It was a most unlikely friendship, forged by unimaginable disaster.
When Noel, Countess of Rothes, and Able Seaman Thomas Jones boarded the Titanic in Southampton, on Wednesday, April 10, 1912, she headed to the luxurious first-class deck, he to the spartan crew quarters.
Edwardian society was such that in ordinary times their paths would never cross. But four nights later – when the ‘unsinkable’ liner hit an iceberg and began to list – they found themselves manning a lifeboat in the darkness, doing their utmost to save their own lives and those of 25 others.
The mutual respect that formed that night never faded. For the rest of their lives, they exchanged letters and sent each other gifts.
Noel praised Jones’s ‘noble’ work amid the panic and chaos of Lifeboat No 8. He recalled her ‘courage under so heartrending circumstances’.
Survivors rarely spoke of what had happened that night and the 1,496 people who died. Some suffered shock, what we would now call PTSD.
Others felt the numbers of dead paled in comparison with the First World War, which broke out two years after the sinking. Noel – my great-grandmother, who was known as Noel because she was born on Christmas Day but actually called Lucy Noel Martha Leslie – was no different. She would only occasionally say: ‘Do remember that whatever you hear about the Titanic is not true.’
But what she would have made of James Cameron’s 1997 film – in which she was played by British actress Rochelle Rose –we will never know.
Pictured: the Countess of Rothes, who survived the Titanic and rowed dozens to safety
Pictured: Thomas Jones, the 5ft-tall Able Seaman who forged a relationship with aristocrat countess Noel on board lifeboat Number 8
After her death in 1956, her son and granddaughter found a box of her Titanic papers they had never seen.
Inside were newspaper cuttings from 1912 and a copy of the sworn statement she had made in Los Angeles a month after the disaster.
There were letters from the niece of the Spanish Prime Minister, the youngest passenger in Lifeboat No 8, who was just 22 years old and on honeymoon when she had to leave her husband behind on the ship, never to see him again. And there were letters from Thomas Jones.
The New York Herald, reporting on the departure of the Titanic, described the Countess as ‘full of joyful expectation’ as the ship left dock. Her husband, Norman Evelyn Leslie, 19th Earl of Rothes, had travelled ahead, planning to buy a fruit farm in California.
In contrast to her alarmed portrayal in the film (she asks a passing steward: ‘Excuse me, why have the engines stopped? I felt a shudder’) the real Countess hardly noticed the moment the vast ship was cut open.
‘A slight jar and then a grating noise’ were all she was aware of. ‘I turned on the light and noticed it was 11.46pm and I wondered at the sudden quiet.’
‘On opening my cabin door,’ she recalled to an inquiry regarding the disaster, ‘I saw the steward, and was informed that the ship had been in collision with ice.
‘As we wished to see the iceberg, we went on deck and walked to the forward part. The deck below was covered with ice, but we did not see the iceberg… No one realised any danger.’
The order came to get dressed and put on lifebelts. Noel poured some brandy for herself and her ladies’ maid and hurriedly dressed: ‘Then no one seemed to know where the lifebelts were kept, and a strange man found ours for us – we tied on his for him – and all shook hands and told each other that it would not be long before we met again.’
Able Seaman Jones, a Welshman who stood just 5ft 1in tall, was ordered by the ship’s Captain, Edward Smith, to command Lifeboat No 8, which was the fourth lifeboat to leave, at 1am.
It could take 65 passengers but left with just 27 on board: 23 women, plus another able seaman, Charles Pascoe, and two stewards.
If all 16 lifeboats plus the four ‘collapsibles’ had been filled 1,178 passengers and crew would have been saved. In the event, just 712 survived. Why, Jones was later asked, hadn’t more people come forward to board the lifeboat?
‘The night was so fine and the Titanic so large that they did not think it possible she could go down,’ he replied. ‘Time and time again I heard Captain Smith appealing to them to board the lifeboats, but they did not, and the boats, in many cases, left half-full.’
Even-numbered lifeboats were stored on the port side; uneven numbers on the starboard side.
Fewer passengers left from the port side as the officer in charge of boarding the lifeboats there seemed to interpret the exhortation ‘women and children first’ as ‘women and children only.’
Roberta Maioni, Noel’s maid, recalled: ‘I was not at all frightened. Everybody was saying as we left the ship that she was “good for 12 hours yet”.’ With no more ladies ready to leave, Jones was ordered to ‘lower away’.
As Noel recalled: ‘We were lowered quietly to the water, and when we had pushed off from the Titanic’s side, I asked the seaman [Jones] if he would care to have me take the tiller, as I knew something about boats.
‘We had no officer to take command of our boat, and the little seaman had to assume all the responsibility. He did it nobly, alternately cheering us with words of encouragement, then rowing doggedly.’
‘There was a woman on my boat,’ Jones later told The Daily Telegraph. ‘When I saw the way she was carrying herself… I knew she was more of a man than any we had on board and I put her at the tiller.’
Captain Smith instructed Jones to row toward the lights of a nearby ship, let the passengers board, then return.
An illustratoin of the wreckage of the Titanic on April 10, 1912, and a lifeboat rowing out amid the icebergs
‘I was sure,’ Jones said, ‘that the ship, whose lights we could plainly see, would pick us up and that our lifeboats would be able to do double duty in ferrying passengers to the help that gleamed so near.’
Those lights came from the steamship the SS Californian, about 12 miles north-north-west of Titanic: by far the closest ship.
‘For three hours,’ Noel recalled, ‘we pulled steadily for the two masthead lights that showed brilliantly in the darkness.’
