Last Survivors
The last American survivor was Barbara McDermott (born Barbara Winifred Anderson in Connecticut on June 15, 1912, to Roland Anderson and Emily Pybus). Her father worked as a draftsman for an ammunitions factory in southwestern Connecticut. He was unable to accompany his wife and daughter on the Lusitania as World War I had created high demands for ammunition manufacturing at the factory where he worked. Barbara recalled being in the ship's dining room eating dessert when the torpedo hit. She remembered holding onto her spoon as she saw fellow passengers running about the badly damaged ship. In the midst of chaos, Barbara was separated from her mother and loaded into Lifeboat No. 15. Barbara later learned that her mother fell into the ocean, but was rescued and placed into the same lifeboat as her daughter. Neither Barbara nor her mother was seriously injured. After their rescue, Barbara and her mother traveled to Darlington, England to live with Barbara's maternal grandmother. Barbara's mother died on March 22, 1917 at the age of 28. Two years later, Barbara left England and traveled back to the United States aboard the Mauretania and arrived in New York City on December 26, 1919. Barbara died on April 12, 2008 in Wallingford, Connecticut at the age of 95 leaving Audrey Lawson-Johnston the last-living survivor of the RMS Lusitania disaster.
Audrey Lawson-Johnston (née Pearl) was born in New York City on February 15, 1915. She was the fourth of six children born to Major Frank Warren Pearl (26 August 1869 – 2 January 1952) and Amy Lea (née Duncan; died 1 February 1964). She was only three months old when she boarded the Lusitania in New York with her parents, three siblings and two nurses. She and her brother Stuart were saved by their English nursemaid Alice Lines, then 18 years old, who jumped off the boatdeck and escaped in a lifeboat. Her parents also survived, but her sisters Amy and Susan were lost. Pearl married Hugh de Beauchamp Lawson-Johnston, second son of George Lawson Johnston, 1st Baron Luke on 18 July 1946. They had three children, and lived in Melchbourne, Bedfordshire. Hugh was High Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1961. Johnston died on 11 January 2011.
Read more about this topic: Audrey Lawson-Johnston
Famous quotes containing the word survivors:
“I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don’t know how to handle their parents. They see that their parents are traumatized: they scream and don’t react normally.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)