AMONG THE PASSENGERS who survived—all of whom received from Cunard a lifetime discount of 25 percent—there were marriages, lifelong friendships forged, and at least two suicides. Rita Jolivet’s sister, Inez, a renowned violinist, was not herself a passenger, but her husband was among the lost. She decided she could not live without him and in late July 1915 shot herself to death. At least two young men who had survived the sinking were subsequently killed in the war.
Margaret Mackworth experienced a complex suite of aftereffects. Her ordeal had the perverse result of eliminating her long-standing fear of water and substituting an exaggerated terror of being trapped in an enclosure under water. This fear came to her primarily when she took the train that passed through the Severn Tunnel, under the Severn River. It was a journey she had to take often, and every time, she wrote, “I insistently pictured the tunnel giving way, the water rushing in, and the passengers being caught and suffocated and drowned like rats in a trap in the little boxes of carriages.”
Overall, though, she believed the disaster had made her a better person. She had a new confidence. “If anyone had asked me whether I should behave as I ought in a shipwreck I should have had the gravest doubts,” she wrote. “And here I had got through this test without disgracing myself.” She also found, to her surprise, that the experience had eliminated a deep horror of death that she had harbored since childhood. “I do not quite understand how or why it did this,” she wrote. “The only explanation I can give is that when I was lying back in that sunlit water I was, and I knew it, very near to death.” The prospect had not frightened her, she wrote: “Rather, somehow, one had a protected feeling, as if it were a kindly thing.”
Her friend and tablemate, Dorothy Conner, went on to join the war effort, working in a canteen in France close to the front. In honor of her help and bravery, the French awarded her the Croix de Guerre.
Young Dwight Harris presented his engagement ring to his betrothed, Miss Aileen Cavendish Foster, and they were married on July 2, 1915, in London. The little boy he saved, Percy Richards, reached the age of forty, but killed himself on June 24, 1949.
George Kessler, the Champagne King, made good on a pledge he had made during his time in the water—that if he survived he would devote himself to the care of victims of the war. He established a foundation to help soldiers and sailors blinded in battle. Helen Keller became a trustee and later gave her name to the organization, which operates today as Helen Keller International.
Five months after the disaster, Charles Lauriat wrote a book about his experience, entitled The Lusitania’s Last Voyage. It became a bestseller. He continued to sell books, manuscripts, and works of art, and in 1922 filed a claim against Germany with the U.S. Mixed Claims Commission for the value of the lost Thackeray drawings and the Dickens Carol. He wanted $51,399.31, which included interest; the commission awarded him $10,000. He died on December 28, 1937, at the age of sixty-three. His obituary in the Boston Globe noted the fact that over the years he had made sixty voyages to London and Europe. A succession of new owners built the Lauriat company into an empire of 120 “Lauriat’s” stores, but this expansion came too quickly, at too great a cost, just as bookstores came under pressure from national chains and online sellers. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in 1998 and a year later closed for good.
Belle Naish, the Kansas City passenger who lost her husband, found that long after the disaster she could not look at a clear blue sky without feeling a deep sense of foreboding. Theodate Pope put Mrs. Naish in her will as thanks for that moment on the deck of the rescue ship Julia when Naish realized that Theodate was not in fact dead and called for help.