Mr. David Craig McCormick, Assistant Telegraphist

David McCormick (1895 – ?), 20, was the assistant radio operator of the Lusitania on that ship’s last voyage, serving with Robert Leith. McCormick had been in the radio room when the ship was torpedoed. He and Leith stayed at their posts to send out distress signals until no more could be done. McCormick had a camera and took pictures of the Lusitania sinking, but as he was immersed in the water, his pictures did not come out. Both McCormick and Leith were saved.

Biography

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David Craig McCormick, a British subject from Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom, was born in 1895 in England. He lived at 23 Lyndhurst Gardens, Liverpool, Lancashire. McCormick joined the Marconi Company in 1913, and before the Lusitania, he served aboard the steamships Ionian, Colonian, Landon Hall, and Warwickshire.

He engaged as Assistant Telegraphist in the Deck Department on board the Lusitania at Liverpool, on the morning of 17 April 1915 just before the liner left Liverpool landing stage for the last time, to replace Telegraphist W.C. Ryan, who had failed to join.

During the voyage, McCormick was serving in the radio room with Robert Leith. During the war, the radio room was used mostly to receive messages instead of sending them to avoid broadcasting their location to the Germans. Admiralty messages concerning how to maneuver through the submarine-infested waters around the British Isles came through them as well, but these classified messages have never been made public.

McCormick survived the sinking three weeks later.

On the afternoon of 7 May 1915, the day the Lusitania was torpedoed, McCormick was at his post in the radio room and Leith was taking a lunch break when the torpedo hit. To McCormick, the torpedo impact sounded like a dull, heavy thud, and a number of unsecured articles went scattering across the floor. McCormick had the impression that heavy guns were being fired at the near vicinity. Without waiting for captain’s orders, McCormick started the motor for the wireless telegraph to radio messages for help, just as Leith rushed into room and joined McCormick at his post. Leith tapped out, almost reflexively:

Come at once, big list, 10 miles south Old Head Kinsale

Leith repeated the message with the Lusitania‘s call letters, MSU, while that the ship’s electric power continued to weaken and drop to zero. The power soon failed. Leith left his chair and turned on the emergency dynamo that ran on storage batteries, and the Marconi radio worked again. As the clock read 2:14 p.m., Leith continued typing:

Come at once.  Big list.  Ten miles south Old Head Kinsale.

The list worsened. There was no doubt in Leith’s or McCormick’s mind that the ship would sink in a matter of minutes. The message to other rescue vessels became more urgent.

Send Help Quickly.  Am Listing Badly!

Leith would later recall in his Sunday Chronicle account:

A passenger looked in through the door with a cheery smile and at the same moment a member of the crew ran across our vision shouting, “The watertight doors are all right, they’re all right, don’t worry!”  All three of us laughed.  The ship had such a list that a child could have seen that she was due for the final plunge within a few minutes.

Saloon passenger Oliver P. Bernard of London, told in The Bradford Daily Telegraph of 10 May 1915 and other newspapers of the day, recounts how he crossed paths with the radio operators during the sinking:

I reached the funnel deck and crossed over to look at the starboard side.  There I came across two Marconi operators.  They were sending out their ‘S.O.S.’.  The explosion had disorganised the main wireless room and they were working the emergency apparatus.  I asked the wireless operators how they were getting on, and at that precise moment they received an answer to their call.  A moment later the apparatus was smashed.

This latter fact does not seem likely in view of other testimonies, as the radio operators continued to use the emergency apparatus, once the ship’s main power had stopped working, until they could do no more and decided to abandon ship.  Bernard’s account continues:

One of the operators [Leith] offered me a swivel chair to go down into the water.  His colleague [McCormick] took out a pocket Kodak and going down on his hands and knees on the deck, which was now at an angle of about 35 degrees, took a solitary snapshot of the scenes forward.  It would have been a wonderful photograph, but the film was destroyed in the water.

By this time, the list had increased alarmingly and the bow was almost submerged. As the water reached the boat deck, the wireless operators ceased sending the distress message.  Near the end, McCormick produced a small camera and, balancing himself uncertainly on his knees, took a picture facing forward. Hoehling and Hoehling’s The Last Voyage of the Lusitania erroneously attributes this action to Leith but captures the mindset perfectly:

“What a snap this will make!” he observed.

Saloon passenger Henry Burgess from Shipley in Yorkshire also encountered the radio operators at about this time and watched McCormick take photographs.  He described his experiences in his local newspaper, The Shipley Times and Observer:

As for myself, I went to the Marconi house and asked if a message had been got away.  The operator said “Yes, but you had better get hold of this, old man, (throwing me an office chair), as you may want it.”  I did not take the chair but I went over to the starboard side and saw that now the water was nearly up to the level of the boat deck. ….. The Marconi man came out of his office at that time and began to take photographs, which struck me as a cool proceeding.  I don’t know whether he saved himself and his photographs.

The photographs never came out, and none ever came to light afterwards.

Second cabin passenger survivor Ernest S. Cowper, writing a year afterwards about the part played in the disaster by Bosun John Davies, in The New York Times Magazine, stated:

He worked the forward falls on the lifeboats which got away from the starboard side, and smoked as he did it.  He was assisted by two boyish-looking well groomed wireless operators, who, catching John Davies’ spirit perhaps, pulled out their cigarettes and smoked as they worked the after falls with him. They were drowned.

These “boyish-looking well groomed wireless operators” were David McCormick, who was aged 20 at the time and Robert Leith, who must have had good genes to be “boyish-looking” at almost 30 years of age.  Cowper was wrong about their respective fates, as both survived.

Leith’s Sunday Chronicle account continued:

My grin was probably a little sickly as I said goodbye to McCormack [sic] who had decided to go down with the ship in the hope of finding a piece of wreckage on which to float away.  The rail of the upper deck was almost level with the sea.  The sun was still shining and the glassy water was dotted with hundreds of white faces, waterlogged boats and the bobbing heads of men who were still swimming.  Nearer at hand smashed boats dangled from davits like toys, while on the other side of the vessel I could see men and women climbing out to walk into the sea on the iron plates of the ship’s side.

McCormick’s account states that he and Leith did not even say proper goodbyes, just that they lost sight of each other as the ship sank. McCormick was also insistent that there was no panic aboard Lusitania except for one or two passengers who seemed excited. His memories became less clear after this point, as he recalls being immersed in the water, escaping from the suction of the sinking ship, and hanging onto a collapsible boat until he, and others with him, were rescued by a torpedo boat late that afternoon.

Leith’s Sunday Chronicle account concluded:

At Queenstown, McCormack [sic] and I were re-united.  He had gone down with the ship and had been caught in the vortex of water closing over his head.  Yet he told me that the suction had been nothing like so serious as everyone had expected and he had been picked up by a boat after bobbing to the surface.

As Leith and McCormick stayed at their posts until the ship sank from underneath them, The Liverpool Daily Post touted “[h]is behaviour, and that of his assistant [McCormick], were in the best traditions of the service.”

On his eventual return to Liverpool, David McCormick was officially discharged from his service on the Lusitania and paid the balance of wages owing to him.

Links of interest

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David McCormick at the Merseyside Maritime Museum

Contributors
Peter Kelly, Ireland
Ellie Moffat, UK
Michael Poirier, USA

References
Cunard Records

New York Times Magazine

PRO BT 100/345

Hoehling, A. A. and Mary Hoehling. The Last Voyage of the Lusitania. Madison Books, 1956.

Liverpool Daily Post

Sunday Chronicle, 5 May 1935.

Wireless World, Vol 3, pages 181-183. Wireless Society of London. 1915.