| John Lewis Senior Third Officer Saved |
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| [No Picture Provided] | |
| Born | John Idwal Lewis 29 August 1885 Portmadoc, Carnarvonshire, Wales, United Kingdom |
| Died | 21 August 1974 (age 88) Lodi, California, United States |
| Age on Lusitania | 29 |
| Lifeboat | Overturned collapsible |
| Rescued by | trawler |
| Citizenship | British (Welsh) |
| Residence | Bootle, Lancashire, England, United Kingdom |
| Spouse(s) | Sophia ? (? – ?) (Please provide name and dates) |
John Idwal Lewis (1885 – 1974), 29, was Senior Third Officer aboard the Lusitania’s last voyage. He was in charge of lifeboats 1 – 11 on the starboard side. He had served aboard Lusitania since October 1914. During the sinking, he assisted First Officer Arthur Rowland Jones in filling and lowering the lifeboats, although very few lifeboats from his section of the ship got away. Lewis went down with the ship and resurfaced, where he clung onto an overturned collapsible boat to stay afloat. He was rescued by a trawler.
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Early life
Lewis was born on 29 August 1885 and was a native of Portmadoc in North Wales. His first ship was a three-masted barque. Since he stood about 5’6” in stature, it was easy for him to work in small spaces. In 1912, he left sail and entered the world of steamships, working on the Moss Line and Blue Funnel Line. In 1913, he earned his master’s certificate.
Lewis joined Cunard in September 1914 as an intermediate third officer. In October, just a month after he joined the company, he was assigned to Lusitania and would stay with her until her sinking.
Lusitania
He engaged as the Intermediate Third Officer in the Deck Department on board the Lusitania at Liverpool on 12 April 1915 at a monthly rate of pay of £10-0s.-0d. and joined the ship at 7 a.m., on 17 April before she left Merseyside for the last time.
Jones’ duties aboard Lusitania included a daily inspection of the ship every morning at 10:30. There were 6 people in the inspection party, and aside from him, the other members were the Staff Captain, who was in full charge, the senior surgeon, the assistant surgeon, the purser, and the chief steward. The inspection would start from the purser’s office and then go through all the passenger classes and crew spaces, down to the boilers.
Jones remembered that the ship’s funnels had been painted black before Lusitania’s final voyage. Although Sarah Lund would say that the superstructure was painted gray, Lewis insisted that the superstructure was still white.
The morning the Lusitania left Liverpool for the last time, Jones recalled doing a Board of Trade mustering drill just before departure. The lifeboats under his charge would be numbers 1 through 11 on the starboard side. Each crewmember received a metal badge that had the number of their lifeboat on it, and boat lists were posted in three areas around the ship. They were posted in the stewards’ quarters, sailor’s quarters, and firemen’s quarters.
The boats under Jones’ care were on the side that was right up against the quay, so his boats could not be lowered. All the drill required was to swing the boats out, clear of the deck, and swing them back in again. Jones did not know if the port side boats were lowered in the drill.
The last voyage
Departure from New York was delayed by 2 ½ hours due to passengers being transferred from the Cameronia. In Colin Simpson’s Lusitania, published in 1972, it is reported that he was at the head of the main gangway when the liner was loading passengers at New York on the morning of 1st May 1915 and noted that the mood amongst the passengers was unusually subdued, because of the German warning that it was not safe to travel on the Cunarder. Lewis remembered seeing a woman running along the dock just as the gangplank was being raised. The woman shouted, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” and the gangplank was lowered again so the woman could board. Lewis later learned that the woman was second cabin passenger, Alice Middleton.
At sea, the Lusitania had daily lifeboat drills, but not for the passengers. Lewis supervised these drills. Every morning, the crew would muster either lifeboat 13 or 14, depending on which side was the leeward side of the ship. Lewis would order, “Man the boats,” and the sailors would put on their lifejackets and jump in and then jump out again. The lifeboat drill signal was the Lusitania’s siren. The steam whistle would blow a long blast and a series of short blasts. During this time, the pursers looked after the ship’s papers and stewards attended to lifeboat provisions, and the stretcher guard and ambulance guard stood by.
On the morning of 6 May, as Lusitania entered the war zone, the lifeboats were swung out to the level of the collapsible boats, about 2 – 3 feet above the deck.
