SOS Lusitania (14 page)
Authors: Kevin Kiely
T
he Kennedy house was very quiet. The evening grew dark and the gaslights came on along Park Terrace, making the trees look like black shadows. Colleen woke in her bed; her chest hurt from weeping and she got up slowly and came downstairs. Mam rose in her chair in expectation, then slumped back down. Sean was asleep in the big chair with his head against one arm. Christopher was at the table, cutting out the photographs from the
Daily Sketch
about the
Lusitania
and when Colleen saw him, she gave her mother an angry look. Mam put a finger to her lips and shook her head, smiling at the boy.
‘We’re all up! We may as well have some tea,’ said Mam. She made tea, then boiled some eggs that Mrs Kelly had left.
Suddenly a large shadow loomed in the panes of glass of the front door, and there was much shuffling outside. Someone in the street tugged the key on its length of cord through the letterbox and fumbled at the lock.
Mam ran at the door. ‘Oh my God!’ she screamed and almost fell backwards against the stairs. ‘Oh my God!’
The children ran out to see who was there.
‘Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy!’ shouted Christopher. ‘I knew it! I knew you’d come back. Oh Daddy, you’re home!’
‘Daddy, I thought you …’ began Colleen, bursting into tears and running towards him, flinging her arms around his waist.
‘My Daddy is back,’ shouted Sean, waking up and nearly falling over as he ran to his father.
They all threw themselves at him and nearly knocked him to the ground in a wave of love.
‘But where’s Finbar?’ Colleen stood back from her father.
‘Listen, Colleen darling, I don’t know where Finbar…’ Captain Kennedy’s eyes filled with tears and they all stared at him.
‘Oh my God, Jack,’ Mrs Kennedy said in shock, ‘Finbar’s not with you? And your poor arm! What happened?’
‘The hand was mangled. That’s where I’ve been – in a Cork hospital. The hand is useless now and I’ll have to do without
the use of it. But I’m lucky, I’ve only lost the use of my right arm. So many lost their lives. Let’s sit down a moment. I cannot believe Finbar’s not here. Oh my lovely son …’ He slowly began to tell them how he had survived, but his voice was low and mournful.
They crowded around him at the table and Mam sat beside him, holding his injured hand. They listened intently, looking at his face as he told them of all the horror of that dreadful day on the sea and how he had survived.
‘… When the ship tipped over I was standing with Captain Turner and then we saw one of the rafts – it must have been the very last one – drop down on the deck in front of us. It was a miracle. As he was the Captain, we were the last to leave the ship – I think. I truly thought I was gone. My hand had been trapped under falling rubble when the ship collapsed, so Captain Turner had to drag me into the raft and he had to do all the rowing. It took hours, but we made it. It broke our hearts to see all the dead bodies in the sea – our precious passengers and crew. I stared and stared, looking for Finbar and when I didn’t see him I just hoped and prayed …’
A
rriving back in Queenstown was a very strange experience for me, having left it as a runaway. That was all like a dream to me now and seemed so long ago. The Cunard offices were open and I read the list of survivors there. I burst into tears when I saw my father’s name.
I limped along the quays and awkwardy climbed the steps past the cathedral as the bells chimed twelve midnight. I passed Fitz’s grocery shop and hurried on as fast as my sore leg would carry me to No. 1 Park Terrace.
The house was dark, but I knocked and knocked and knocked until I thought the door would fall down. I forgot all about the key on the string, I was so upset. I had run away from home – and look at what happened. Would they want
me back? Would my father really be there?
Mam opened the door. She dropped the candle she was holding and screamed. ‘Oh, tell me it is you, Finbar, not some ghost!’
‘It’s Finbar, Mam.’ I could not see her for tears. ‘Mam, I’m sorry I ran away on ye, but I will explain–’
She rushed towards me and enveloped me in a hug. ‘Oh Finbar, Finbar!’ she cried.
By now the whole household was awake and downstairs. The others surrounded me and Mam, all of them weeping and hugging me and each other. Sean and Christopher were shouting at the tops of their voices: ‘Finbar’s home!’ Colleen wrapped her arms around my neck and would not let go. Mam and Dad touched me all over as if I were broken and they were searching for the broken pieces. Mam lifted my hurt leg onto a chair to examine it. I started to explain all about the Seal Man, but Mam and Dad told me to shush – it didn’t matter how I got there, all that mattered was that I was home.
Mam stoked up the fire, got the kettle on and brought out a pie. ‘We’ll have to celebrate Finbar’s homecoming,’ she said.
Dad put a stop to my apologies and excuses for running away. ‘You’re a man of the world, now, Finbar,’ he said. He explained the loss of the use of his hand and said it was
something he could live with. ‘Finbar, you are my right hand now.’ He laughed loudly. ‘I won’t be going to sea again. Captain Turner is going to recommend me for a desk job here in Queenstown in the Cunard office. Isn’t that something? I’ll be home for tea every night, for a change. And you can go back to school, Finbar.’
‘And I do want to get back to school, Dad. Will Mr Dempsey kill me?’ I asked, but I wasn’t really afraid. ‘And I’ll keep working as a tout down at the quays and find other work so we won’t be poor. And look!’ I fidgeted in my pocket and pulled out a roll of dollars that had survived the sea. ‘Mam, count them. It is a present from New York and from the
Lusitania
and from the Atlantic. It will all add up to a pretty penny.’ I handed them to Mam and she wept again.
