Maiden Voyages

by Siân Evans

  In addition, there were occasional daily news stories picked up and transcribed by the ‘Marconi men’, the on-board wireless operators. There were some nuggets of royal gossip, mostly focusing on possible dynastic intentions and the holiday plans of European royalty, many of whom were closely related to one another as descendants of Queen Victoria. On 22 June 1914 there was a report that King George V was planning to meet his cousin the Tsar of Russia in the autumn, renewing (completely unfounded) rumours that the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, might be contemplating a marriage with one of the Romanov daughters. Two days later, Queen Mary’s holiday plans were revealed: she was intending to spend part of the late summer of 1914 in Germany, staying with her aunt, the Grand Duchess Augusta of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, then at the summer residence of the King and Queen of Wurttemberg.

  July 1914 marked a high point in transatlantic travel; trade was booming, with well-heeled passengers of all nationalities crossing the great gulf of ocean that separated the Old World from the New. The wealthy were able to enjoy conditions of unparalleled luxury and high-quality service and cuisine, all modelled on the best international hotels. The commercial shipping industry appeared to have learned valuable lessons from the hubris that caused the sinking of the Titanic, and the most modern ships, such as the Aquitania, were deliberately designed and marketed to inspire confidence in the most nervous passenger. Even those who had been personally involved in the tragedy, seasoned seafarers such as Violet Jessop and Maud Slocombe, had weighed up the alternatives, gritted their teeth and returned to shipboard life in order to support their dependants and maintain their households. On the upper decks of the great ships, stewardesses catered adeptly to the whims and needs of their ladies, alert that attentive service could be rewarded with lucrative tips. Meanwhile, many decks below, in steerage, experienced matrons kept an eye on the physical welfare of their polyglot emigrants, and prayed for a flat sea and a welcome breeze to improve the fuggy conditions in their tightly packed quarters.

  No matter what their position in life, the hopes and aspirations of millions of people were about to be overturned by the accelerating pace of global events, which would lead to a great catastrophe. The first sign of the gathering storm can be seen in the Cunard Daily Bulletin. On 3 July 1914, on page 11, alongside entertaining accounts of American rowers at Henley and truculent suffragettes fighting with court officials in Caernarvon, the newspaper ran a brief news item that struck a discordant and sombre note. The bodies of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, both of whom had recently been assassinated at Sarajevo, were being transported from Trieste to Vienna. The Kaiser had decided not to attend their funerals, because of fears for his safety from anarchists. Within a month, the Aquitania had completed its third transatlantic trip, and Europe was plunged into war.

  2

  From the Ritz to the Armistice

  Violet Jessop’s life was immediately disrupted by the declaration of war on 4 August 1914. She was working as a stewardess aboard the White Star Line’s Olympic, the sister ship of the Titanic, which was sailing to New York. The outbreak of hostilities surprised many merchant vessels already embarked on scheduled voyages, or berthed in what were, suddenly, hostile ports. Ocean liners hurried across open waters, fearful that enemy ships might already be lying in wait for them. On the transatlantic routes there was a great homeward rush of Americans and Europeans travelling in both directions.

  Aboard the Olympic, Violet noted that the passengers managed to maintain the civilities but there was considerable tension among the multinational crew. The journey back to Britain in the huge ship, now darkened in case of enemy action, was sinister and menacing. Violet recalled: ‘It seemed uncanny, journeying back to England, to goodness knows what, in a huge darkened Olympic. The first sign of a large ship with the unmistakable signs of a cruiser about her did make our hearts beat swifter. It was the Cunarder Aquitania, already converted to an armed merchant cruiser, looking very much like a woman showing off a beautiful new dress, which we duly admired, gratefully.’1

  Passenger numbers were adversely affected by the outbreak of war, and many women seafarers were rapidly made redundant. Cunard’s internal records show that by 1915, owing to the submarine menace, passenger traffic across the Atlantic had to a large extent been diverted to steamers of a neutral flag. However, there were still some Allied passenger ships plying the Atlantic, albeit less frequently, and it was generally believed that the Germans would not dare to target any passenger ship carrying civilians from a neutral country such as America or Canada. But those assumptions were proved catastrophically wrong by the sinking of the Lusitania, a huge Cunard liner, sailing from New York to Liverpool via Queenstown, in May 1915. On board were 1,959 people, including twenty-one stewardesses, a matron and a typist.

