Sinking of the Lusitania

Lusitania 1st Class dining room

In the days when ocean liners provided the only way to travel across the Atlantic, the R.M.S. Lusitania was one of the fastest and most luxurious.  The domed, two-storey First Class dining room (above) was gilded and decorated with frescoes. The First Class lounge (below) boasted marble fireplaces at each end and a vaulted stained glass skylight above. Second Class accommodations were deemed to be superior to most First Class on other ships, and even Third Class fared better on the “Lusy”.

1st Class lounge

The Lusitania began her last voyage on May 1, 1915 from New York to Liverpool, England. The crossing was smooth and uneventful, despite the threat of German submarines, and on May 7 the ship was off the coast of Ireland, nearing the end of her journey. Some First Class passengers were finishing lunch and listening to the orchestra playing “The Blue Danube” when a U-boat torpedo struck. It took only 18 minutes for the ship to sink, and just 6 of the 48 lifeboats were successfully launched.

Aftermath of the Lusitania's sinking; painting by William Lionel Wyllie

Among the 1,959 passengers and crew, only 764 survived, some – amazingly - spending two or more hours in the frigid sea. Canadian Josephine Burnside, sister of Sir John Eaton (mentioned in a previous post), was sucked into one of the four smokestacks when the ship sank, but was blown out again. She lived to tell the tale, but her 20-year-old daughter didn’t. Although a $5000 reward – a fortune in those days – was offered for finding one of America’s wealthiest men, Alfred Vanderbilt, his body was never recovered, nor were nearly 900 other men, women, and children.

A few of my characters are on board the ship. Not all survive.

Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy by Diana Preston is a fascinating account of her fateful last voyage and the controversies surrounding the events.

Marching Off to War

The hot and languid summer of 1914 was rudely interrupted by escalating hostilities an ocean and a world away from Canada. Once Britain declared war on Germany, it was only a matter of hours before Canada rallied to support her Mother Country. After all, Canadians were British subjects in those days.

“WAR” screamed the Toronto Star headline on August 5, and people cheered in the streets. With a mixture of excitement and patriotism, over 30,000 naïve young Canadians hurried to enlist in a conflict that everyone thought would be over by Christmas. They couldn’t have imagined the enormous sacrifices they would make.  

Privilege and wealth didn’t help. In fact, officers were killed in proportionally larger numbers than their men. Some families lost all their sons. Many felt that the best and brightest were among those who lay in the endless rows of graves.

During the four years of conflict, 600,000 Canadians enlisted, 68,000 died and over 170,000 were wounded, some more than once. Canada's population at that time was less than 8 million. There is, of course, no record of the mental and emotional toll that "the war to end all wars" took on the participants and their families.

From Regattas to Combat

Canoe race

One of the highlights of summers on the lake is the annual regatta. These friendly but often fierce competitions encompass sports such as canoeing, swimming, and sailing, and also quirkier events such as canoe tilting, as shown in the photo below.

Canoe tilting or jousting

The Muskoka Lakes Association (MLA) Regatta was already so popular prior to The Great War that people travelled up to Lake Rosseau from Toronto just for the day, with special steamships and overnight trains to ferry them home again. Hundreds of private boats sat at anchor or were moored many deep at the docks and islands within view of the activities. At the end of the day, various resorts held dances because even the largest of them, The Royal Muskoka Hotel (mentioned in a previous post), couldn’t accommodate all the revellers.

MLA Regatta at the Royal Muskoka Hotel

Canada’s Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, was vacationing at the luxurious Royal Muskoka Hotel in July of 1914, and was supposed to award the prizes at the MLA Regatta. But he had to rush back to Ottawa just days before Britain declared war on Germany on August 4^th, when Canada was also plunged into war.

The young men who had fought to be the toughest or fastest on the lakes would now battle on a far different and distant playing field.

No Shocking Glimpse of Stocking

Photo by Frank Micklethwaite

It must have been awkward and difficult to canoe in those long skirts and fussy picture hats – to say nothing of dangerous if you capsized. Underneath those dresses, ladies wore steel-boned corsets, lace-edged chemises, ruffled, embroidered, pleated, or flounced petticoats, knee-length drawers, and stockings. Not exactly swimwear, or comfortable for energetic summer activities. 

Eaton's Catalogue 1913-14

Eaton's Catalogue 1913-14

 These elegant styles are from the Eaton’s 1913-1914 Fall and Winter Catalogue.

Eaton's Catalogue 1920-21

During the war, hemlines were already rising to show a bit more of a “glimpse of stocking”, which Cole Porter rightly pointed out in his 1934 hit, “Anything Goes”, had once been considered shocking. Perhaps more shocking are the prices, which seem to have more than tripled in only 7 years.