Letter written by LUSITANIA disaster survivor Walter Reinhold Storch to the sister of Mary Nicol.

The letter gives a detailed account of Mary Nicol's last moments on the LUSITANIA, torpedoed by a German u-boat on 7th May 1915. Walter Storch helped Miss Mary Nichol into a lifeboat but the boat soon filled with water. Miss Nichol admitted that she could not swim and was very frightened. The lifeboat capsized and caused confusion and during this he looked for Miss Nichol but saw the poor girl face down in the water, very still, with someone hanging on to her neck under the water. The letter goes on to recount the tragedy with the lifeboat capsizing and righting itself four times in all. Mary was ‘the life and soul of the ship’ and he recalls her sweet singing during the voyage.

Administrative / biographical background
A detailed six-page letter that describes the plight and death of Miss Mary Nichol a second class passenger in the LUSITANIA. The letter was written by Walter Reinhold Storch, a British citizen living in the United States of America, who survived the disaster and whose failed attempts to save Mary Nichol are described in his letter to Nichol’s bereaved sister. The account shows the confusion, chaos and panic during the eighteen minutes it took for the LUSITANIA to sink and the aftermath in which the water was choked with bodies, lifeboats and the detritus of the ship. The desperate situation of those left in the water is demonstrated by Storch’s macabre description of a submerged survivor holding onto Nichol’s neck. It was to be a common tale in the aftermath of the disaster, that the survivors used the dead and dying to remain afloat. It also explains how the ship’s lifeboats – both rigid and collapsible, could not be safely launched. Storch himself describes how he helped to launch lifeboats is such difficult conditions.