Remembering Gregg Bemis #GreggBemis #Lusitania #RMSLusitania

On 21 May 2020, Gregg Bemis, the owner of the Lusitania wreck, passed away at age 91 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States. He was due to celebrate his 92nd birthday the following week. His ship, the Lusitania was torpedoed by the German submarine U-20 in 1915, resulting in the deaths of almost 1,200 people aboard. The disaster turned American public opinion against Germany and helped bring the United States into World War I.

Education and experience

Bemis was a businessman and millionaire, who, in addition to owning the Lusitania, served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. He graduated with a economics degree from Stanford (’50) (after switching out of psychology) and a MBA from Harvard (’54). He credited his time in Korea as being his “second education.” For the May/June 2015 edition of Stanford Magazine, he told the story of having to replace a subordinate who abused South Korean workers, and that bettering their treatment started attracting South Korean volunteers essential to American efforts.

Bemis was born and raised in Boston. His father, F. Gregg Bemis, was one of the creators of the rules governing modern-day yacht racing and is honored in the National Sailing Hall of Fame. The Bemis Family had a place in Cohasset, Massachusetts, where every summer, young Gregg was in and on the water. From his experience, he gained a respect for the power of the sea. In the late ’60s, Bemis sailed a 40-foot boat across the Atlantic from Portugal to the Caribbean island of Grenada. “I don’t sail anymore, though,” he said, “It’s like golf, I only play if I’m invited.” He took up scuba diving in the late 1960s, around the time he became involved with the Lusitania.

A venture capitalist, Bemis left his last corporate job in 1979, at the age of 51, to focus full time on private investments. He said that the corporate America’s “cult of youth” made it difficult for him to find a comparable job, so he decided to work on himself. A 2004 Harvard Business School story stated that Bemis had participated in over 40 start ups. He ascribed his success and his ability to evolve with the times to his Protestant work ethic. 

He also had an interest in public service, having made three unsuccessful bids for the New Mexico legislature as a Republican in a Democratic district. 

Acquiring the Lusitania

Bemis first acquired joint ownership in the Lusitania in 1967. “He got involved by accident, really, doing so as a favor for a friend,” says Padraig Begley, a member of the Old Head Signal Tower and Lusitania Museum Heritage Company in Kinsale, Ireland.

Initially, Bemis’ interest in the Lusitania was to make money, to salvage the ship’s precious cargo of copper, bronze, and silver for scrap. After the Lusitania sank, the Liverpool War Risk Insurance Association (a British government operation) assumed ownership by paying off the owners’ insurance claim. In 1967, it held a silent auction, drawing two bidders: British intelligence and an ex-U.S. Navy diver, John Light, who won with a 1,000-pound bid ($2,400 1967 US dollars).

From 1960 to 1962, Light had made a name for himself by diving the 300 feet down to the Lusitania wreck 42 times. With only basic scuba gear and primitive gas-mixing technology available at the time, he suffered severe nitrogen narcosis on his dives. After his purchase, Light needed funding to lead a salvage operation and entered into a contract with businessman George Macomber, who recruited Bemis. Bemis earned a one-third share of the ship as collateral. However, Light’s venture soon collapsed. Bemis and Macomber assumed ownership of the Lusitania in the liquidation.

Renewed interest

Busy with his life as a corporate executive, for years, Bemis had almost forgot about his 50 percent ownership of the wreck. But by 1982, diving technology had improved dramatically, and he hoped to start a new salvage operation. Over the years, Bemis had grown to appreciate the Lusitania‘s story as something much more than a business venture. He became particularly invested in the questions: why did the ship sink so quickly? and was there a cover up? 

Macomber, wary of the liability and heavy financial losses already incurred, willingly gave his 50 percent to Bemis in 1982 for the grand total of $1. As Bemis said in the May/June 2015 edition of Stanford Magazine, the venture was “a personality failure on my part. I like to stick to things, I like to see them through to the end.”

