Jean “Jeanie” Graham was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, Scotland, in 1848.
She married John Fyfe, who was a cabinet maker and funeral undertaker, on the 31st December 1869 in Paisley, and by the late 1890’s, they resided at 70, High Street, Johnstone, Renfrewshire.
The couple had one son, James, who was a church minister, and who had immigrated to Bath, New Hampshire, in the United States of America. In 1914, Jeanie decided to cross the Atlantic Ocean to visit him.
On the 25th September 1914, she boarded the Sardinian at Glasgow and disembarked in Boston, Massachusetts, almost two weeks later. She then made her way to Bath and spent some months with her son. She also visited Holyoke, Massachusetts.
In the spring of 1915, she made her plans to return home, and booked second cabin passage on the
Lusitania. She left Holyoke by rail at the end of April 1915 and joined the vessel at the Cunard berth at Pier 54 in New York, in time for the liner’s last ever sailing from there, just after mid-day on 1st May 1915. The
Lusitania was scheduled to depart at 10.00 a.m. on that morning, but her sailing was delayed because she had to load cargo and embark passengers and crew from the Anchor Liner
Cameronia which the British Admiralty had requisitioned for service as a troop ship at the end of the previous month.
Then, just six days later, on the afternoon of 7th May 1915, the liner was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of southern Ireland on the afternoon of 7th May by the German submarine
U-20. At that stage of her voyage, she was within twelve to fourteen hours steaming time of the safety of her home port.
Jeanie Fyfe was lucky enough to be counted amongst the survivors of this action and having been rescued from the sea, she was landed at Queenstown, from where, she eventually made it back by sea and rail, to her native home.
A few weeks after the disaster, another second class survivor, Cyril Wallace, wrote to the Cunard Steamship Company, seeking the address of Jennie Fyfe and another Scottish survivor, Robert D. Gray. It can be assumed that they became acquainted during the course of the voyage, and may have been rescued together.
One of the second cabin passengers who was killed, and whose body was never recovered from the sea and identified afterwards, was Richard Preston Prichard, who originally came from Ramsgate in Kent. In an attempt to learn more of his fate, the Prichard family first went to Queenstown and scoured the mortuaries there and his brother Mostyn printed and published posters seeking information about him. Mrs. Prichard then wrote to many surviving passengers and crew members seeking information. One of these was Jeanie Fyfe, and it wasn’t until the 20th March 1916, that she felt well enough to reply to Mrs. Prichard. Her spelling and punctuation was not very good, so corrections have been made to make her correspondence more legible. She briefly gave an account of her own experience: -
… I received your letter regarding your dear son. You must excuse me for not answering your letter as I am so dreadfully nervous since my dreadful experience in the Lusitania that I really could not settle to sit down to write to you. I will never be the same. It is an unforgettable experience. My husband has got a nervous shock & not been able to work since. He got such a shock when he heard about it being torpedoed and its loss that I don’t think he will ever get over it. I am terribly sorry that I can’t give you any information regarding your dear son or else willingly I would do so. I have lost my memory since. It is gradually coming back. I did not know I was in the water until the following day, a gentleman told me I was in the water 12 minutes, is not a wonder I was spared & and so many young ones went down. I am 66 years of age, …
Whether or not the ordeal she had been through was a contributing factor will never be known, but just over two years later, on the 3rd June 1917, Jeanie Fyfe died in Johnstone. She was aged 68 years.
Scotland Select Marriages 1561 – 1910, 1881 Census of Scotland, 1891 Census of Scotland, 1901 Census of Scotland, Massachusetts Passenger Lists 1820 – 1963, Cunard Records, Daily Record, Dundee Advertiser, Liverpool Record Office, IWM GB62, PRO BT 100/345, UniLiv D92/2/244, Graham Maddocks, Geoff Whitfield, Michael Poirier, Jim Kalafus, Cliff Barry, Paul Latimer, Norman Gray.
Copyright © Peter Kelly.