Lewis also stated that as they entered the war zone, that all the portholes, windows, and doors were closed and darkened. He claimed not to know of any open ports during the Lusitania’s last day, although passengers such as James Brooks, Rita Jolivet, Frederic Gauntlett, Oscar Grab, Charles Lauriat, Isaac Lehmann all stated that practically all of the portholes were open.
The morning of 7 May 1915, the day of the disaster, Lewis started with a 4 am to 8 am shift. He recalled that it was foggy that morning, and then he had a quick breakfast and went to the baggage room, from where he going up and down that morning. Standing on C deck, he could see the weather clearing, but the coast of Ireland still remained under a haze.
Lewis finished his duties around 12:45 and changed for lunch, where he joined First Officer Jones on a portside table in the first class dining saloon. Lewis restated that all the portholes were shut.
Disaster
The band was playing Tipperary, and Lewis was finishing his lunch when he heard something “like a report of a heavy gun about two or three miles away from us” coming from the forward starboard side.
“A few seconds afterwards, whether it was an explosion or not I couldn’t say, but there was a heavy report and a rumbling noise like a clap of thunder… It was accompanied by the sound of broken glass, like glass breaking. That was on the starboard side again, forward of me, but closer than the first one was, further aft that the first one. I stood up and looked around and both of us walked out of the saloon. Of course, we couldn’t run out, there were too many people ahead of us.”
“I should think it would be [the Lusitania was listing] about 10 degrees when I was on the staircase. I went up along the main saloon staircase up to C deck. The only difficulty was that the place was crowded with people ahead of me. I came out on to the C deck on the port side and went up on the boat deck along the outside ladders, the outside staircases.”
Reaching the boat deck, he saw Chief Officer Piper by lifeboat 2 on the port side. Lewis crossed over to the starboard side and saw the land, indicating that Lusitania had swung towards Ireland. Lewis went to the bridge and found Quartermaster Hugh Johnston.
“I sang out to the quartermaster and I said, ‘What is the list on the telltale, on the compass,’ and he told me 15 degrees.”
Second Officer Hefford tossed several lifebelts to Lewis, but he gave them all to others instead of keeping one for himself.
Simpson’s book states that soon after the torpedo strike, down in the engine room, Senior Third Engineer George Little tried to put the engines full astern, on orders from the bridge, with the result that one of the main steam pipes fractured. This blew the top off one of the condensers on the boat deck and nearly decapitated Third Officer Lewis, who was standing nearby.
Lewis went to his assigned boats, 1 – 11 on the starboard side, and saw First Officer Jones there. Lewis notice that lifeboat 1 was already lowered into the water and had only two sailors in it. Lewis did what he could to fill his boats, but almost none got away.
“Well, filled them up with passengers, with people; I don’t know whether they were passengers – I filled it up and lowered it down… The list of the ship would swing the boat out from the edge of the ship… When we had taken the women passengers on to the edge of the collapsible boat to get into it the distance was such that they rather drew back instead of getting in it; we had to use our best judgment to try and get them into the boat. Some were afraid of attempting to go across.”
Lewis stated that he filled his boats until he thought that they were full and lowered them. He did not stop to count. While on deck he also saw a fishing schooner and the coast and wishing that both were nearer so he could make a swim for it.
While lowering one boat that was full, Lewis recounted that he had to stop some men who tried to rush the boat and enter it.
Lewis went forward to fill the forward boats and saw that others were already filling the boats for him. Lewis went aft to help First Officer Jones, where they each took charge of one end of the lifeboat as they lowered it. Lewis then stated that he went back to his own section, going “continuously between no 1. and no 9.”, making sure that they were getting away all right. He states that he lowered lifeboat 9 safely into the water. A woman in the lifeboat yelled to him, “For God’s sake jump.” He told her, “Good-bye and Good luck. I will meet you in Queenstown.”
Whether the lifeboat got away from the ship, Lewis did not know. Lifeboat 9 was not one of the boats that Charles Lauriat saw docked in Queenstown.
Lewis’ last lifeboat was number 3. He said that at the time, very few people were left on deck. The angle of the ship was such that people had to hang onto the handrail on top of one of the deck houses to stand up, “in fact, it took all I could to stand on the deck.”