And stick with the Lusitania he did. Deep-sea diver Eoin McGarry said of Bemis’s tenacity to uncover the mysteries of the Lusitania, “He always wanted to find out what caused the second explosion on the Lusitania, and the mantle we have to take on is to find that out.” 

Declassified files from the British Ministry of Defense and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office expressed worry that Bemis’s 1982 expedition would actually find evidence that the second explosion was caused by a secret cargo of munitions, despite Britain’s official stance that the Lusitania did not carry any such cargo. German claims that the British were using women and children as human shields to transport munitions, if confirmed, would strain British-American relations, especially since the sinking had drawn the United States into World War I. Furthermore, the British Government feared that any further unexploded munitions could “literally blow up on us,” causing a different kind of international incident should Americans be injured or killed on the wreck, and that American survivors and relatives of those who died in the Lusitania sinking could sue the British Government for damages.

Eventually, in 2008, McGarry found four million rounds of small-arms ammunition on board, which, at the time of the Lusitania‘s last voyage, was permitted to be carried on board. They were not the large explosives that Bemis had hoped or that the British Government had feared they would find.

Sole ownership and legal battles

Despite the cheap initial cost of ownership, Bemis had to fight decades of expensive legal battles in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States to verify his ownership. Bemis believed the Lusitania wreck to be his property and, thus, that there should be no government interference. His court victory over the British Government led to Bemis alone owning the wreck but not the cargo or personal effects. Anything that he salvaged would belong to him unless anyone else claimed the property, but Irish authorities disagreed.

The trouble began in 1994 when Bemis denied a British team of technical divers, led by Polly Tapson, access to the ship. Despite Bemis filing a lawsuit to stop the dive, Tapson and her team went ahead anyway. Bemis believed that it was out of spite that Tapson leaked to a reporter that she had seen the lead tubes rumored to contain saloon passenger Sir Hugh Percy Lane‘s lost art collection and that Bemis would try to steal them.

This news attracted the attention of the then arts minister and future Irish President, Michael D. Higgins, who subsequently placed an underwater heritage order on the Lusitania wreck in 1995. Higgins considered the wreck a grave that required both protection and “regulated” and “transparent” investigation. Thus began 12 years of litigation between Bemis and the Irish government, holding up his proposals to analyze the wreck and film a documentary at the site. The case reached the Irish Supreme Court, which, in 2007, awarded Bemis the right to access the wreck, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Irish Government. Even so, Bemis still needed permission and licenses through the Irish bureaucracy to conduct expeditions.

In 2014, President Higgins reaffirmed his declaration that the Lusitania was “a grave” and cautioned against excavating it. In February 2015, a representative of the Irish Department of Arts and Heritage stated in the Irish Independent, “the department’s view is that the conditions attached to Mr. Bemis’ license are no more onerous than is absolutely necessary to protect a wreck of this magnitude.”

Exploring the wreck

In 1990, Bemis invited Dr. Robert Ballard, famous for discovering the wreck of the Titanic, to conduct research on the Lusitania. The result was a 1993 National Geographic expedition and the documentary Last Voyage of the Lusitania, where they explored the wreck in a mini-sub. Bemis strongly disagreed with Ballard’s theory that coal dust caused the second explosion, calling it a “crazy idea.” 

“When Ballard went down, we discovered to our horror that the Lusitania was laying on its starboard side, the side the torpedo penetrated,” Bemis told Stanford Magazine. “The only way to get conclusive evidence [of what caused the second explosion] is to get inside the ship, and we can only do that with brute strength.”

Bemis claimed in 2014 that onerous licensing conditions were frustrating attempts to establish the cause of the second explosion, though Ireland’s Department of Culture denied the claim. To this day, with the wreck collapsing in on itself, no remote-operated vehicles have explored the inside the wreck to conclusively determine what happened.

In 2011, Bemis led another research expedition with National Geographic, leading to the documentary Dark Secrets of the Lusitania.

