‍As the Titanic goes down a Countess proved her worth to an able seaman

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‍AS TRAGIC as it was, the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, was to give birth to an almost endless chapter of touching newspaper stories. None more so than the story of one of its lifeboats, of which there were far too few.

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‍The launching of lifeboat 8 in the turmoil and screams of that night sealed a platonic love and friendship between the class structures of the time, a Countess and an Able Seaman.

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‍The Countess of Rothes, Lucy Noël Martha and Welshman, Able Seaman Thomas William Jones, would form a bond that lasted a lifetime. And that bond was only properly discovered in 1956, when the Countess died and her family discovered a box that contained letters, newspaper cuttings and memorabilia from the disaster.

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‍The Countess, known as Noël, was 33 years old when she boarded RMS Titanic in Southampton along with her parents, Thomas and Clementina Dyer-Edwards, her husband’s cousin Gladys Cherr and her ladies’ maid.

‍She was travelling to America to meet her husband, Norman Evelyn, the 19th Earl of Rothes, while their two young sons remained at home in Glenrothes, Fife.

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‍Seaman Thomas, aged 34, and unmarried was born and raised in Cemaes, north Anglesey, Wales. He had joined the White Star Line approximately 10 years prior to boarding the ship the day it sailed.

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‍The two were destined to meet for the first time in the mayhem of the night the Titanic was sinking. There was a rush for the lifeboats, disorder broke out, women were screaming and some men fought each other for spaces as the order went out “Women and Children” first.

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‍Thomas, who was helping unleash the lifeboats, was given charge of Lifeboat 8 and set about helping women and children down the ropes to safety in the ice black sea. It wasn’t easy, some of the women were hysterical and No.8 rocked. It was all he could do to stop them falling into the sea. By 1.30am there were 26 people in the boat, 22 women and four men.

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‍Thomas worked tirelessly stabilising the boat, and helping people to seats as the sea swelled up and down and the Titanic began to dip its nose in the darkness. All around them were screaming people in the dark water. Women in the lifeboat were screaming and crying too, until Noel comforted them and with Thomas and Gladys worked tirelessly to calm things down.

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‍As they began to row away, the three of them were in favour of going back to try and help rescue more passengers struggling in the water. But they were outnumbered by the rest of the people on the lifeboat who wanted to get away from Titanic, as they feared being sucked down when the ship started to go under.

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‍Thomas shouted to all: “Ladies, if any of us are saved, remember I wanted to go back. I would rather drown with them than leave them!”

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‍When Thomas realised the male stewards in his boat were poor rowers, he assigned the countess to an oar, and she rowed for two hours alongside him and even took the tiller.

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‍Gladys also steered the boat as Thomas and Noel boosted the morale of the panicking women in the pitch black.

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‍Thomas later told reporters: “When I saw how the Countess spoke to the others; I knew at once that she was more of a man than any we had on board. I put her in command.”

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‍Nearly four hours later they saw the rescue ship, RMS Carpathia and once they were on board, Noël got to work helping the doctors. Her knowledge of French was vital in communicating with the French survivors and she earned the nickname: ‘The Plucky Little Countess” by the crew.

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‍Not long after the sinking of Titanic, Thomas, who was hailed a hero, and Noël started their correspondence. The Countess sent the seaman an engraved fob watch in memory of their time together in danger. He made a plaque with the metal 8 from their lifeboat set in its centre for her.

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‍And for the next 44 years they sent each other letters, until Noël’s death.

‍But the memory of the unlikely friendship has been kept alive by her granddaughter, Angela Young, who was five when Noel died of heart failure, aged 77.

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‍Now with the help of the scrapbooks and letters her mother gathered, Angela has been able to compile their story with her talk: ‘the Aristocrat, the Able Seamen and the tragic sinking of the Titanic.’

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‍In April 2022 a memorial was unveiled in Cemaes where Thomas was born and raised. Dedicated to both Thomas and the countess, it stands on the beach just below the house where he was born. Thomas died in 1967, aged 89.

