The Lusitania

Just after two o'clock on the afternoon of 7 May 1915, the Cunard liner Lusitania, six days out of New York and close enough to the Cork coast for passengers to pick out the fields, crossed the periscope of the German submarine U-20. One torpedo hit her on the starboard side. A second, bigger explosion came from somewhere inside her, and one of the fastest and most famous ships in the world went down in eighteen minutes, about eighteen kilometres off the Old Head of Kinsale. Of the 1,959 people on board, 1,198 died. People on the headland watched it happen.

The rescue from Queenstown

The response came from Cork. Fishing boats out of Kinsale and Courtmacsherry pulled for the smoke, the Courtmacsherry lifeboat under oars because there was no wind for her sail, and every vessel in the harbour towns that could float went out. Everything afterwards ran through Queenstown, the town now called Cobh. The boats landed 761 survivors on its quays through the evening and night, and the town took them into its hospitals, hotels, lodging houses and front rooms. The dead were laid out in the Town Hall and the Cunard offices while relatives walked the rows looking for faces. Three days later, on 10 May, the town buried more than 160 of them in three mass graves in the Old Church Cemetery north of the town, in a procession that went on for most of the day. Many bodies never came ashore at all.

The shock that crossed an ocean

The Lusitania was a civilian liner, and among the dead were 128 Americans and nearly a hundred children. Germany argued that she was carrying munitions through a declared war zone, and she was in fact carrying rifle cartridges and shell cases in her hold. What that second explosion was has been argued over for a century and the argument is not finished. The effect is not in doubt. The sinking turned American opinion hard against Germany, two years before the United States came into the war, and it became one of the great recruiting images of the conflict. Within weeks the poster below was on walls across Ireland, and Cork men signed up under it.

The same harbour, three years apart

The Lusitania and the Titanic bookend the same three years in the same harbour. Queenstown was the Titanic's last port of call in April 1912, and the Lusitania's refuge in May 1915. Between them the two ships did more than anything else to make Cork Harbour famous around the world, and neither of them for reasons anybody would have chosen. Stand on the waterfront at Cobh today and you are looking at the water the survivors were carried across, and the quays the tenders left from three years before.

What is left

Cobh remembers. The Lusitania Peace Memorial by Jerome Connor stands in Casement Square, near the quays where the survivors landed, an angel over two exhausted fishermen. The inquest opened in the courthouse at Kinsale within days of the sinking, and the town's museum keeps relics of the ship. On the Old Head itself, in the old signal tower, there is a Lusitania museum and a memorial garden shaped like the ship, with the names of the dead. The wreck lies in about ninety metres of water off the headland, a protected war grave in Irish waters, and on a clear day from the garden you can look straight out at the patch of sea she went down in.

On the walk

The tour tells Cork's story through the revolutionary decade the sinking landed in. The Cork of 1915 was a city of war recruitment posters and rising rebellion at the same time, and the Lusitania hit both nerves at once.