Charles Gouder, image courtesy British National Archives/Michael Poirier.
Charles Gouder (1889 – 1970), 26, was a waiter aboard the Lusitania‘s last voyage. He survived.
Gouder was born on 5 March 1889 in Malta, then a British territory. The final trip of the Lusitania was his first aboard that ship as a waiter. He recalled the warnings he heard in New York about the Germans planning to sink the ship, but few people took the warning seriously. On 7 May, he had just finished serving lunch and gone to the top deck when the torpedo struck the ship. The following is an excerpt of his account of the sinking:
I was with a mate eating ice cream when we suddenly heard somebody shout, “Look a torpedo,” and I heard a bang.
From later in his account:
People have talked about there being two torpedoes but I only heard one explosion. The stewards weren’t told she was carrying ammunition.
Gouder’s account mentions people running about and screaming and a rush to the lifeboats. He managed to get into a lifeboat, but as it was lowered, one of the ropes became jammed and the lifeboat tipped up.
We had to cling on to the seats like monkeys to stop ourselves falling into the sea and when the line was cleared, the boat crashed into the water. Even then, it didn’t float away. It was attached to the ship by a mooring rope and we found ourselves close to the propellor [sic]. The engines had more or less stopped by the screw was still turning and hitting our boat so I took off my shoes and socks and jumped into the sea.
Gouder recalled the Lusitania listing to starboard and then recovering to an even keel. He thought that the ship might float and swam back to the liner. He grabbed onto a rope but was too weak to climb over the rail, so he fell back into the water.
It was a terrible sight. People were dying all around me but there were so many that you couldn’t really give help. I came across two ladies clinging on to a plank of wood and I managed to paddle it over to an upturned boat.
I looked back at the Lusitania and saw people running up the deck as she went down and I turned my face away in horror. When I glanced again, she had gone.
Gouder and a number of other survivors clung to the overturned boat until they were rescued. When he landed in Queenstown, he only had the shirt and trousers he was wearing. Gouder had been so shaken up by the Lusitania sinking that he did not return to sea for 6 months.
Charles Gouder’s identity certficate. Image credit: British National Archives/Michael Poirier
|
In his later years, Gouder saw a documentary about the sinking of the Lusitania by Granada Television and was deeply moved. The newspaper reported his reaction was “shocked” and that he had “tears in his eyes”. Gouder reflected upon how lucky he was to have been on the top decks and to have known how to swim.
He settled in Gillingham, Kent, England and died at the St. Williams Hospital in Rochester, England on 9 May 1970. He was 82 years of age.
Contributors:
Loren O’Neill (grandson of Charles Gouder), UK
Michael Poirier, USA
My brother and I were ‘extras’ in the movie “The Sinking of the Lusitania”, which was made by Granada TV sometime in the late sixties or early seventies in Cobh (pronounced Cove), formerly Queenstown. I had two roles. First, at the time of the sinking of the Lusitania there were a number of German butchers with butcher shops in Queenstown; when a bunch of Irishmen who were drinking in the local pubs heard of the German sinking of the Lusitania they went crazy and formed gangs and started to smash the butcher shops (where at that time the owners lived above the shops), broke into the premises went upstairs and threw their furniture out through the windows from the upper floors and set fire to the piles on the streets. We auditioned for the leaders of the gangs by competing to see who could shout the loudest. I won the contest so became the leader of one of the gangs. We were all given rocks to start throwing at the premises once we got the order from the director (to start breaking the windows). Typically, some of the guys at the back of the ‘gang’ starting throwing rocks before we got the order and injured some of us at the front line. In any event, it was the only time in my life that I got paid to act like a mob member. The film company had contacted the local ‘labor exchange’ (unemployment department), where my sister worked so nepotism came into play and my brother and I got the parts.
Second part: after the sinking they started to bring the bodies into the dockside at Queenstown and lay them out along the jetty so the bodies could be labeled. My brother and I and all the other extras had to lie on the dockside with our shoes off, and be dead bodies. They came along and put tags on our big toes and numbered us – not as exciting a part as the first part.
It may have been the first we ever heard of the Lusitania as I (certainly) was not a history buff at the time. We waited for years and years expecting to one day see the beginning and end of our movie careers on Granada TV in Ireland but it never happened and I’ve tried over the years to find a copy of the movie but never succeeded.
Now living in California for over 31, and having a much greater interest in history, every now and then I think of searching for that movie but so far no luck. Just seeing this new book “Dead Wake” just published has rekindled my interest so, hopefully I will have more luck this time.
I’m wondering if there will be anything of interest in that area in this new book, which I will order today.