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Lord Mersey If you wish to read a transcript of the findings click here

The formal investigation was held at Central buildings, Westminster, on the 15th 16th, 17th and 18th June,at the Westminster Palace Hotel on the 1st of July, and at the Caxton Hall,Westminster, on the 17th of July,before the Right Honourable LORD MERSEY, Wreck Commissioner. He was assisted by Admiral Sir F. S. Inglefield, K.C.B.; Lieutenant- Commander Hearn RN; Captain D. Davies and Captain J. spedding, (both from the Merchant Navy) who were acting as assessors, into the circumstances attending the loss of the steamship "Lusitania", and the loss of 1,198 lives at a spot ten to fifteen miles south of the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, on the 7th May 1915. (Please note that the official figure for lives lost does not include the three Germans locked in the ship's cells). The Board of Trade required that a formal investigation be held on the above dates. Some were held in public others were in camera. A total of thirty six witnesses were called and a number of documents examined. Twenty one questions for the court were formulated by the Admiralty for the Board of Trade which we will detail, with the answers as given. The full report is not available to the public, indeed the only surviving copy to our knowledge is in Lord Mersey's private papers. As two of the hearings took place behind closed doors, the only transcript of those hearings s in Lord Mersey's private papers. It was during these in camera hearings, that the Admiralty tried to frame Captain Turner. They very nearly succeeded in this, but at the last minute, their own staff work let them down. The "prosecuting" barrister started reading from Admiralty memos that had not been submitted to the court! Mersey stoppedb the proceedings and summoned ALL the lawyers to the bench. He then icily demanded an immediate explanation of the memos from the Crown Solicitor General, who was at a loss to explain. Lord Mersey, and Sir F.E. Smith, (the prosecution barrister) suddenly realised that the evidence had been falsified by the Admiralty and they refused to proceed further. The inquiry was adjourned and Lord Mersey asked all of the assessors to give him their seperate opinions in sealed envelopes. Only Admiral Sir Frederick Inglefield returned a guilty verdict against Captain Turner. This was not surprising as Inglefield had been pre-briefed by the Board of the Admiralty and instructed to find Turner guilty of treasonable behaviour. Our copy of the report came from the Cunard archives held at Sydney Jones library, Liverpool University and obviously only covers the PUBLIC hearings. We obtained the pages that related only to Captain Turner's given evidence but the version of the report which is held at the library, is available to the public. The report as detailed shows the questions and answers and the court's findings. We have added the answers that show an Annex with our comments, which appear in red type. Ultimately of course, the Mersey inquiry was simply a public whitewashing exercise. Something had to be seen to be done, to quell public outrage. With Lord Mersey clearing Cunard and Captain Turner of blame, the full blame had therefore to be placed with the "beastly Hun". So justice, at least to some, appeared to have been done. But it was a fundamentally unsound justice, as Lord Mersey knew only too well. Two days after he closed his inquiry, Lord Mersey waived his fees for the case and formally resigned. His last words on the subject were: "The Lusitania case was a damned, dirty business!" He did have one consolation though. However hard they tried, then or later, the Admiralty would NEVER be able to completely cover their tracks as Lord Mersey, in his wisdom, had taken the liberty of confiscating the entire contents of Admiral Inglefield's master court file, and placing it with his own, secure, private papers. Annex to the Booard of Trade During the course of Lord Mersey's public inquiry, reference was made to the signals which were sent between the Valentia Wireless Station to and from the Lusitania in the time leading up to the attack. The Admiralty strove to prove that Captain Turner was kept fully and specifically informed of the submarine threat to his ship. They also wanted to remove all traces of the signal he'd received from