Roll Back the Clouds, my
new novel about the Lusitania, releases on March 17. Many of the
passengers aboard the ill-fated, final voyage appear alongside main characters,
Geoff and Rosaleen Bonnard. I’ll be profiling several of them here. This week, meet
Ian Holbourn.
On an expedition to Iceland in 1899, 27-year-old
Ian Holbourn passed by the Isle of Foula in Scotland. He visited Foula the following
year, and determined to buy the island. He succeeded in doing so, and thus became
laird of Foula. When he took his future wife to visit Foula, she was surprised
they were treated like royalty.
Ian was a lecturer at Oxford, Cambridge, and London. His
topics ranged from archaeology and architecture to Greek philosophy and
medieval history to social and ethical problems. He was invited by the Lecturers’
Association of New York to tour the United States, and presented over one
thousand lectures at universities across America.
For twenty years, he had been working on a manuscript
entitled The Fundamental Theory of Beauty. He had taken it with him to the U.S., hoping
to have it ready for publication in 1916.
Returning
home on the Lusitania, he was outspoken in lobbying for passengers to learn
proper evacuation and how to put on lifebelts, and was critical of the captain’s
refusal to hold lifeboat drills for passengers. A group of men came to him and
ordered him to stop talking of these things and upsetting the others. For their
refusal to face the dangers of sailing into the war zone, he called them the
Ostrich Club.
When
the Lusitania sank, he jumped into the sea with a few of his most important
manuscripts. He swam to an overcrowded
lifeboat, where he was refused to come aboard. He threw in his manuscripts so
at least they would be saved. After nearly an hour in the water, he was pulled
into another lifeboat, and survived.
In Roll Back
the Clouds, Geoff Bonnard hears Professor Holbourn warn of the possible
danger and derisively refer to the Ostrich Club.
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