Vitals

John Hannah as Ian Holbourn, English-born professor, writer, and Scottish laird

RMS Lusitania in the North Atlantic Ocean, off the Irish coast, May 1915

Film: Sinking of the Lusitania: Terror at Sea
(Original title: Lusitania: Murder on the Atlantic)
Air Date: May 12, 2007
Director: Christopher Spencer
Costume Designer: Diana Cilliers

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

110 years ago today on the afternoon of Friday, May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was steaming east toward its destination port of Liverpool when a German U-boat fired a torpedo that struck the Cunard ship on its starboard side. Less than 20 minutes later, the grand 787-foot-long ship was on its way to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in a disaster that would claim the lives of nearly 1,200 of its 1,960 passengers and crew.

Although the Lusitania was indeed a passenger liner, the Imperial German Embassy had just issued an official warning that any ship flying the flag of England or her allies was subject to a German attack. This open statement of aggression from the German government has resulted in lingering conspiracies that the British government had intentionally sailed the Lusitania through dangerous waters to provoke a German attack and lure the United States into war. Though these theories have been generally discredited, the deaths of 128 Americans who were aboard the liner has been cited as a significant factor in the U.S. ultimately entering World War I against Germany.

Unlike the famous sinking of the RMS Titanic three years earlier, the Lusitania victims were less determined by chance than a mix of luck and “survival of the fittest”, with the odds favoring able-bodied swimmers who were either on deck or able to quickly reach it during the 18 minutes that it took the liner to founder.

Despite the drama, scale, and significance of its sinking that took 1,197 lives, the Lusitania disaster has yet to be prominently portrayed on screen, save for a docudrama that first aired on the Discovery Channel in May 2007. Originally titled Lusitania: Murder on the Atlantic, the 90-minute production’s recognizable cast includes Kenneth Cranham as the ship’s captain William Turner and John Hannah as Ian Holbourn, an Anglo-Scotsman professor who was returning to his home on the remote Shetland island of Foula after a lecture tour of the United States. Missing his own sons who were at home with his wife, Holbourn befriended the homesick 12-year-old Avis Dolphin (Madeleine Garrood), a fellow second-class passenger.

“Holbourn, who was a cautious, sensible man as well as a kind one, ‘thought that everyone should know how to put their lifebelts on and suggested this to a number of passengers,'” author Diana Preston describes in Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy, her nonfiction volume that drove much of the docudrama’s narrative. “He told Avis all about his beloved island—just three and a half miles long and half a mile wide and so remote that it took four days to reach from Edinburgh… he had an extraordinary talent for storytelling, and he made the shy, homesick child laugh with his quirky tales of the Fogey bogeyman.”

Shortly after U-20’s torpedo struck Lusitania, Holbourn helped the girl get into a life-jacket and a lifeboat, but in the chaos of the evacuation, Avis’ lifeboat overturned into the sea—illustrating another major difference from the Titanic sinking where being lowered in a lifeboat ensured survival while Lusitania‘s lifeboats could offer no similar guarantee.

“Against all odds, Avis Dolphin had managed to surface, choking and sputtering,” writes Preston. “She owed her life to the fact that Professor Holbourn had tied on her life jacket correctly.”

After seeing Avis’ lifeboat capsize, Holbourn leapt into the sea to help her but became entangled among the bodies and wreckage that fell from the sinking ship. Luckily, both Ian Holbourn and Avis Dolphin were among the 763 saved, and they remained lifelong friends until his death in 1935.

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What’d He Wear?

Though it’s unlikely that this made-for-TV docudrama had a large budget (and wouldn’t have reserved much of it for wardrobe, given the scale of the disaster necessary to portray), costume designer Diana Cilliers did an excellent job representing the fashions of 1915 while also incorporating Ian Holbourn’s heritage and personality into the character’s clothing. Aside from full evening dress at dinner, John Hannah’s depiction of Holbourn exclusively wears Norfolk suits.

Defined as a loosely cut tweed jacket with vertical box pleats and a belted waist, the Norfolk jacket grew fashionable in the late 19th century on the grounds at Sandringham House in Norfolk, where Edward VII—then Prince of Wales—popularized this ruggedly refined style among his fellow sportsmen. By dressing him in this smart and classic country attire, Cilliers draws the contrast between the more grounded Holbourn and wealthier passengers like Alfred Vanderbilt. The Norfolk jackets also reflect Holbourn’s English origins and his pastoral calling as laird of Foula.