Vice Admiral Coke in Queenstown, which ordered him to divert his ship into the safety of Queenstown Harbour. Their main objective was blaming Captain Turner for the loss of his ship; the very ship they had spectacularly, and deliberately, failed to protect. The Admiralty Signals Registers for WW1 are in fact completely preserved in their entirety; well almost! There are only two pages "missing" for the entire period. Those two pages are for Friday 7th May, 1915, and relate only to messages that were sent to and from the Lusitania. In 1972, Colin Simpson discovered what appeared to be the two missing pages in the private archives of Lord Mersey. He reproduced them at the time in his book LUSITANIA, but for some reason or other, they were not reproduced in the subsequent edition of his book. However, we also have a copy of those two pages. They show coded messages sent to the ship. When we first obtained the copies back in 1999, there was no way to decode the messages on the sheets without working for Bletchley Park, but those were the days before the internet of course! So we simply filed them in our collection. Fast forward to 2023 and we were contacted by a fellow Researcher and Historian, Jim MacGregor; who together with co- author Gerry Docherty, runs the Hidden Histories of WW1 website. They have also written a superb and acclaimed book titled PROLONGING THE AGONY. How The Anglo-American Establishment deliberately extended WW1 By Three-and-a-Half Years, which was published in 2018. Mitch had previously been asked to contribute an article for their Hidden Histories Of WW1 website, which he did. Jim was now seeking our help with the Lusitania related section of their latest project. During the lengthy and extremely interesting email conversations between Jim and Mitch, the subject of the Valentia Signals Register and the missing pages came up. Mitch told Jim we had copies and emailed images of them over to Jim, who expressed his regret at not being able to read the content of the messages. Enter the internet! Mitch spent an evening looking for a website that could (a) recognize the cipher and (b) crack the code. After a couple of hours, he found one! It turns out that the cipher is called the Gronsfeld Cipher. It uses six-lettered words with a 5 digit shift key. The shift key can be changed for any one of thousands of 5 digit keys, but the shift key for these Lusitania messages is 41513. If you want its technicalities, Gronsfeld cipher is a polyalphabetic cipher similar to the Vignere disk cipher, but in Gronsfeld, the letter shift is determined by numbers between 0 and 9, not other letters transposed, as in the Vignere disk cipher. So, to those Signals register sheets: This is Page 1. The very first message on sheet 1 is Captain Turner asking for a repeat of the earlier signal "submarines active off the south coast of ireland" When he first saw it, Captain Turner thought it vague and possibly incomplete. The Valentia operator seems unsure who had requested the repeat but then writes "(mfa sent once, quickly)" MFA was Lusitania's call sign. Next message is an en clair personal message for Alfred Vanderbilt, 1st Class Passenger aboard the Lusitania followed by a simple acknowledgement, without a call sign. Next one from GCK (Valentia) was sent to "no call" (No specific call sign) as it was a general broadcast addressed to "a.b.m.s. homeward bound" (All British Merchant Ships homeward bound). It is navigational instructions for shipping bound for the ports of Dover, London and Liverpool. Full text reads as follows: "between south foreland and folkestone keep within two miles of shore and pass between the two light vessels. Take liverpool pilot at bar and avoid headlands. pass harbours at full speed, steer mid channel course. submarines off fastnet." The note in brackets 3/4 of the way down sheet 1 on the left which reads "(Though no call sign was used it is definitely known the ship was mfa)" refers to the request Captain Turner made for a repeat of the message he'd thought incomplete. The final entry at the bottom of the first sheet; "7-5-15. 11.2. From GCK to MFA. Send following mge 12 words to mfa" is the crucial entry. This is the 12 word message sent from Vice Admiral Coke in the NAVAL cipher, diverting Captain Turner into the safety of Queenstown harbour. The 12 word content of that message SHOULD be the first entry on sheet 2.

