Authors: Greg King
Lusitania (8 page)
Cunard believed in Turner, paying him a generous £1,000 a year, far more than most other captains received.
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His crew held the gruff captain in great esteem, knowing that his strict, matter-of-fact manner ensured a tightly run ship.
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Turner, one
Lusitania
passenger noted, was “not the picture postcard commodore of an Atlantic fleet.” Instead, he seemed “a more ordinary type of old man, who wore, rather than carried, his gold braid as if conscious of his Sunday best.”
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Short and stocky, with “broad shoulders and powerful arms,” Turner, said one comrade, was “a rugged old salt if ever there was one,” a man known for being “taciturn and austere.”
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Yet Turner failed miserably in the role of social butterfly. Many passengers, noted a guidebook, viewed a captain as “little more than a pleasant host,” and vied with themselves to obtain seats at his table.
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Turner loathed the social obligations accompanying his position, preferring to dine alone in his cabin rather than preside at his table in the Dining Saloon.
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In private, he supposedly condemned most of his wealthy passengers as “bloody monkeys.”
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With Turner purposely absenting himself as much as possible, it fell to the staff captain to serve as the ship’s social leader.
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Aboard
Lusitania,
this position was filled by forty-eight-year-old Liverpool native James Anderson. Known as “Jock,” he was, said one acquaintance, “a man of sturdy character and fine knowledge of seamanship,” someone whose genial nature better meshed with the expectations of the ship’s privileged passengers.
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Anderson, in turn, relied on his comrades to help tend to the passengers: Chief Officer John Piper; Extra Chief Officer John Stevens; First Officer Arthur Jones; Second Officer Percy Hefford, on his way to attend a relative’s funeral; Senior Third Officer John Idwal Lewis; and recently married, twenty-four-year-old Dublin native Albert Bestic, who served as junior third officer.
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Cunard laid down a series of rigid rules it expected its officers to follow, warning them not to drink with or become too friendly with the passengers and “on no account invite them to their cabins or vice-versa.”
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Turner could rely on these officers, assured of their competence and loyalty. He couldn’t be as certain when it came to his crew on this voyage. The demands of war had played havoc with the merchant fleet. When the conflict erupted, Cunard “lost all its Royal Naval Reserve and Fleet Reserve men” to the service. The lack of available capable seamen led Cunard to “take on the best men they could get, and to train them as well as might be in the time at their disposal.”
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Eighteen-year-old Leslie Morton and his brother, John, were among those who signed on to
Lusitania
as last-minute deckhands. They had just spent several months at sea on “a particularly vicious passage,” working their way from Liverpool to Australia and then to New York on the sailing ship
Naiad
. By the time they anchored in New York, both young men were exhausted. They also thought that the war would soon be over and wanting, “in our ignorance, to see something of it,” decided to return to England. Their father wired them money for two Second Class fares aboard
Lusitania,
but a chance encounter with one of the liner’s officers the night before sailing changed their minds.
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“We have had ten of our deckhands run away this trip,” the man told the brothers, adding, “I could use two boys like you.” The Morton brothers told their comrades, and eventually talked several of the
Naiad
’s crew into joining them as hands on
Lusitania
.
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The Morton brothers, though, still had the money their father had wired, some £60 in all.
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“This was a really large sum of money, as it was in those days,” Leslie recalled.
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With a free night to enjoy in New York City, the brothers had spent every penny, “in luxurious if doubtful surroundings,” as Leslie admitted.
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At a bar Leslie had ordered a Manhattan cocktail; by the time he was on his second drink, things became blurry. He briefly awoke to find himself sitting on Broadway, a burly policeman eyeing him suspiciously and twirling his nightstick, but remembered nothing else until sunrise the next morning, when he and his brother made their way to the pier.
Lusitania,
he said, “seemed as large as a mountain” as the young men boarded her to join the crew. Leslie spent his days washing the decks and painting lifeboats; occasionally, he entertained curious passengers by tying intricate knots as they applauded his expertise.
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A war zone, enemy submarines, a makeshift crew—these things should have weighed on Turner’s mind as
Lusitania
cleared New York City, passed down the Hudson, and steamed past Ambrose Light toward the open Atlantic. As if these pressures weren’t enough, Turner had spent the previous day ruminating about a captain’s worst nightmare—the loss of his ship. Three years earlier, the confident superiority of the Edwardian Era, the perfectly ordered world of the Gilded Age, the invincibility of wondrous modern technology—it had all vanished one dark April night, when White Star Line’s new
Titanic
struck an iceberg.
Edward Smith, like all good captains, had gone down with his ship; his actions largely escaped censure in the fevered accounting of heroic gentlemen and brave ladies who had met death in the frigid Atlantic. Not everyone was as forgiving: survivors and relatives of the disaster’s victims sued White Star for negligence. And so, Captain William Turner had found himself sitting in the New York City law offices of Hunt, Hill & Betts, ready to opine on the tragedy. Turner knew something about helming liners, and his blunt words did little to help White Star’s case. The “heroic” Captain Smith, he declared, had been “foolish” to run his ship at such a high speed. He’d been told that potential danger in the form of ice lay ahead in his path, and had ignored the warnings. The whole thing had been avoidable. Yet Turner was sure that nothing had been learned from the disaster. Sooner or later, another great liner would meet some unnecessary and perfectly avoidable tragic end: “It will happen again,” he declared.
