RMS Lusitania

By the turn of the century Cunard was losing the Atlantic. The Blue Riband had gone to Norddeutscher Lloyd's Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in 1897 and to HAPAG's Deutschland in 1900, and J. P. Morgan's International Mercantile Marine had already absorbed White Star and was making offers for Cunard itself. Chairman Lord Inverclyde went to the British government, which agreed in June 1903 to lend the line £2.6 million over twenty years at 2.75 per cent, with an annual operating subsidy of £75,000 a ship. The price was that both ships be built to Admiralty specification, fit to serve as auxiliary cruisers in war.

The design committee included Charles Parsons, whose turbines would have to deliver 68,000 shaft horsepower for 25 knots. The largest sets built until then were the 23,000 shp fitted in the battleship Dreadnought. Cunard had refused the untried machinery until trials between the turbine cross-Channel ferry Brighton and the reciprocating Arundel settled the argument in March 1904. Four turbines drove four screws directly, since no gearbox strong enough yet existed; the inboard pair turned inward, the outboard pair outward. Twenty-three double-ended and two single-ended boilers fed them through 192 furnaces, and a fourth funnel was added to vent the extra plant.

She was designed by Leonard Peskett and built by John Brown at Clydebank, where the yard had to be rebuilt around her. A new slipway on driven piles took the space of two existing berths; the company spent £8,000 dredging the Clyde, £19,000 on a crane able to lift 150 tons, and £18,000 extending the dock. The river was only 610 feet wide where the hull was 786 feet long, so she was launched diagonally into the mouth of the Cart. Her plating was high-tensile steel rather than mild, 26 per cent stronger for less thickness, held in triple rows of rivets. Cunard called her the Scottish ship.

Lusitania left the Liverpool landing stage under Commodore James Watt at 9 pm on 7 September 1907, with a crowd of 200,000 watching her go. The first crossing took five days and 54 minutes, half an hour outside the record, fog having caught her on two days. On the second attempt in October she took the Blue Riband at four days, 19 hours and 53 minutes, averaging 23.99 knots westbound. Mauretania took the eastbound record back in December, and after her propellers were changed in 1909 Lusitania made 25.85 knots west, her fastest crossing, before her sister reclaimed the prize the same month.

The speed came with a fault her builders never entirely cured. On builder's trials off Skelmorlie she made 25.6 knots at 76,000 shp, but the wake of the outer propellers beat against the inner pair and set the stern resonating so badly that second-class accommodation was uninhabitable at speed. The remedy meant gutting those spaces and rebuilding them around new pillars and arches. On 10 January 1910, two days out of Liverpool, a rogue wave 75 feet high rolled over the bow, smashed the bridge windows and shifted the bridge structure a couple of inches aft. One person was injured and she reached New York a few hours late.

In eight years she made 201 crossings on the Liverpool to New York route, carrying 155,795 passengers westbound and 106,180 east. Her interiors were by the Scottish architect James Miller, worked in plaster rather than the wood panelling Harold Peto gave Mauretania, which left her the brighter ship. The first-class dining saloon rose through two decks to a 29-foot dome frescoed in the style of Boucher. Third class drew the warmest comment: two-, four-, six- and eight-berth cabins instead of open dormitories, and a 79-foot dining room finished in polished pine. She was a popular emigrant ship.

Her subsidy had bought pillars and supports for twelve 6-inch guns, and the Navy List carried her as a Royal Naval Reserve Merchant Vessel. When war came the Admiralty ordered nine liners taken up as armed merchant cruisers, Lusitania and Mauretania among them, but the big Cunarders were released almost at once: their fuel costs were ruinous relative to their usefulness and there was a shortage of guns. She was never armed or commissioned. Painted grey for her first eastbound crossing of the war to confuse identification, she was soon back in Cunard livery with her name picked out in gilt.

Cunard shut down her number four boiler room to save coal and crew, which cut her maximum speed from over 25 knots to 21. Germany declared the seas around Britain and Ireland a war zone on 4 February 1915, and loosened its U-boat rules of engagement in April when results disappointed. Captain William Thomas Turner replaced Daniel Dow, having commanded Lusitania, Mauretania and Aquitania before the war. On 22 April the German embassy placed a general warning about travel in fifty American newspapers, which appeared just as she prepared to sail. She left Pier 54 in New York at 12:20 pm on 1 May 1915.

She was eleven nautical miles off the Old Head of Kinsale on the afternoon of 7 May 1915, near the end of her 202nd crossing, carrying 1,264 passengers, three stowaways and 693 crew, along with some 173 tons of war supplies: 4.2 million rounds of rifle ammunition, almost 5,000 shrapnel-filled shell casings and 3,240 brass fuses. She crossed in front of U-20 at 2:10 pm. Her commander, Walther Schwieger, later claimed not to have identified the ship, and gave the order to fire one torpedo.

It struck the starboard bow just behind the bridge, and a second explosion followed from inside the hull. She took a heavy list to starboard, and the list defeated the boats: only six of 48 were launched successfully, with several overturning or breaking apart. She sank in eighteen minutes. Of the 1,960 people aboard, 1,199 were lost. Irish rescuers and survivors brought the count of the saved to 767, four of whom later died of injuries. Most of the dead were British or Canadian, but 128 were American, among them Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, the producer Charles Frohman and the writer Elbert Hubbard.

Germany's unofficial spokesman Bernhard Dernburg argued within a day that she had carried contraband and was classed as an auxiliary cruiser. The New York Times printed the details of her military cargo the day after the sinking, and Cunard's assistant manager admitted the small-arms ammunition while denying munitions. Washington's counsel, from Robert Lansing, was that none of this could matter: nothing justified the killing of large numbers of un-resisting civilians. Wilson demanded an apology and compensation, and William Jennings Bryan resigned rather than endorse the line. German policy on liners was quietly restricted in June 1915; its reversal in January 1917 brought the United States into the war.

A Glasgow expedition working from the salvage ship Orphir found her on 6 October 1935 after three months of searching, and the diver Jim Jarrett went down to her in a Tritonia suit. She lies eleven miles south of the Kinsale lighthouse on her starboard side at about 30 degrees, in roughly 305 feet of water. She has deteriorated far faster than Titanic. Fishing nets lie across the wreckage, the stern was damaged by depth charges, salvage operations have taken three of her four propellers, and the hull is badly collapsed and unstable.

The wreck was sold for £1,000 in 1967 to the former US Navy diver John Light; the American venture capitalist Gregg Bemis bought out his partners by 1982 and spent decades trying to prove British complicity. Robert Ballard, given permission to dive in 1993, found the exposed area of the cargo hold clearly undamaged and concluded that a coal dust explosion was the likelier second blast. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory concluded in 2012 that the torpedo did the work, with a secondary explosion from the boilers that did not much affect what followed. Bemis rejected both findings and died in 2020.

Ireland declared the site a heritage monument under the National Monuments Act in 1995. A Cork Sub Aqua Club team diving under licence found 15,000 rounds of .303 ammunition in boxes in the bow section, photographed and left in place under the terms of their permit. On the centenary in May 2015 a small fleet sailed from the Isle of Man, whose seven fishermen aboard The Wanderer had taken 150 people out of the water in 1915; two of their medals are held at the Leece Museum in Peel. The wreck is now owned by a museum in Kinsale.