She congratulated a passenger ‘Mrs Smith’ for her ‘sterling service’ in rowing five hours with Jones without taking a rest.
‘Really, she was magnificent, not only in her attitude but in the whole-souled way in which she worked. Mrs Pearson also rowed, and my maid, Roberta Maioni, rowed the last half of the night.’
But as hard as they rowed, they did not get near the Californian. ‘I pulled for the light,’ said Jones, ‘and I found I could not get near the light.’
Noel recalled: ‘For a few minutes we saw the ship’s port light, then it vanished, and the masthead lights got dimmer on the horizon until they, too, disappeared.’
The reason they couldn’t ‘get near’ the lights was that the Californian’s captain, Stanley Lord, made a fatal mistake.
His apprentice officer told the inquiry that he saw white rockets being fired to the south, and reported them to his captain, but his captain gave him no instructions.
According to the British Board of Trade rulebook, if there was any doubt about a rocket’s meaning, it had to be taken for a distress signal. That rule was ignored by the Californian’s captain.
What was more, the Marconi wireless operator was off shift when the Titanic began sending SOS messages. The wireless room was closed between 11pm and 8am, to allow the lone operator time to eat and sleep.
Jones heard Noel doing what she could to comfort the women on board, at least four of whom had had to leave their husbands behind on the ship.
She reassured them that their men would find places in later lifeboats – she had no idea there weren’t enough. At 2.20am, the Titanic sank. Those still on board were pitched into the icy water with only their lifebelts to protect them.
Noel wrote to her parents: ‘The horror of it all can never be told… those fearful cries when she sank will never go out of my head.’
As they had boarded Lifeboat No 8, the newly-wed husband of the young Spanish woman Maria-Josefa had asked Noel to take care of her: ‘It was awful making her leave him, but one’s only feeling was to prevent any panic or scene and obey the Captain’s orders.’
Maria-Josefa then began screaming for him. ‘It was too horrible,’ recalled Noel. ‘I slipped down beside her to be of what comfort I could. Poor woman! Her sobs tore our hearts out and her moans were unspeakable in their sadness.’
‘The most awful part,’ Noel continued, ‘was seeing the rows of portholes vanishing one by one.’
The cold was intense, ‘and we were surrounded by icebergs that we expected would be on us at any moment. In this terrible blackness we rowed all night. Our hearts seemed chilled, but we hoped against hope that someone would pick us up.’
Jones wanted to turn back in search of survivors in the water, as the boat could easily take more passengers. My great-grandmother also wanted to turn back.
‘But the other people in the boat were very strongly against it,’ Noel recalled, ‘saying that the suction wave [caused by the Titanic’s sinking] would take us down and we would be swamped. I spoke to one of the other passengers and said I thought we ought to return.
‘She demurred … and asked me not to say anything more about it, as it might result in a panic in our boat if the others heard that I advocated returning.’
The infamous liner docked in Southampton before it set sail for its fateful journey to America
The other fear was that when desperate people in the water struggled to board the boat, it would turn over, and the 27 on board would die. Both the Countess and Jones struggled with this.
In a letter to Jones, Noel later wrote: ‘The dreadful regret I shall always have, and I know you share with me, is that we ought to have gone back to see whom we could pick up.’
When the terrible sounds of people dying behind them stopped, the absolute silence seemed worse. In order to distract those in the boat, someone suggested they sing.
They sang through the rest of the night, every ballad, nursery rhyme, folk song, hymn – any song they could think of. ‘It kept up our spirits,’ Jones recalled. ‘We sang as we rowed, starting out with Pull For The Shore.’
The Carpathia was bound from New York to Gibraltar and was some 58 miles away when its captain, Arthur Rostron, received the Titanic’s distress message. She arrived at the scene at 4am, an hour and 40 minutes after Titanic sank, too late to save anyone who hadn’t found a place on a lifeboat.
Noel fainted as she was taken on board: ‘I remember nothing after I was put into the swing and hauled up until I found myself on the dining-room sofa with the doctor pouring hot stuff down my throat.’
She and Jones would exchange Christmas cards every year until Noel’s death.
Among the treasured items found in her Titanic box was a wooden roundel with a bronze number ‘8’ embedded in the middle.
It was a gift Jones had made for her: when the ordeal of the night was over, he had removed the bronze ‘8’ from the prow of the lifeboat, then mounted it on wood.
‘My lady,’ he wrote, when sending it to Noel, ‘I beg to ask your acceptance of the number of my boat from which you were taken on board S/S Carpathia. In asking you to accept the same, I do so in respect of your courage under so terrifying circumstances.’
She sent him a silver fob watch, engraved with the simple words ‘April 15th 1912. From the Countess of Rothes’.
At Christmas Noel would enclose £1 with her letter. According to the family, £1 (worth around £400 today) ‘did Christmas’. It paid for everything.
Nell, Jones’s daughter, once told me she remembered the letters he wrote to Noel and the replies he received, because he used to read them to her.
But when she told her school friends her father was writing to a Countess, they didn’t believe her. She told me, with a smile, that, as a girl, she thought, ‘everybody knew a Countess’.
For her part, Noel would be haunted by a particular piece of music for the rest of her life.
It was the Barcarolle from The Tales Of Hoffmann – the last piece she heard the orchestra play on deck, before she retired to her cabin the night the ship went down.
l Adapted from The Aristocrat And The Able Seaman by Angela Young (The History Press, £14.99).
To order a copy for £13.49 (offer valid to March 28; UK P&P free on orders over £25) mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937