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Gulls dove and swept around
Lusitania
’s funnels, following her as she steamed east. Travelers who braved the weather had watched as New York’s skyline receded on the distant, gray horizon; the long silvery ribbon of foam churned by her propellers stretched along Long Island, where breezes brought a whiff of salt air as she neared the open Atlantic. One by one, passengers abandoned
Lusitania
’s decks, disappearing into a confusing maze of corridors as Saturday evening approached.
“The people who use these ships are not pirates,” an exasperated designer once insisted. “They do not dance hornpipes. They are mostly seasick American ladies, and the one thing they want to forget when they are on the vessel is that they are on a ship at all.”
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Lusitania
was born in the age of historicism, at a time when liners strove to attract impressionable travelers with luxurious, opulent decor evoking the past. Palladian lounges, Teutonic smoking rooms, Turkish baths, Parisian palm courts, and Jacobean dining saloons mingled side by side, in a jarringly abrupt mixture of conflicting styles and claustrophobic decoration. The interiors Scottish architect James Miller devised for
Lusitania,
though, were subtler in approach. Here, the understated elegance of the Georgian Era predominated: rooms paneled in dark mahogany, bedecked with carved pilasters and columns, ringed by deep ornamental friezes, and crowned with vaulted skylights or graceful domes. The effect gave passengers the “pleasurable hallucination” that they were enjoying a stay at a luxurious hotel like the Ritz in London or the Waldorf-Astoria in New York.
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“The impression of bigness begins when you enter the ship,” recorded one traveler.
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The Grand Entrance on the Boat Deck formed the hub of the ship’s First Class public rooms and served as a fitting introduction to Miller’s style. Mahogany walls, enameled white and adorned with Corinthian pilasters and carving picked out in gilt, were washed with light from the large, leaded glass barrel-vaulted skylight above. At one end, a white marble fireplace, set in a nook and flanked by built-in sofas upholstered in rose-colored brocade and potted palms, offered respite; across the black and white tiled floor was the Grand Staircase, which twisted in a rectangle down six decks between elaborate railings of black wrought iron set with decorative ormolu swags, rosettes, and medallions.
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“The treads were easy,” remembered one passenger, “and the magnificent balustrades and thick pile carpets reminded one of a first class hotel instead of a ship.”
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In the middle of the stairwell attendants in gold-trimmed uniforms guarded the ship’s two nine-person elevators, with polished mahogany cars wrapped in ornate cages of aluminum topped with gilded rocailles echoing the design of the black and gilt railing.
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The lifts could speed passengers down the decks at 150 feet per minute.
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“These elevators, by the way, give you curious sensations when the ship is rolling,” a traveler said. “You start at the bottom with a distinct leaning to the right; perhaps by the time you reach C Deck, you are headed straight for the zenith, and when you land on Deck A, the car is pointed to the left. Small wonder that a special corps of boys will have to be trained for this whimsical, zigzag service.”
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Descending
Lusitania
’s Grand Staircase, First Class passengers faced corridors with “a vista many hundreds of feet long, which narrows in your sight,” said a passenger, who noted the “doors of staterooms without number, until you feel that it must have taken a wilderness of mahogany to build this long street.”
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“If you have a berth and a stateroom with another person,” a guidebook advised, “seek them out at the earliest possible opportunity and exchange cards. Occupants of the same room should practice mutual forbearance.”
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Many passengers, though, found no need to extend themselves. Despite “the extravagant waste of space which such a proceeding involves,” a critic groused, “many of the best steamships are fitted with single-berthed state rooms, so that to be thrust into acquaintanceship with a perfect stranger is no longer essential for the whole voyage.”
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Lusitania
’s suites and cabins did not escape the conflicting and chaotic decorative tastes of the day. “You may sleep in a bed depicting one ruler’s fancy,” an author opined of the typical liner, “breakfast under another dynasty altogether, lunch under a different flag and furniture scheme, play cards or smoke, or indulge in music under three other monarchs, have your afternoon cup of tea in a verandah which is essentially modern and cosmopolitan, and return to one of the historical periods experienced earlier in the day for your dinner.… It is a wonder that some arbiter of fashion has not decreed that the costumes of the passengers shall match the scheme of decorations.”
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Saloon Class cabins and suites were disposed over the five top decks; the lower one went, the less imposing the accommodations. Ordinary cabins for one or two passengers were fitted with thick Brussels carpets and blue or crimson brocade hangings; wardrobes and desks of mahogany or walnut; and brass-plated beds or berths covered with quilted eiderdowns. All featured electric fans, individual heating, and basins with running water.
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“Even in the inexpensive cabins you have a broad sofa with many pillows and a silk-shaded lamp in just the proper place to read by,” marveled a passenger.
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Even the crystal prisms in the ceiling fixtures were strung on rigid wires, so that they would not sway in foul weather.
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