HISTORICALEIGH - Leigh's Link To The Lusitania

August 10, 2015 by Carole Mulroney

Leigh's Link To The Lusitania

Peter Buswell was born in 1888 Canning Town, then part of Essex, and by 1915 was living with his wife and son in Leigh Hall Road. He was a shipping agent for the Anchor Line based in Glasgow, later to be closely allied to the Cunard. Peter's career was to be one of crossing the Atlantic in some of the greatest passenger liners of the day, such as the Aquitania and the Berengaria.

On 22 March 1915 he arrived in New York aboard the Cunard ship, Tuscania and was scheduled to return to Glasgow aboard the Cameronia. For reasons that are not clear the Cameronia was requisitioned on 1 May and so Peter, along with several others, was transferred to the ill-fated Lusitania.

On 7 May, Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-Boat, 11 miles off the southern coast of Ireland inside the declared "zone of war". She sank in just 18 minutes.

The sinking caused huge protests in the US, as 128 Americans were among the dead, and influenced America's eventual declaration of war two years later. It also invigorated the recruitment campaign at home.

Peter Buswell survived the sinking of the Lusitania and continued to travel back and forth across the Atlantic, sometimes taking his wife with him. He lived in Leigh Hall Road until his death in 1945.

Did he ever pass the story of his experiences on to anyone in Leigh?