Holbourn boards Lusitania in a tan woolen tweed Norfolk jacket, styled in the conventional manner with vertical box pleats down the front and back, between the straight chest yokes and the semi-belted waist. The single-breasted front closes with four low-contrasting tan buttons, with the lowest positioned directly over the waist-belt, matching the two smaller vestigial buttons on each cuff. A single vent splits the back of the skirt up to the waist. The only outer pockets are the two flapped bellows pockets over the hips.

The jacket is part of a complete suit with matching knickerbockers—the roomy, knee-length breeches favored for sportswear through this era. Holbourn wears walnut-brown leather cap-toe oxford ankle boots with knee-high tan wool socks, specifically designed to fully and snugly cover his calves by extending up from the shoes and covering the bottoms of his knickerbockers.

Holbourn typically wears white cotton shirts, detailed with a point collar—which would have likely been detachable in 1915—and squared single cuffs, secured with cuffs. He boards the Lusitania wearing a beige butterfly-shaped bow tie with black diamonds connected by a taupe-brown geometric print, but he later changes into a simpler tan straight tie knotted in a four-in-hand.

“Why are you wearing that hat?” Avis asks of Holbourn’s fawn-colored tam o’shanter. “It’s a Scottish hat. I live in Scotland,” he replies. These bonnets emerged as common Scottish headgear by the 16th century but received their colloquial name centuries later, referencing the eponymous hero of Robert Burns’ 1790 narrative poem.

“Tammies” are distinguished by their wide and round crowns made of soft wool, typically detailed by a wool pom-pom (“toorie”) at the top and fitted around the wearer’s head with a fabric band that often ties in the back. Holbourn’s woolen tammie follows these traditional style points, embellished on the left side with a ceremonial brown cockade.

Nearly a week later on May 7th, Holbourn is wearing a darker brown twill Norfolk suit when the Lusitania is struck by a torpedo and begins to sink. This jacket is similarly styled to his tan jacket, except that the belt is more separated in the front with a two-button closure and the sleeves are finished with banded three-button cuffs.

With this darker suit on the day of the sinking, Holbourn rigs his white shirt with a detachable standing collar and a burgundy silk day cravat in a repeating gold rectangular print.

On both of his shipboard Norfolk jackets, Holbourn keeps his pocket watch in the right-hand pocket, connected to a silver chain strung “double Albert”-style across his jacket with a shield-shaped fob hanging down from where the chain is hooked through below the second buttonhole. The silver-toned watch is a “hunter”-style, with a protective cover that flips open to reveal the dial. He evidently loses it during the sinking.

During the subsequent inquiries into the sinking back on land, Holbourn continues wearing Norfolk suits but in a more businesslike dark indigo-blue woolen fabric befitting the courtroom settings, though a gentleman more concerned with decorum would have still dressed up in at least a worsted lounge suit. (My understanding is that Holbourn was something of an affable eccentric, who would not have felt as bound to strict sartorial expectations.)

This indigo Norfolk jacket follows the design of the brown jacket with its separated two-button self belt, three-button banded cuffs, and dramatically roped shoulders. He again wears white shirts with turndown collars, though these have a wider spread than the white shirt he wore with the tan Norfolk suit. He wears a dark rust-colored four-in-hand tie for the initial hearings but has changed into a lavender cravat by the end.

John Hannah wears a simple gold wedding ring, which may be his own or it could be prop jewelry to represent the real Holbourn’s 1904 marriage to Marion Constance Archer-Shepherd.

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How to Get the Look

In a Scottish tam o’shanter with Norfolk jackets and matching knickerbockers, Ian Holbourn’s sporty attire aboard Lusitania reflects his background and contemporary fashions.

• Tan woolen tweed Norfolk jacket with single-breasted 4-button front, notch lapels, front-and-back vertical box pleats, half-belted waist, flapped bellows hip pockets, and single vent
• Tan woolen tweed knickerbockers
• White cotton shirt with detachable point collar and single cuffs
• Beige geometric diamond-print bow tie
• Fawn-colored wool tam o’shanter with toorie, grosgrain band, and brown cockade
• Walnut-brown leather cap-toe oxford ankle boots
• Tan wool knee-high socks
• Silver-toned full hunter-style pocket watch on gold “double Albert” chain with shield-shaped fob
• Gold wedding ring

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.

You can also learn more about the actual sinking through the many excellent books on the subject, including Erik Larson’s Dead Wake and Diana Preston’s Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy, the latter including many details about Professor Holbourn and Avis Dolphin’s lifelong friendship that began during the ship’s doomed final voyage.

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The Quote

I used to think a government was there to protect its people, but of course, it’s there to protect itself.