RMS Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915, sank killing 1,198 passengers and crew.  Among them were three Emmanuel members. On the following Sunday our fourth rector, the Rev. Elwood Worcester, lamented their deaths in his sermon “The Issues of Life“:

It does not seem to me natural to let this day pass without allusion to the terrible event of which our hearts are full. In this church we are not merely a congregation, we are a large family. No one suffers alone, and the fate of several of our beloved people brings the whole dreadful tragedy very near to us.… Among those whose deaths are most personal to us are Mr. and Mrs. Stewart S. Mason and Mr. Edwin W. Friend. Mrs. Mason, Leslie Hawthorne Lindsey, was the daughter of our friends and parishioners, Mr. and Mrs. William B. Lindsey of Bay State Road.

William & Leslie Hawthorne Lindsey on her wedding day at Emmanuel

William devoted the last years of his life to the construction of our Lindsey Chapel in his daughter’s memory.  Please see the Lusitania Resource for biographies of Edwin, Leslie, her husband Stewart.

In November 2012, a year before he died, parishioner and art historian Dr. Samuel (Pen) Cowardin III, donated his painting of the ship, which hangs in our library and is detailed in the image above.

In commemoration of the centennial of the tragedy, authors Len Abrams spoke at after the service on May 3, 2015, about the Lindseys, who appear in his novel  Debris: A Novel of War, Love and the Lusitania.  See also Wikipedia and news analysis on the centennial: for instance, How the Sinking of the Lusitania Heralded an Entirely New Kind of War.

John Shuley & Co. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division