Miss
JOSEPHINE BRANDELL (BRANDEIS), Saloon Class Passenger
[No Picture Provided]
Josephine Brandell, 22, was an opera singer and had been the leading
lady in the London Opera House's production of Come Over Here
in 1914. Josephine's cabin on the Lusitania was D-30.
During the voyage, she often went around tables during meals to collect
tips for members of the orchestra. She was often in the company of
Charles Frohman, Rita Jolivet, Charles
Klein, Justus Miles Forman, George Vernon,
and Wallace Phillips.
Josephine was present at Charles Frohman's party in his stateroom.
Later, Josephine and Rita were at the ship's concert on the night
of 6 May but did not perform. Instead, they were sitting with "men
friends they had met onboard" (Hickey/Smith, 154).
That night she asked Mabel Crichton to share a cabin as the talk
of submarines had made her rather nervous. The Mabel spent most
of the night trying to calm Josephine. On her way to breakfast the
actress had noticed that some people, so afraid of the submarines, had
gathered their blankets and slept in the lounges. The foghorn also
did not do much to comfort her, making what she described as "a noisy hooting[.]"
Josephine had just finished collecting for the orchestra and was
finishing her lunch with Mabel Crichton, Francis Bertram Jenkins, and Max Schwarz when
the torpedo struck. Upon hearing the explosion, Mabel jumped and exclaimed,
"They have done it!"
Rushing to the staircase to get to the boat deck with Mabel, Josephine
was "simply horrified with fright[.]" As Bertram Jenkins tried
to calm her, Ezekiel Edgar Gorer "put a lifebelt on me . . . and told
me to be brave."
Jenkins and the two women came out on the port side of the boat deck.
He assisted the women into a lifeboat and he had one foot on the
boat when "one of the ropes broke or one of the sailors loosed their hold
and the thing collapsed and went into the water" (Jenkins' testimony).
Josephine Brandell was able to find a floating deck chair in the
water and held on. After the ship went down she clung onto an oar,
and other people in the water asked her whether she had seen their loved
ones. To Josephine, "the cries for mercy, the people drowning and
coming up again . . . were too terrible."
She was in such bad condition when Assistant Purser Harkness pulled
her out of the water that she had been mistaken for dead.
Contributors:
Michael Poirier
Judith Tavares
References:
Hickey, Des and Gus Smith. Seven Days
to Disaster. G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1981.
Preston, Diana. Lusitania: An
Epic Tragedy. Berkeley Books, 2002.
[Back to Saloon Class Passengers] [Lusitania Resource Home]