Lucy (Noël) Leslie


(Countess of Rothes; Lucy Noël Dyer-Edwardes)

1878 - 1956

Titanic survivor and philanthropist. Born in London, she became a noted Society beauty and married Norman Leslie, the 19th Earl of Rothes, in 1900. In 1904, the couple moved to Leslie House in Fife.

In 1912, Lady Rothes boarded the RMS Titanic with her parents. They disembarked at Cherbourg, while she continued to the USA intent on meeting her husband who was there on business. After the Titanic struck an iceberg, she is said to have helped row a lifeboat and maintain the spirits of its other passengers until they were rescued by the Carpathia. She then tended to the survivors and was feted as a heroine, although she hated this label. Her father, Thomas Dyer-Edwardes, gifted the Lady Rothes lifeboat to the town of Fraserburgh in gratitude for her rescue.

She enthusiastically raised funds for a number of institutions, including the Randolph Wemyss Memorial Hospital in Buckhaven, the Queen Victoria School in Dunblane together with several local charitable causes in Fife. She also ran a hospital for injured soldiers in Leslie House during the First World War.

She married for a second time after the death of the Earl of Rothes in 1927, and died in Sussex.


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