  On the morning of the Lusitania’s departure from New York, on 1 May 1915, the German Embassy in Washington placed warnings in major American newspapers:

  Travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters, and travellers sailing in the war zone … do so at their own risk.

  The threat of attack was not taken seriously by those booked to travel on the Lusitania because, unlike other Cunard vessels that had been converted to military and naval use, the Lucy, as she was affectionately known, was still supposedly engaged solely in conveying passengers, and had not been requisitioned by the Admiralty for war service. Nevertheless, Captain W.T. Turner took every precaution, with bulkhead doors and portholes sealed and lookouts posted.

  The Lusitania was a modern and well-designed ship, with modifications added since the loss of the Titanic; she carried forty-eight lifeboats, which were capable of accommodating 2,600 people, ample capacity for the full complement of 1,962 passengers and crew on board. However, on this voyage the ship was not travelling at full speed; due to the general decline in the volume of transatlantic travel and the increased price of coal, as well as a shortage of labour, it had been decided to reduce the steam power of the propellers by approximately a quarter, which simplified manning the stokeholds but reduced the speed of the vessel to twenty-one knots. Crucially, the Lusitania was moving slowly enough to provide a tempting target for the German U-20 U-boat, when she was spotted on 7 May 1915, ten miles off the Old Head of Kinsale in Eire.

  The lookout reported an oncoming streak of foam and the ship was hit seconds later below the bridge by a torpedo. There was hardly any time to launch the lifeboats and evacuate, as the ship sank a mere eighteen minutes after the attack. Survival was random, a matter of luck. Although the captain insisted ‘women and children first’, as on the Titanic, so quickly did the Lusitania start to sink that panic spread and there was a mad scramble for the lifeboats, with the youngest and fittest inevitably winning the struggle.

  Families were separated in the chaos; Lady Allan, wife of a partner in a shipping company, escaped in a lifeboat with both her maids and her Cartier diamond and pearl tiara, but her two teenage daughters, Anna and Gwendolyn, were among those who died because they were in a separate part of the ship when the torpedo hit and could not be located in time.

  An Irish passenger in third class, Mrs Nettie Mitchell, found herself one of eleven people in Lifeboat 14, which was lowered successfully, but rapidly filled with water as it had no boat plug in place. The lifeboat was swamped, and sank almost immediately; her husband Walter and baby son were quickly drowned. Nettie slipped into unconsciousness, was picked up by a rescue boat and was left on the quayside at Cobh in the open air among a pile of corpses, as her rescuers assumed she was dead. By chance, Nettie’s brother John, who had also survived the sinking, was searching the port look
ing for his family; he found Walter dead, then spotted Nettie’s apparently lifeless body nearby. He noticed her eyelids were fluttering, and summoned medical help. Nettie was resuscitated, and recovered from her physical ordeal, though her double bereavement – the loss of both her husband and son in such traumatic circumstances – affected her mental health for some time. Eventually, her doctor recommended she take up some absorbing, worthwhile career as therapy; Nettie moved to Dublin and trained as a midwife, a vocation that she found greatly rewarding.

  Of the twenty-one stewardesses on board the Lusitania, only eight survived. One of the fortunate few was Fannie Jane Morecroft, who had worked aboard the Lusitania since 1912. An ebullient Londoner who had a lively past and a spirited personality, she had eloped at the age of eighteen with a much older man, whom she married despite her parents’ disapproval. In 1901 he died, leaving her a widow with two young children, and so she was forced to place her children with a foster family in Liverpool and to seek work at sea as a Cunard stewardess to support them. In later years she lied about her age, claiming to be seven years younger than she was in reality. Her great friend, Marian ‘May’ Bird, who was forty, worked alongside her on the ship, and they were both apprehensive of German submarines, which were known to be active around the coast of Ireland.

