Lusitania (44 page)

The mother of Lindon Bates, hearing of his last minutes aboard
Lusitania
spent helping others, told a newspaper, “It is good to know that my son acted with courage and unselfishness.”
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James Houghton had desperately searched the water for Marie Depage after the ocean separated them when
Lusitania
sank. Her body, identified by her grief-stricken husband, was taken back to Belgium. King Albert and Queen Elisabeth attended her funeral, and she was buried near the hospital at La Panne. Houghton sent a long, anguished letter to the family of his friend Richard Freeman, excusing himself for the delay as “my nerves have been in such a condition since the catastrophe that I have actually been unable to write about it.” He had known Freeman “since sophomore year in College, and he being the only person on board whom I had known for any length of time, I feel his loss more keenly than any of the others.” Although acknowledging the “perfectly terrible blow,” he thought “it must be a continual source of comfort to you to know that Dick went like a man, thinking only of others and giving his life that the women and children might be saved.”
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Houghton died in 1931.

Carl Foss had embarked on
Lusitania
as a humanitarian, hoping to offer his expertise in surgical wounds to the Red Cross, but his later life was shrouded in scandal. Returning to his home in Montana in 1916, he resumed his medical practice, but soon became involved in a land dispute with a neighbor that turned ugly. To resolve the problem before it reached the courtroom, Foss and several friends apparently murdered the neighbor, which earned the doctor a prison term at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. He spent only a year in custody.
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Suffering from the nephritis that had originally kept him out of the war, he was released and returned to Montana. He died in 1924 at the age of thirty-four, after an operation for a gangrenous appendix, lauded in the local newspaper as “one of the most prominent physicians and surgeons of Northern Montana.”
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Young Barbara Anderson came through the ordeal with no ill effects and only vague recollections of the disaster. A few months after the sinking, her mother, Emily, gave birth to a son, who lived only five months; tuberculosis claimed Emily Anderson in 1917. When the Great War ended, Barbara returned to her father in America; unfortunately, the prized spoon engraved
Lusitania
that she had carried aboard the ship and into the lifeboat was lost. Back in Connecticut, she completed her education, married Milton McDermott, and had two children. In her later years, she appeared in a number of documentaries about the tragedy, a soft-spoken lady with dazzling blue eyes. Every night, she once said, she thanked God for having saved her from the
Lusitania
. Barbara Anderson McDermott died at the age of ninety-five in 2008.
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The vivacious Dorothy Conner, who had naively embarked on her Red Cross mission armed with evening gowns and fur pieces, spent several years working with her brother-in-law, Howard Fisher, at a relief hospital and canteen in France. In 1923, she married naval lieutenant Greene William Dugger, and had two children. Her husband predeceased her, dying in 1941, while Fisher died in 1946. Dorothy lived until 1967.
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Phoebe Amory returned to Canada, where in 1917 she published a booklet,
The Death of the Lusitania
. This mingled her experiences aboard the doomed liner with a fair dose of jingoistic nationalism and anti-German propaganda. “I hated the race that made war on women and war on children,” she confessed, “and I would have given everything for revenge.”
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She died in 1942. Fellow Canadian Josephine Eaton Burnside lived until 1943. Isaac Lehmann died in 1947, Thomas Home in 1952, and Michael Byrne in 1953.
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Shortly after the
Lusitania
disaster, Harold Boulton was given a post as Equerry to Princess Louise, Marchioness of Lorne, Queen Victoria’s daughter. Three years later, he married Louise McGowan and had three children. On his father’s death in 1935, he became 3rd Baronet Boulton. During the Second World War, he served in the RAF Reserves as well as an infantry battalion. He lost his youngest son, Duncan, in fighting in 1944.
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“The memory” of the
Lusitania,
Boulton wrote in 1939, “is with me as clearly now as in the first days following. Sometimes I can speak of it all quite calmly, as if I were a literary third person reporting it, and the next time, a sickening wave comes over me and I am living everything again all too vividly.” He suffered frequent nightmares, and would awake to “find myself standing on my pillow, clinging to the bedpost, trying to get out of the water.”
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Boulton died in 1968. Elisabeth and Frederic Lassetter, with whom he had shared a floating box in the aftermath of the sinking, later gave testimony to the official British inquiry into the disaster. Elisabeth died in 1927; Frederic died in 1940.

The trio of wealthy Montreal survivors, Frederick Orr-Lewis, Robert Holt, and Lady Allan, all returned to Canada. Orr-Lewis died in 1921; George Slingsby, his faithful valet, died in 1967. Holt completed his education in England and joined the British Army. Having inherited his father’s immense fortune, he became one of Canada’s leading and most important financial figures before his death in 1947.