To kiss the Lusitania

In June 2004, Bemis made an unofficial visit to the wreck for a record-setting 287-foot dive. Technical diving, or “tec” diving, exceeds normal scuba diving depth limits of about 130 feet and is extremely dangerous. Divers risk permanent injury and death (the Andrea Doria, at a similar depth, has claimed 19 divers since her sinking in 1956). Then aged 76, Bemis trained for 18 months in waters off Florida in a 240-foot-deep “sinkhole” to prepare for his death-defying dive. He carefully researched the wreck site’s swiftly changing currents, the lack of visibility, the cold temperatures (about 45 degrees Fahrenheit/7.2 degrees Celsius) and the mixture of nitrogen, helium, and oxygen he would need to breathe at that depth. As for why he wanted to do dive in person, his words were:

I finally said, ‘Dammit, it’s my boat, and I am going to go down and give it a big kiss… It’s beautiful down there. You’re weightless, like the astronauts, so you move around in an environment that’s very mystical and spooky. The only noise is the sound of your own breathing.’

As for what he saw down there, he related:

It was very dark. There was virtually no light. Visibility was about 25 feet, but the stuff down there is absolutely beautiful. I could see fixtures from the ship, and railings. Nearly everything there should be brought up and preserved. It was just beautiful, beautiful.

No other diver his age had ever gone so deep. But at that depth, he could only stay for five minutes before he had to return to the surface. The dive granted him celebrity status among the tec diving community.

Costs

Exploring the ship has not been cheap, costing several hundred thousand dollars. Concerning the amount of money he has had to invest into exploring the Lusitania, he said, “I find it interesting that when a plane goes down we spend tens of millions of dollars to find and investigate it. Then there’s a shipwreck that has 1,200 victims, and no government money is available to support any research into it.”

To cover costs, Bemis auctioned off thousands of recovered items through the salvage firm Bemis partnered with in the 1980s. He regretted being unable to prevent some of those sales. Of the three salvaged ship’s brass propellers, one was purchased by Liverpool’s Merseyside Maritime Museum for 20,000 pounds; another went to a Saudi oil magnate before being passed on to the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation in Menlo Park, California, and then to Harlan Crow, a Dallas developer who (as of 2020) now displays it at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas; the third is widely reported to have been melted down to make sets of commemorative golf clubs.

Beliefs about the disaster

Bemis believed in a government cover-up over the Lusitania and supported Colin Simpson’s thesis that the UK used the Lusitania to carry munitions and planned for Germany sink her to embroil the United States in World War I. He also dismisses Bailey and Ryan’s counterargument that Captain Turner was at fault for exposing the ship to danger and that the second explosion came from the boilers, not illicit ammunition.

In his interview with Stanford Magazine, he said, “There were some things that were fortuitous, like where Schwieger’s torpedo struck the ship, but other things seem planned.”

He points to Churchill’s correspondence with Runciman on the importance of embroiling the United States in the war, and the U-boat being in the right spot to encounter the Lusitania, and his belief that the U-20 must have known where the Lusitania would be traveling through to target the ship. Bemis believed that Churchill being out of the country when the ship was sunk was suspicious (though historians Beesly and Preston argue the opposite, that Churchill, being a micromanager, would not have left someone else execute such a plot), as well as the recall of the cruiser Juno that was meant to provide an escort to Lusitania when she reached Ireland.

(Editor’s note: Lusitania was actually faster than many naval ships, and Juno‘s escort would have slowed her down, making her an easier target and justify any German attacks. See also: the slower Aquitania outsteaming her escort in World War II and being told “Your fine speed requires little protection.”)

Of Captain Turner, Bemis stated, “He had secret orders that could only be read once out in the water. He never revealed those orders in court. He was a total gentleman. Turner was not incompetent. I think he was an excellent man.” Bemis hoped to locate the captain’s safe containing secret orders that would exonerate him.

MS Estonia

Bemis was also interested in the MS Estonia, a cruise ferry that sank in the Baltic Sea in 1994. This deadliest peacetime shipwreck in European waters killed 852 people. The official report concludes that heavy waves caused the bow door lock to fail, exposing the vehicle deck to the open sea. However, Bemis dived the wreck in 2000, and concluded from the evidence he gathered that foul play was involved. His dive was unauthorized, and as a result, Sweden had a warrant for his arrest.

