Two brothers, John and Percy Barrow Moss, are commemorated on a joint gravestone at Brighton’s Bear Road cemetery. Both were victims of WWI — but in very different circumstances.
Born in Crosby, Liverpool, the Moss brothers (like many Liverpudlians) went to sea: John worked for the commercial Cunard line, while Percy joined the Navy’s Volunteer Reserve, Drake Battalion, and became an Able Seaman. By 1915, the Volunteer Reserve had become part of the Royal Naval Division. Meanwhile, John Moss had become a waiter in the second-class accommodation on the passenger liner that was the pride of Cunard: RMS Lusitania.
On Saturday May 1 1915, the ship left from pier 54 in New York harbour, bound for Liverpool via Queenstown, Ireland. On board were 601 second-class passengers, squeezed into accommodation designed for 460; they were mostly doctors, businessmen, military men, clergymen and their families. Most of them were British, but they also included American, Dutch, Russian, Italian, Belgian, Spanish, Argentinian and French nationals. One of the passengers was Professor Ian Holbourn, who co-founded the Ruskin College for working men; another was Dr Ralph McCredy, Ireland Olympic cyclist.
The second-class accommodation was almost as luxurious as that of first-class: the lounge was 42 ft x 40 feet, and fitted out in mahogany and the dining room was neo-Georgian, 60 feet long and as wide as the ship itself. On May 7, at around 2.10pm, the Lusitania was 8 miles off the Old Head of Kinsale; the ship’s orchestra was playing The Blue Danube, and passengers were still finishing lunch. Due to the excessive numbers on board, the 60 ft second-class restaurant was overbooked and meals had to be taken in two sittings, with several tables put in the hallways. Because of the war, some items not being served by John Moss and his fellow waiters with the six-course lunch were German lagers and mineral waters, and Austrian claret. At that moment, the ship was struck on its starboard side by a torpedo from the German submarine U-20 hit; it sank in 18 minutes.
Many passengers were killed or seriously injured when the lifeboat at station no.2 was launched and, loaded with 50 passengers, swung inboard, crushing everyone on the boat deck. The same tragic accident occurred at lifeboat stations 4, 6, 8 and 10. Lifeboat no.16 was smashed to pieces when, fully loaded, it slid down the ship’s side. Only six lifeboats out of a total of 48 survived. The final casualty figures were 1,201 men, women and children dead out of 1,962 people on board; out of 129 children on board, only 35 survived. The body of John Moss was not known to be recovered, but a number of unidentified male victims were recovered and buried in mass graves in Queenstown (now Cobh). Of the 21 second-class waiters, only nine survived.
In 1916, a bottle was fished out of the north Atlantic: it contained a final message sent before the Lusitania sank. The message read: ‘Still on deck with a few people. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast. The orchestra is still playing bravely. Some men near me are praying with a priest. The end is near. Maybe this note will…’
Two years later, RNVR Drake Battalion was involved in action in France and Belgium. Percy Barrow Moss was wounded in action and brought to the Kitchener Military Hospital, Brighton, where he died on May 11 1917, aged 23, of ‘primary septic pneumonia, secondary septic shell wounds (right forearm, right and left thigh)’. He was buried in Bear Rd cemetery, and an inscription to his brother was added to the headstone — a belated but permanent marker to one of the ‘unmarked’.
To find out more about how WWI affected Brighton and its people, read Death and the City, http://deathandthecity.com/.
For more about Rose Collis, visit www.rosecollis.com