  As soon as the torpedo struck, Fannie Jane Morecroft ran to the cabins in her care and hurriedly helped the women and children passengers into life jackets, then bustled them up on to the starboard deck. She graphically recalled that everyone was running about ‘like a bunch of wild mice’. She assisted passengers into lifeboats, and watched as the boats were launched. Marian emerged from the crowd as the ship listed alarmingly and they began to slide across the tilting deck. The two stewardesses jumped overboard together and were pulled from the water by the occupants of Lifeboat 15, which was floating nearby. However, that boat became entangled in the exposed wires and trailing ropes of the stricken ship, and it was only by luck that at the last moment it was able to float free, rather than be dragged under as the Lucy sank. All those in Lifeboat 15 were picked up by a trawler and taken to Queenstown. So determined was Fannie to return to her family in Liverpool that, three days after the sinking, she arrived at her married daughter’s home, still wearing the bedraggled stewardess’s uniform in which she had been rescued.

  Of 1,959 people on board, 1,198 were lost; there were only 761 survivors, and 885 bodies were never recovered. The sinking of the Lusitania caused international condemnation and outrage. British public opinion was incensed:

  The simple fact was that the Lusitania, carrying about two thousand passengers, who for purposes of interest or pleasure pass to and fro across the Atlantic, was torpedoed without the usual warning, so that there was no time to rescue any but a comparatively small portion of those on board, and the hostile submarine made off without an attempt at rescue … We can scarcely imagine even the bloodthirsty Hun gloating over the deaths of these.2

  The day after the sinking, on 8 May 1915, Cunard’s chairman A.A. Booth wrote a heartfelt letter to the company’s general agent in America, Charles P. Sumner: ‘We are all at one in our feelings with regard to this terrible disaster to the Lusitania, and it is quite hopeless to try to put anything in writing. My own personal loss is very great, as my New York partner, Mr Paul Crompton, with his wife and five children, all appear to have drowned … the loss of life appears to have been appallingly great as the time was so short [between the torpedo’s impact and ship’s sinking just eighteen minutes later].’3 The Board Minutes from Cunard on 20 May 1915 recorded the members’ ‘deep sense of horror at the outrage committed against this ship’.

  The German government defended its actions against international denunciation, and, despite the findings of the commission appointed to investigate the matter, that there was no truth to allegations that it was a cruiser carrying troops and munitions, Admiral Tirpitz maintained in his memoirs that the Lusitania ‘figured as an auxiliary cruiser in the British Naval list’, and he described the ship as an ‘armed cruiser, heavily laden with munitions’.4

  The sinking of the Lusitania was the inspiration for one of the most compelling propaganda posters of the Great War. In June 1915 artist Fred Spear portrayed a drowned mother, her dead child still clutched in her arms, sinking down through murky waters, with the simple instruction ‘Enlist’. It was an emotive and influential image, designed to inflame a sense of moral outrage at the atrocity perpetrated by the enemy, and contributed to America joining the Allies in 1917.

  * * *

  For women seafarers, as the Great War progressed there were diminishing opportunities to pursue their former careers afloat. So great was the public revulsion at the fate of the women and children killed by the sinking of the Lusitania that Cunard was reluctant to employ any female staff on ships until the end of the hostilities. Fannie Morecroft was laid off, to her great indignation, and she spent the rest of the war working in a variety of jobs, including that of tram conductor, though she was able to return to her maritime career when peace was restored. And she was not alone; as transatlantic passenger traffic shrank, many stewardesses of all lines were forced to seek employment in other fields. Some retrained as nurses, and found themselves working on one of the seventy-seven converted liners that were now hospital ships, where their sea knowledge was highly regarded. During the Great War, Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service alone had eighty-five sisters on thirteen hospital ships, and Dr Jo Stanley estimates that there were some 2,000 nurses employed on British hospital ships, coping with the wounded of all nationalities.

