Barbara McDermott

Apr 22 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

SHE was the penultimate survivor of Cunard liner, Lusitania, and could vividly recall the moments before it sank with the loss of 1,200 lives.

Barbara McDermott was just three and in the middle of eating her lunch when the ship was torpedoed by the German on April 12, 1915.

The vessel, en route from New York to Queenstown (now Cobh) in southern Ireland, sank within 18 minutes, just eight miles off the Irish coast.

Many of the crew lost in the disaster were from Liverpool, the home port of the liner, and its sinking led to riots in the city directed against Germans.

Barbara Anderson, as she was then, was a month short of her third birthday and one of 747 ushered into a lifeboat who managed to survive.

Born in Connecticut, US, where her father worked as a draughtsman for a munitions factory, Barbara was with her pregnant mother, Emily, six days into their passage across the Atlantic to visit her English grandmother in Darlington, Co Durham, when the vessel was sunk by a U-20 submarine.

She clearly recalled being in the ship’s upper level dining room, eating her pudding when the torpedo hit at 2.28pm, and clutching her spoon as she watched other passengers scurrying about below.

The child became separated from her mother, but purser William Harkness saw the frightened girl at the ship’s rail near the stern.

“Mother was nearby,” she remembered, “but he scooped me up and we both fell together into a boat which was lowering.”

She found her in lifeboat 15 – where her mother explained she had been rescued after falling into the Atlantic.

The disaster was among the factors which drew American into the First World War.

In adult life, Barbara became an assistant at a Connecticut department store, later transferring to the personnel office as a manager.

She is survived by a son and a daughter.

The last living survivor of the Lusitania disaster is now thought to be Audrey Lawson-Johnston, aged 93.

Barbara McDermott, Lusitania survivor; born June 15, 1912, died April 12, 2008.