WHAT HAPPENED NEXT CAME AS A SURPRISE TO CAPTAIN Turner. Even though the cause of the disaster was obvious—an act of war—the Admiralty moved at once to place the blame on him. Anyone privy to the internal communications, or “minutes,” flung between the offices of senior Admiralty officials in the week after the disaster could have had no doubt as to the zeal with which the Admiralty intended to forge a case against Turner. In one, Churchill himself wrote, “We sh’d pursue the Captain without check.”
Before the effort could get started, however, the coroner in Kinsale, Ireland, John J. Horgan, convened an inquest of his own, much to the Admiralty’s displeasure. Horgan claimed the responsibility fell to him because five of the Lusitania’s dead had been landed in his district. The inquest began the day after the sinking, Saturday, May 8. Horgan called Turner as a witness and after hearing his testimony praised the captain for his courage in staying with the ship until the last moment. At this, Turner began to cry. Horgan, in a later memoir, called the captain “a brave but unlucky man.”
On Monday, May 10, the coroner’s jury issued its finding: that the submarine’s officers and crew and the emperor of Germany had committed “willful and wholesale murder.”
Half an hour later a message arrived from the Admiralty, ordering Horgan to block Turner from testifying. Horgan wrote, “That august body were however as belated on this occasion as they had been in protecting the Lusitania against attack.”
THE ADMIRALTY was far more prompt in laying out the contours of its strategy for assigning fault to Turner. The day after the disaster, Richard Webb, director of the Admiralty’s Trade Division, circulated a two-page memorandum, marked “Secret,” in which he charged that Turner had ignored the Admiralty’s instructions that called for him to zigzag and to “give prominent headlands a wide berth.” Instead, Webb wrote, Turner had “proceeded along the usual trade route, at a speed approximately three-quarters of what he was able to get out of this vessel. He thus kept his valuable vessel for an unnecessary length of time in the area where she was most liable to attack, inviting disaster.”
Webb made a formal request for an investigation by Britain’s Wreck Commission, under Lord Mersey, who had led inquiries into the losses of many ships, including the Titanic and the Empress of Ireland.
On Wednesday, May 12, Webb intensified his attack on Captain Turner. In a new memorandum, he wrote that Turner “appears to have displayed an almost inconceivable negligence, and one is forced to conclude that he is either utterly incompetent, or that he has been got at by the Germans.” In the left-hand margin, First Sea Lord Fisher, in his wild fulminating hand, jotted, “I hope Captain Turner will be arrested immediately after the inquiry whatever the verdict of finding may be.”
The Admiralty took the unprecedented step of insisting that key parts of the planned inquiry, especially the examination of Turner, be held in secret.
U.S. CONSUL FROST sensed early on that the Admiralty’s soul had hardened against Turner. On Sunday, May 9, Frost paid a call on Admiral Coke, senior naval officer in Queenstown, accompanied by two U.S. military attachés who had just arrived from London to help arrange the return of American dead.
Admiral Coke openly criticized Turner for sailing too close to shore and too slowly and read aloud the warnings that had been sent to the Lusitania on Friday. But Consul Frost was surprised at how little detail these messages contained. “Bare facts only,” Frost noted, later. “No instructions or interpretation. It is true that Turner should have kept farther out; but to my mind it seemed that the Admiralty had by no means done their full duty by him.”