Instead, what we have is "mfa following naval centre Queenstown begins Questor ends 10 50" This is Vice Admiral Coke asking what edition of the NAVAL code Captain Turner is carrying. This SHOULD have been the LAST entry on page 1 as it was sent at 10.50am. At 11:10, there's an entry "from mfa to naval centre Queenstown. Westrona" This is Captain Turner replying with the code word for whichever edition of the Naval code he was carrying. The timings are clearly out of sync, because the LAST entry on page 1 was the actual message diverting the ship, sent at 11:02, seemingly BEFORE Coke knew which edition to use in order to send that message! The message after "Westrona" appears reads: "submarines active in southern part of irish channel last heard of twenty miles south of conningbeg light vessel" . Then we have the 1pm message from GCK to MFA which again is following from Naval centre Queenstown,which reads: "submarine five miles south of cape clear proceeding west when sighted at ten am" Next message at 1.45 is yet another repeat of the "abms homeward bound" message, poignantly followed by the Lusitania's first distress call. The last entry on page 1 and the first two entries on page 2 are clear proof that a specially coded 12 word message was sent by Vice admiral Coke in Queenstown to the Lusitania, but what that message said has been deliberately withheld. The 12 words of that message, sent in naval code, are simply not on the register's page. Well, not on THIS register's page, anyway! What is glaringly obvious, is that page 2 is a forgery. It has been doctored, tailored specifically for use at Lord Mersey's inquiry, and with the sole aim of helping them "prove" Captain Turner's "guilt". As Jim MacGregor said: "The Valentia Signals log appears to have been kept on single sided printed sheets with holes punched and held together with string. It appears that the second sheet (that we have available) chronologically follows on directly from the first. That is, the message to mfa at 11.2 am May 7 ends the first sheet, and 11.10 am May 7 "Questor" message is the first timed entry beginning the next sheet. Yes, it's possible the actual 12 word message to Lusitania was deliberately not recorded; but the guys recording the messages at Valentia would surely not have done that, since they had no inkling of what was really going on. Far more likely is that the original second sheet bearing the actual message was later removed and a new doctored sheet put in its place. The handwriting on both pages looks the same (that would be easy to copy). However, the writing of the L in Lusitania at the top of each page looks very different. And, the SS on the first page is written with two distinct capital letters with full stops after each: S.S., whereas on the second page they are in joined up writing. The writing on the first page generally abbreviates the word 'message' to 'mge', whereas it is generally written out fully as 'message' on the second page. Maybe there were two individuals recording the messages of course. Any message to Captain Turner to divert to Queenstown had to be eradicated from the record for the Mersey Inquiry, and doing that would have been child's play for the experts the Admiralty had available. Just rip out the actual sheet with Coke's message and copy in another without the 12 words. Covering up and lying came as second nature to these people". Another interesting point discussed by Jim and Mitch was that back in 1972, in his book, Colin Simpson propounded a sort of theory that there was an Admiralty tug called Hellespont in the area, whose call sign was also MFA and that Vice Admiral Coke's "divert" message was intended for her, not Captain Turner. We don't know if the word "Hellespont" actually translates as "Red Herring", but that is EXACTLY what it is and quite why Simpson introduced it, is a mystery; because if you look at all those exchanges, there is never any question about mfa being the Lusitania. No mention at all of any confusion as to it possibly being an Admiralty tug allegedly bearing the same wireless call sign, which suddenly "popped up out of nowhere" and "might have been the intended recipient" of just one of those messages, Coke's divert signal, (even though the Admiralty were saying emphatically that Coke didn't send such a message!). Well, here's the clincher in that respect: Mitch managed to get through to ofcom, who regulate and govern Britain's airwaves. Having explained to them exactly what it was all about, they said that even in the early days of wireless, each station HAD to have its own UNIQUE call sign identification letters. A station's call letters were then, and still are today, as totally unique to that station as a number plate is to a motor vehicle. There is "absolutely no way" that any two stations could ever have, or have ever had, the same call sign letters, either by accident or design. Just thought we'd dispel that myth too, whilst we were at it! So there you have it. Documentary proof of just a small part of Captain Richard Webb's dirty work. Courtesy of Jim MacGregor and Mitch Peeke.