  Nursing was to offer a worthwhile career to many a British woman who was previously denied a role outside the home. Sheila Macbeth Mitchell was born in Bolton to middle-class Scottish parents, and had hopes of becoming a teacher of physical education, but was dissuaded by her parents, who did not want her to work. The outbreak of the Great War swept aside such misgivings, and Sheila trained to become an auxiliary nurse in Queen Alexandra’s Nursing Service. In 1916 she found herself on the hospital ship Britannic, working alongside veteran former stewardess Violet Jessop, and the two women left gripping eyewitness accounts of the disaster that befell the vessel. Violet’s wartime transatlantic voyages had left her in no doubt of the value of nursing as a career. In the first months of the war, while she was working as a stewardes on the Olympic, commanded by the redoubtable Captain Haddock, their vessel was involved in the rescue of the crew of the Royal Navy battleship HMS Audacious, which had struck a German mine on 27 October 1914, between Northern Ireland and Scotland. Despite the appalling weather and mountainous seas, all the crew were saved, though the ship was lost. It was this experience that made Violet decide to train as a nurse, like many other young women. She joined the VAD, the Voluntary Aid Detachment. This was a nursing organisation that had been set up by the British Red Cross Society, with great success; by the end of the war there were more than 126,000 VADs working in support of the war effort, and they were greatly needed. Violet’s four brothers were now serving in the trenches, and she lived in fear that one of her injured patients might turn out to be her sibling.

  By 1916 Violet was a qualified nurse, but her considerable pre-war maritime experience as a stewardess made her doubly valuable on the HMHS Britannic, which had been despatched to the Mediterranean, to the Aegean Sea. There were 673 crew on board and 392 hospital nurses. The ship was enormous, a former White Star ocean liner designed for the transatlantic route, and it was the sister ship to the Olympic and the ill-fated Titanic, on both of which Violet had previously worked. The Britannic was charged with caring for wounded Allied servicemen, and was equipped with 3,000 hospital beds. Fortunately, it had not taken on any patients by the morning of 21 November 1916, when there was suddenly an explosion, caused by either an underwater mine or a U-boat torpedo, and the ship began to list.

  Sheila related how those on board remained calm, picking up their life jackets and queuing quietly to enter their designated lifebo
ats. The order was given by the captain to evacuate, and the sixty-year-old chief matron, Mrs E.A. Dowse, stood calmly on the ship’s deck, counting off each of the nurses as they filed into lifeboats with crew members. Mrs Dowse had been one of four nurses who had been in the 1885 Egyptian Campaign, serving in the Relief of Khartoum. During the Siege of Ladysmith in the Boer War, she was in charge of the hospital, apparently impervious to the constant danger from stray bullets.

  The Britannic’s engines were still running and the ship was moving, as the captain was hoping to beach the vessel in the shallows. But the prow of the ship gradually filled with water and tilted downwards, while the giant propellers continued to turn, rising from below the sea to scythe through the air. As the first lifeboats full of evacuees struck out from the ship, relief at their escape turned to horror as boat after boat floated within reach of the vast, churning steel blades above them. Some seamen wrestled with the oars, desperately trying to steer their boats out of danger, while others leaped into the water, capsizing their boats, and were drawn inexorably into the bloody carnage left in the Britannic’s wake. Fractured wooden spars, life jackets, horribly injured men and women were all churned up in a bloody froth. Two lifeboats were cut in half, their occupants slashed to pieces in seconds. ‘Unsinkable’ Violet Jessop was the only survivor from her boat. Despite being unable to swim, she was wearing a cork life jacket, so she dived into the water as the boat overturned, and came up under it, sustaining a bad blow to the head. In the darkness her hand grabbed another’s, and she was dragged to the surface by a surgeon from the Royal Army Medical Corps. There they floated among a sea of bloodied, injured and dead men. Violet had received a deep gash to one leg, a head injury and a fractured skull, but she was lucky to be alive. ‘All the casualties were caused directly or indirectly by the propeller, and the wounds and fractures were terrible,’5 recalled Sheila Macbeth Mitchell.