‘Oh my gosh, there’s twenty-eight dollars here! A fortune!’ she said. She put her arms around me.
‘We are not poor, Finbar,’ said Dad. ‘I am the richest man in the whole world. We have a roof over our heads and we are all together.’ He looked around and smiled at us all – his precious family. ‘We’re not poor, and even if we are, we are happy and that’s what matters. Our happiness will enable us to survive. There’s Mam, Colleen, Finbar, Christopher, Sean and myself – the six of us in our own liner – with our troubles, indeed,
but the best of weather whatever the weather. The finest ship I have ever sailed. And what is the name of this ship, crew?’ Dad looked at all of us in turn.
‘Tell us, Jack.’ Mam was cutting more slices of pie.
‘
The Survivor
.’
HISTORICAL NOTE
EMEMBER THE
L
USITANIA!
'
Aleister Crowley
was a double agent. He worked for both the British and the Germans during the war. He was a writer and a member of many secret societies.
Captain Turner
was the real captain of the
Lusitania
and gave evidence at the inquests into the sinking of the ship.
William Pierpont
was the detective on board the
Lusitania
.
Paul König
and
Gustav Stahl
were crew members and also German spies.
Walther Schwieger
, the captain of the German U-20 which sank the
Lusitania
, was a war ace. He sank a further thirteen British ships. Schwieger and his crew died in 1917 when their U-boat exploded in a collision with a minefield.
Hooper
, Schwieger’s dog, was on board the U-20 when it hit the
Lusitania
.
All other characters are invented.
All contemporary locations and streets are real.
Weir’s Boarding House in New York was real.
The newspaper offices and their publications were real.
The warning notice printed in the
New York Times
was real, and was believed to have been drafted by Aleister Crowley.
‘Remember the Lusitania’
and
‘Avenge the Lusitania’
were slogans used on recruiting posters to persuade young men, especially Americans, to enlist as soldiers in 1917 in the First World War (known as the Great War, 1914–1918).
The sinking of the
Lusitania
was a huge event in world news in May 1915. Only three years before, in 1912, the
Titanic
had sunk, with great loss of life, having struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage
from Southampton, England, to New York. The
Titanic
disaster was explainable in terms of human error. The
Lusitania
disaster was not an accident.
On 7 May 1915 this great liner was sunk in an attack by a German submarine off the Irish coast near Kinsale. Close to 1,200 people died; two hundred of these were US citizens; six hundred were British and Canadian citizens.
There was huge public reaction to the sinking of the
Lusitania
and this meant that America eventually decided to join in the Great War.
The bulkheads of the
Lusitania
were placed in such a way that the lower deck would be flooded if the ship was hit by a torpedo. This is what happened.
The Germans torpedoed the
Lusitania
, and everyone knew that. However, another story slowly began to emerge. Down through the years people have tried to unravel that story, but it still remains a mystery to this day.
The claim is that the sinking was not just a lucky strike by a German submarine, but was really a plan drawn up by high-ranking officials in the British Navy and their spies in order to bring America into the war.
Walther Schwieger’s diary states that the U-20 under his command
sank the
Lusitania
on May 7 (1915). However, the day before, 6 May, Schwieger and the U-20 sank two other ships,
Candidate
and
Centurion
, and on 5 May sank the
Earl of Lathom
. All of these ships were hit in the sea south of Cobh and off the Wexford coast. The British Admiralty knew of these three sinkings yet they sent no warning to Captain Turner on the
Lusitania
. It is also on record that in March 1915 the Admiralty gave battleship protection to the
Lusitania
on entering and leaving Irish waters, but then withdrew it, so that in May there was no such support.
Arms and other war supplies as well as gold bullion were part of the cargo of the
Lusitania
.
There were two inquests after the disaster. They differ in several details.
Captain Turner, questioned in Kinsale in May 1915, spoke of only one torpedo which struck the liner at 2.15pm on the day of the disaster. The
Lusitania
sank eighteen minutes later.
Turner was evasive in answers about the British Admiralty’s orders transmitted by Morse Code, which asked him to slow his speed long before the attack by the U-boat. The
Lusitania
was ordered to slow to 15 knots along the south Irish coast. The
Lusitania’s
top speed was 25 knots, and travelling at 15 knots made it an easier target for the U-boat. Why was Captain Turner ordered to slow his speed? ‘That
is a matter for the Admiralty,’ was the captain’s rather weak answer, but it suggests that the
Lusitania’s
passage through the war zone was controlled by the Admiralty, not the Captain of the liner.
At the second inquest in June 1915, Sir Edward Carson, acting for the British Navy, broke Turner down as the main witness. Carson put it to Turner that the
Lusitania
had been struck by two, even possibly three torpedoes. They wanted to prove that the sinking was completely due to torpedoes and not to any arms already on board the ship. Turner agreed that two torpedoes had struck the
Lusitania
, contradicting what he had said at the earlier inquest. But in later years he stated publicly that only one torpedo had struck the ship; this is also what Schwieger, the captain of the German U-20, said in his accounts of the shipwreck.
The London inquest stated that the reason for the reduction in speed was to enable the
Lusitania
to arrive in Liverpool in a good tide. But this seems unconvincing: it could have slowed down nearer to Liverpool and would have had battleship protection within English shores.
These mysteries remain unanswered to this day.