Lewis saw the water rise to the bridge level. He tried to head aft but missed his footing. He was knee-deep in water then. He caught hold of a collapsible boat. He then saw a tiny gold watch being swept up along the deck and pocketed it.
Lewis climbed on top of the collapsible and was climbing back on to the ship by the rail on the hurricane deck to try to reach the port side and jump from there. He was only halfway across the Lusitania when the ship went down from under him. He was drawn down into the water, and when he surfaced, the entire ship was gone.
He grabbed onto the piece of boat chock. Sometimes he was on top and other times he was beneath it. He made his way to an upturned collapsible boat, only one-third above the water, and got on top of that until a trawler fished him out of the water half an hour later. He arrived in Queenstown and left for England the next afternoon.
After his return to Liverpool, like all surviving crew members, Lewis made a deposition on oath to a Board of Trade official. Most of these have not survived to this day but some have, in facsimile form, written at the time. These are held in The Public Record Office in Richmond, Surrey, England.
Intermediate Third Officer Lewis was eventually officially paid off from the voyage at Liverpool and given the balance of wages owing to him, which amounted to £8-6s-8d., (£8.33p.). In company with all the Lusitania’s crew, whether survived or perished, he was paid up to 8th May, 24 hours after the liner had gone down.
During the liability hearings, lawyers asked him why only two of his lifeboats, 1 and 11, made it to Queenstown. Lewis claimed not to have seen those boats in Queenstown and did not know how many of his lifeboats successfully cleared the ship.
The last surviving officer
During the course of the First World War, Lewis became a chief officer, one of his ships being the Carpathia of Titanic rescue fame. Afterwards, Lewis became a captain and then the assistant marine superintendent of the Cunard-White Star Line, after rival companies Cunard and White Star merged in 1934.
Lewis moved to the United States and applied for naturalization in 1924. At this time, he resided at 880. St. Nicholas Avenue, New York City. He became an American citizen on the 9 May 1925. Lewis married a woman named Sophia, and together they had a son, Henry, and a daughter, Joan. They made their home in New York City, where he was a member of Pyramic Lodge, number 490. The family also vacationed in Inverness, Florida.
Lewis came across a newspaper interview of Junior Third Officer Albert Bestic, in which Bestic claimed to be the last surviving officer. Lewis wrote a newspaper rebuttal, stating that he was not dead, and that the deck officers managed to launch 6 lifeboats and save over 700 people. Lewis also snidely commented that Bestic must have given up on the sea after the Lusitania sinking, “because I never heard of him afterward.”
In 1935, the 20th anniversary of the sinking, Lewis had a reunion with several crewmembers who survived the Lusitania disaster. The reunion was held in his office at the New York Cunard-White Star building. Present were Richard Wylie, now assistant marine engineer of Cunard-White Star, William Ewart Gladstone Jones, now chief electrical engineer of the Scythia, Alexander Duncan, now the chief officer of the Berengaria, and Albert Charles Dunn, now chief engineer of the Bantria. They drank a silent toast to all their shipmates who were lost with the Lusitania.
Lewis retired in 1950 and moved to California in 1956, as Henry and Joan had both moved there. In 1960, he took up residence in Stockton. In his retirement, Lewis often sketched ship and worked in his garden. Lewis died on 21 August 1974 at the Lodi Convalescent Home, then eight days short of this 89th birthday, the last surviving officer of the last voyage of the Lusitania.
Links of interest
Lest We Forget Part 2 – As the Lusitania Went Down
John Idwal Lewis at the Merseyside Maritime Museum
Contributors
Jim Kalafus, USA
Peter Kelly, Ireland
Ellie Moffat, UK
Michael Poirier, USA
References
Kalafus, Jim & Michael Poirier ( 2005 ) “Lest We Forget Part 2 : As The Lusitania Went Down” Gare Maritime. Online. (ref: #4701, accessed 5 September 2012) <http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/lusitania-lest-we-forget-2.html>.
I’m researching into the Welsh conections on the Lusitania. Mr Lewis’ family comes from from near where I was brought up and I was wondering whether I could paint a picture of his life after Lusitania? I know he left service after the Lusitania, or pretty soon after, because his trail goes cold. Does anyone know if some of his family are still alive. Any information would be greatly appreciated
Many thanks
Ifan