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‍I wonder if they ever met up again. We’ll never know.

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‍OLD NEWS IN BRIEF:

‍POTTY WAY TO DIE

‍At the Carlisle Arms in Soho in 1893, Walter Cowle, 21, made a reckless bet with customers that he could fit a billiard ball into his mouth and close his teeth around it.

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‍The landlord handed him the pink on the assumption that Cowle would palm it and use sleight of hand. But he swallowed it instead after “stretching his jaw to the point of immobility,” the Evening Standard said.

‍Drinkers held him by his feet, shook him and slapped his back. But he choked to death upside down.

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‍FATAL PREDICTION

‍A 53-year-old man, fearing he would die early, bought a coffin ‘of polished rosewood, lined with white satin and trimmed with silver’ which he left balanced upright in his home, reported the Leicester Chronicle in 1856.

‍But he accidentally stumbled into it one evening, causing it to topple over, hit him on the head and kill him outright. He did die early after all.

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‍FEELING A BIT OF AN ASS

‍Threatened by fellow villagers in Middleton near Manchester, with being dragged before magistrates for cruelty to his donkey, a “half-witted fellow named James Driscott” agreed to do penance, said the Illustrated Police News on January 22, 1876.

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‍The donkey was placed in the cart, and its owner, with the collar round his neck, was forced to drag his four-footed servant through the village. A reporter said it was “the most laughter-moving scene he had ever witnessed.”

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‍HORROR OF THE MISSING GIRLS WHO BECAME PREY TO WEST HAM RIPPER

‍How the Victorian Penny Dreadful pamphlets
reported the West Ham Ripper in 1880s

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‍Victorian killers were sadly good for newspaper circulations — and there was no shortage of them. But the one that intrigues me most is the West Ham Ripper.

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‍In the late 1800s, while his famous rival Jack was busy creating his trail of blood in Whitechapel, the Illustrated Police News, The Star and The Times were picking up on young women who had disappeared down the road on the housing estates of West Ham.

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‍The disappearances led up to the brutal rape and killing of 15-year-old Amelia ‘Millie’ Jeffs who vanished on an errand. Her father Charles, who lived on West Road, sent her to buy three penneth of fried fish in Church Street at 6.30pm on Friday, January 31, 1890. But Millie never arrived at the chip shop and never returned home.

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‍The district was in uproar since several girls had already disappeared in the area without a trace. At that time, houses built along the new Portway thoroughfare were unsold and left empty.

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‍A caretaker let two policemen into them to search for Millie but claimed to have lost the key to No 126. So, the officers climbed through a window at the back.

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‍They found her body in a cupboard. She had been brutally raped and strangled. The coroner and police were told that there had been carpenters working in the empty houses.

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‍And Millie’s boots were clean, indicating that she had been let in through the front door by the killer using a key, rather than through the building site mud at the back. Builders were suspected but none arrested.

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‍A verdict of murder was returned against a person or persons unknown.

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‍The West Ham disappearances began in 1881 when Mary Seward, aged 14, vanished after leaving her home in West Road to search for her four-year-old cousin who had gone missing. She went knocking on doors and the boy returned home later, but Mary never came back.

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‍Another girl went missing nine months later — Eliza Carter, who was 13 when she vanished from her home in Church Street after visiting her married sister in January 1882.

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‍Her dress was found in West Ham Park the next day with the buttons cut off. Nothing was ever heard of her again.

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‍In all, 12 young women in West Ham vanished in the 1880s — some were later found strangled. Others were never found at all. It was at the same time Jack the Ripper was on the loose in Whitechapel.

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‍Just what a dangerous place London was for young girls then is highlighted in ‘Rivals of Jack the Ripper’, a book by Jan Bondeson, History Press. And the newspaper reports show that from Bloomsbury to Spitalfields; from Chelsea to the City of London, male killers were stalking at night.

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‍Collectively, these mysterious cases were headlined “The Epidemic of Vanishing Londoners”. And they included young boys.

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‍The Ripper was never alone in his murderous mission.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍8 June 2026