Champagne, Five-Day Crossings… and the Day the Lusitania Sank
How speed, modern life, and one American heiress turned a public disaster into a private memorial
I finished Dead Wake by Erik Larson with that very particular feeling one gets after an exceptionally good book: a sort of stunned stillness, followed by the urge to press it urgently into the hands of friends. It is meticulous, propulsive, and quietly devastating — a book about minutes, misjudgements, and modernity at speed.
And yet, what stopped me cold was not the torpedo itself, nor even the terrible arithmetic of the sinking, but a family whose name I already knew.
The sinking of the RMS Lusitania has been written about endlessly — as outrage, as catalyst, as tragedy — but for Alberta Sturges Montagu (later ninth Countess of Sandwich), it was something far more intimate. Among the civilian dead were Paul Crompton, his wife, their six children, and their nurse — the largest family aboard the Lusitania. One of those children was named Alberta. Alberta Sturges Montagu was her godmother.