Bequest and legacy

In his last decade, Bemis made preparations for what should happen to the Lusitania wreck after his passing. He made sure that the Lusitania ‘s ownership would not transfer to the Irish Government upon his death.

“I’ve talked to my children about it, and they love the project, but none of them want to take on the hassle. No one else has volunteered. But I do have it set up in my will that my ownership should be transferred to a nonprofit,” he told Stanford Magazine.

In late 2014, Bemis presented a formal proposition to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. He thought the Hoover Institution’s specialization in World War I history would have been a great fit. In the end, however, he willed the wreck not to Stanford but to the Old Head Signal Tower and Lusitania Museum Heritage Company.

Con Hayes of the Old Head of Kinsale Museum Committee recalled, “Gregg has been ill for a number of years but he was quite determined to come to Ireland last year [2019] to formally hand over the ownership of wreck to us and that’s something for which we will be eternally grateful.”

His visit to Kinsale in 2019 to sign over the ownership of the wreck in a formal ceremony would be his last.

Bemis was very invested in opening the museum. He believed Ireland was not making the most out of the Lusitania‘s value to attract tourists and wished to establish a suitable museum for artifacts and to encourage visiting divers. He was quoted in BreakingNews.ie saying, “I’ve come to realize that, at almost 91 years old there is only so much more I can do to further this project and I think because of the Lusitania’s part in history, it’s very important that it be done properly and we get all the artifacts we can from the wreck to put in the museum planned for here.”

The wreck was held in escrow until his death, when the museum’s ownership would then be activated. Architects are working on plans for the museum, though the current COVID-19 pandemic has led to several major fundraisers for the cause being cancelled.

A tribute from Culture & Heritage Minister Josepha Madigan described Bemis as “a man of vision, fortitude and determination, who enriched every initiative he supported… He will be missed by his friends in Kinsale.”

Con Hayes said Bemis’s generosity would “not be forgotten.”

Padraig Begley, a member of the Old Head Signal Tower and Lusitania Museum Heritage Company, said of Bemis, “He is best described as a great friend and benefactor to Kinsale.”

References
Alvarez, Joshua. “What Really Happened?” Stanford Magazine, May/June 2015. <https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-really-happened>. Accessed 31 May 2020.

McTague, Tom. “Revealed: British officials feared sunk WWI cruise[sic] ship Lusitania could ‘literally blow up on us’ during 1982 salvage mission.” Daily Mail. 1 May 2014. <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2617701/Revealed-How-British-officials-feared-secret-sunk-Lusitania-spark-diplomatic-crisis-US.html>. Accessed 1 June 2020.

O’Neill, Kevin. “Lusitania wreck donor, Gregg Bemis, hailed as friend and benefactor of Kinsale.” Irish Examiner, 22 May 2020. <https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/lusitania-wreck-donor-gregg-bemis-hailed-as-friend-and-benefactor-of-kinsale-1001146.html>. Accessed 27 May 2020.

“Retirement’s Changing Face.” Harvard Business School Alumni, 1 December 2004. <https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/stories/Pages/story-bulletin.aspx?num=2382>. Accessed 31 May 2020.

Rogers, Paul. “How Deep Is His Love.” Stanford Magazine, March/April 2005. <https://stanfordmag.org/contents/how-deep-is-his-love>. Accessed 29 May 2020.

Siggins, Lorna. “‘The captain of the ship has gone’: Gregg Bemis, owner of Lusitania, dies.” Breakingnews.ie, 22 May 2020. <https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/the-captain-of-the-ship-has-gone-gregg-bemis-owner-of-lusitania-dies-1001029.html>. Accessed 29 May 2020.

Telegraph Obituaries. “Gregg Bemis, flamboyant millionaire who bought the wreck of the Lusitania – obituary.” The Telegraph, 25 May 2020. <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2020/05/25/gregg-bemis-flamboyant-millionaire-bought-wreck-lusitania/>. Accessed 27 May 2020.