Despite her grief, the formidable Marguerite Allan proceeded with her plans to open a convalescent home for Canadian soldiers in England with her daughter Martha. But the Great War was not yet done with the illustrious Allans. On July 6, 1917, their only son Hugh, serving as flight sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, left on his first patrol over enemy lines in Belgium. German artillery caught his plane, and he was shot down and killed at the age of twenty. Rather than bring him back to Canada, his parents decided to bury him in Belgium.
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Born into the comfortable luxury of the Victorian world, and having presided over the splendor of Edwardian-era Montreal, Marguerite Allan now witnessed the raucous Jazz Age that followed in the wake of the Great War. Once stately Ravenscrag had brimmed with elegantly attired ladies and Strauss waltzes; now, its halls rang with the sound of clinking cocktail glasses as Martha ushered in a new era of hospitality. She never married, instead devoting herself to the theater, and wrote and acted in a number of popular works at her parents’ estate. The audiences grew so big that she finally took over Ravenscrag’s stables, where the Montreal Repertory Theatre was born.
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Fate had one remaining cruel turn of events in store for Marguerite Allan: in 1942, Martha died unexpectedly in Vancouver. Lady Allan had given birth to four children; all had predeceased her. Occasionally she and her husband, Hugh, still spent summers at Montrose in Cacouna but the house was too large for the elderly couple; in 1941, they sold it to an order of Capuchin monks. Ravenscrag, too, had outlived the era in which it had been built: by World War II, it was too difficult to maintain, too expensive to heat, and too impractical as a private residence. With Martha’s death, the couple moved permanently into a hotel suite, and gave the grand house to Montreal’s McGill University Faculty of Medicine. Most of its once famously lavish interiors—columns, plaster reliefs, painted ceilings, and silk brocaded walls—were stripped, replaced with utilitarian enamel paint and institutional rubber tiling. Today, Ravenscrag still dominates the city from the foot of Mount Royal as the Allan Memorial Institute.
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Sir Hugh Montague Allan died in 1951; Marguerite Allan lived for another six years, dying in September 1957 at the age of eighty-four. She is buried beside her husband, Gwendolyn, and Martha at Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery.

Gladys Bilicke returned to America, remaining in New York City for several weeks to recuperate before continuing on to Los Angeles. She was, reported the
Los Angeles Times,
“still unnerved by her dreadful experience aboard the
Lusitania
”; not only did she refuse to speak about the disaster but she also refused to see any of her friends or her husband’s business acquaintances.
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Doctors treated her for shock and exposure immediately after the disaster, but the effects lingered and caused something approaching a nervous breakdown. “In all probability,” a report noted, “she will never recover her former mental and nervous poise.”
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Living in the house she had shared with Albert apparently proved too disturbing, and she soon moved to a residence in Los Angeles; ironically, just down the street lived a couple who had lost a son in the sinking of
Titanic
.
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In the 1920s, Gladys was among numerous
Lusitania
survivors and relatives who lodged lawsuits against the German government. A commission, established after the end of the Great War, heard evidence. Some $15.5 million in lost property, personal injury, and lost revenue was claimed; in the end, and some ten years after the disaster, the Mixed Claims Court awarded just $2.5 million versus the $15.5 million asked for in damages and compensation, money paid by the German government.
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Gladys Bilicke received $50,000 in compensation from Germany, while her two children were granted an additional $90,000 in total.
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Gladys disliked speaking of the
Lusitania
and its painful memories. She died in 1943.

Surviving the
Lusitania
forever changed George Kessler. The charming bon vivant and wine merchant became a philanthropist. Determined to help soldiers fighting Germany, he organized and became president of the Blind Relief War Fund, a training organization for soldiers who had lost their sight. This interest soon led him to Helen Keller, who encouraged the work and became—along with Kessler’s wife, Cora—one of the initial trustees in his Blind Relief War Fund. Kessler spent the next few years raising funds for the organization. He died in Paris in 1920.
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Angela Papadopoulos felt that her experience on
Lusitania
“destroyed forever my poor nerves,” writing, “I believe I will never be able to erase those moments from my memory.” She kept in regular contact with several other survivors, including Lady Allan. She lost two of her children to the great influenza epidemic, and eventually moved to Paris, where in 1924 she married Russian émigré Count Alexander Bakeev; she died in 1936 at the age of fifty-three. “At my death, when and wherever it should be,” she wrote, “I want to be buried wearing the uniform of a sailor” who had given her his clothing when she was pulled from the water and which “I still jealously guard.”
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On hearing of the tragedy, Alfred Vanderbilt’s wife, Margaret, had locked herself in their suite at the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York City. Her brother-in-law Reggie and sister-in-law Gertrude rushed to see her, and let it be known that she was “bearing up bravely.”
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Although the hotel lowered its flag in mourning, Margaret still held out hope that Alfred had somehow survived.
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“I will not believe Alfred is dead until I see the body,” she insisted. “I have a feeling that he has been picked up, perhaps unconscious and unable to give an account of himself and that his identity will be made known within a short time.”
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When, after a few days, it finally became apparent that he had perished, she was said to be suffering from a “severe strain” that caused her friends “great anxiety.”
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Despite the immense reward offered, Alfred Vanderbilt’s body was never recovered. On May 22, the family finally announced in the
New York Times
that Alfred had “died at sea on May 7.” There was no mention of
Lusitania
.
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Five days later, Alfred’s icily regal mother, Alice, held a private family memorial at her New York City château; among the two hundred invited mourners who filled the immense stone hall were Alfred’s outcast brother, Neily, and his scandalous wife, Grace, death finally healing the breach their marriage had caused. Again there was no mention of
Lusitania,
though the short service ended with an Episcopal prayer for burial of the dead at sea.
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On arriving in London, Oliver Bernard found his talents commandeered by the
Illustrated London News,
which wanted firsthand sketches showing how
Lusitania
had met her end. Bernard produced a series of drawings dramatically depicting the liner’s last minutes, from the initial torpedo impact to the debris left in her wake after she had disappeared beneath the surface. Later, as he had hoped, he was allowed to join the army. During fighting on the Western Front he was wounded in the leg and forced from the fighting; thereafter he designed camouflage for British units, and was honored with the Order of the British Empire by King George V for his services.
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Having divorced his first wife, Muriel, he married his second, opera singer Dora Hodges, in 1924 on learning that she was pregnant. Various theatrical and industrial design commissions kept him busy: in 1929 he was responsible for the striking art deco–style entrance to the Strand Palace Hotel in London, yet Bernard felt that he was not being allowed to fully use his talents. This, as his son recalled, left him somewhat embittered and sensitive.
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Oliver Bernard died of peritonitis in 1939.