over a rail into a lifeboat and the lifeboat was just ready to go, it was full. I went to jump into the lifeboat and the sailor grabbed me back and said “Its full, there’s plenty of room in the next one”

I got a bit hysterical and I yelled so he let go and I jumped. As the lifeboat was going down I jumped to the side of it and the lifeboat landed in the water just as I did and a man who was in the lifeboat leaned forward and grabbed me by the hair and I toppled over into the lifeboat.

The baby was tucked quite firmly around my neck.

After that, I’ll never forget, all of us tried to get away. The suction of the liner was pulling us back, every time the oars went forward we were going as if we were going to be drawn under and eventually we got away.

I saw the funnels, one by one disappearing, I saw all those life boats… the life boat I was in was the only one saved on that side. At the court of enquiry they did their very hardest to contradict what side but I knew perfectly well where I was and what happened. They said it was impossible for a lifeboat, because you see it was jogging on the ship.

There was a submarine over there on the surface watching us, full of sailors watching us (SM-U20 did not surface). All those bodies of people and wreckage, the sea was as calm as a pond. I don’t think anyone would be alive if it had not have been a lovely calm day.

(On the state of mind of the passengers and crew) They were all struggling of course but as panic goes no more than you would expect. What happened, or so I was told by another who was saved, she was on the other side, the Captain ordered the passengers out of the lifeboats, she couldn’t sink, she was not built to sink but they still got into the lifeboats and they got out of there. In twenty minutes that lovely liner, because they were so sure it was impossible to sink.

There was this huge lovely liner and as I watched one went, then the other, then the other until the ship was gone and the sea was calm and all you could see was bodies and wreckage of furniture which had been in the ship and was now floating in the water.

An Irish fishing smack called out… “would you like a tow?” One of the stewardesses said yes.

“If we throw you a tow will you let them know that we helped you?”

I mean, fancy waiting to ask that!

We were pulled a long long time a long way when a British ship picked us up and we were landed in Queenstown.

Personally I don’t think I could have been saved with a lifebelt on, you couldn’t fit a baby under one and I never dreamed of putting one on. Quite honestly where I was standing with the boy as we got up the steps I leaned back and a gentleman came running down and he said;

“You don’t have any life belts”

I just said “No” and he said “I’ll go and get you some.”

Poor man, I knew he could never come back from where I had come from as the water was rushing in… we didn’t see him anymore.

This sailor came to our rescue, he grabbed the boy under his arm and I followed. The boy was too young… but once he knew he was alright he was quite happy and he was chattering away as if on holiday.

(When) The boy was thrown into the lifeboat by the sailor, the one next to it was empty which was to be the next one. I yelled out “You’ve got my boy, I must go, you’ve got my boy!” I didn’t stop to think I just jumped.

There was quite a lot of (bodies) swimming and hanging on to deckchairs and tables floating but the horror as far as the memories go was this huge boat, supposed to be the largest in the world, disappear under my very eyes and all i can see all over was bodies and wreckage floating and this side was the submarine watching us. In actual fact the submarine was right on top of us. My employer (Amy Lea Pearl) she saw the torpedo come, she was on deck, and she saw it come. He (Frederic Pearl) turned up a few days later but she was found unconscious a fortnight before he knew she was alive. They found her in a deck chair, she had a lifebelt on, she was unconscious in a deck chair. You could not put a penny between her bruises. She was black with bruises.

(Greta) Did her duty, she found me on the stairs and asked me what she should do and my last words to her were;

“We are all for ourselves, try and find Bunny and save the child.” Her brother was a lieutenant on the Titanic. Her poor mother lost both her son and her daughter. She was a lovely girl, a well educated girl. She came to England to learn English, she knew seven languages absolutely perfect and she did her job. We were friends…

When I got into the lifeboat I passed out and when I came round someone had got the baby and I called out “Where’s my baby?!” and a lady put the baby in my lap.

By the side of me was this very excitable man, he was a Frenchman and he said to me;

“If you have lost your husband, don’t worry, you can come and live with me.”

When we were rescued by our own British gunboat the officer asked me if he was being a nuisance and I said “Yes he is” and they got rid of him somewhere or other.

(in the boat) We sang hymns, we sang “Abide by my” as we pulled for the shore , we kept ourselves bright all the time. There was no panic on the lifeboat at all. Actually, it was gone midnight, early hours of the morning when we landed in Queenstown and everybody was very kind. I was asked if there was anybody I wanted contacted.

It worried me, my first baby, the one I called Bunny, I took from birth and I absolutely loved the child, I couldn’t possibly love her more… I used to go to the station and watch the trains come out to see what I could see and I used to go to the mortuary to see if I could see any of the three and I did that every day.

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Jane Marshall Lewis (IWM Cat no. 7361)

I had my daughter (Edith)… We were on the deck, just after lunchtime and we had just come down to lunch and we were just inside the dining room, just inside the door so we could get out as we had heard rumours that something like that (U-boat attack) might happen… When the awful noise came we got out of the door and onto the landing and down the stair case but the people came pouring from the dining room and the other part of the ship, People fell down, people walked over them. You couldn’t do anything because the boat was going sideways.

We got out because we were by the door otherwise we would never have got out for the people. Then instead of going up stairs they went down and I fell down. We got down onto the lower deck and then we stayed there, we didn’t go down any further. We were standing by a lifeboat waiting to see what it could do. There was no one about where we were, hardly, there were plenty in the water.

My Husband said that he had better go down to the cabin and get a lifebelt and I said “No, you’re not going down. If you go down there you’ll never get up again” and I said “If we are going we are all going together.”

We stayed there and there was a small boat in the water, it was fastened to something, and we got in the boat but we couldn’t get away. My husband, none of the men could find a pen knife on them, they seemed to have lost them all! We eventually got away in the last. I was thrown into the boat because we had to be quick. So we moved away from the ship for a time and there were people everywhere. We sailed on the water for some time and then they took us on to a fishing smack.

There were a lot of soldiers coming home with us and their wives and babies… There was a woman on the deck with me with a baby but I never saw her again. I did feel frightened, I was for Edith, the little girl, I didn’t want her to get frightened or alarmed. She was really very good.

Another person, who had come down from Canada, had recently got married and she wanted to bring all of her presents, her wedding gifts home with her and she got into the water somehow though I don’t know how. When the funnels came off the ship it came down on top of her and she shot up out of it - she was very frightened. She lost all of her gifts. I never saw her again either.

She went bow down and when I was in the little boat in the water my husband said “Look round now, she’s going down.” and I said “No I won’t” because I didn’t want to see her going down and I had a look and I just saw her going down, down and that was the last I saw of her.

(On whether there was panic) Well there might have been in other parts of the ship but not where I was because there was hardly anyone there… we were lucky to get into the ship that was there, if not we would have had to get into the water. We didn’t see much (of the crew) . One young man sat beside me and he had a rag in his hand and I told him he had to throw it away and he said that he had been cleaning… he was a very nice man, out of the engine room.

There was over two thousand in the water. You couldn’t do anything, there weren’t enough boats to pick them up. You couldn’t look around much to see what was going on, you had to look at what you had to do.

The most vivid thing was when the first explosion came, when we were in the dining room that was the most real… everybody was frightened, panicked and had we not been by that door we would never have got out because of the stream of people… people were being stepped on and walked on. That was the most terrifying thing for me, they just couldn’t help themselves. The crowd was so strong. It was very exciting. I don't know why we got that seat, it was just fate.

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