Frances Stephens

Frances Stephens, around 1900

Frances Stephens , née Frances Ramsey McIntosh (born January 27, 1851 in Edinburgh , Scotland , † May 7, 1915 in the Atlantic Ocean off Ireland ) was a Canadian philanthropist of Scottish descent and a prominent lady of the society of Montreal. She was the wife of landowner and attorney George Stephens , who rose to become cabinet minister for the province of Québec .

She died on the luxury steamer RMS Lusitania , which was sunk by a German submarine. This attracted a lot of attention because a short time later the RMS Hesperian was sunk by the same submarine. Frances Stephen's body was on it for return. This has been referred to in the American media as Double Jeopardy (double murder).

Life and family

Frances Stephens was the daughter of Nicholas Carnegie McIntosh and Margaret Brown, who came from Edinburgh, Scotland. She had an older sister, Elizabeth. The sisters grew up in sheltered circumstances in Montreal. Elizabeth McIntosh married in 1865 the businessman and lawyer George Stephens , who later went into politics and became MP and Minister for the Province of Quebec.

After Elizabeth died young, Frances married her widower in 1878, who was nineteen years her senior. Together they had a son, Francis Chattan Stephens, who was born in 1887. Chattan became a stockbroker on the Montreal Stock Exchange and founded the FC Stephens & Co. group. He married Hazel Beatrice Kemp (1889–1961), daughter of the Canadian MP and later military minister Edward Kemp, in Toronto in 1912 . They had two children: Frances Elizabeth Stephens (born September 15, 1912 in Paris ) and John Harrison Chattan Stephens (born 1913 in Montreal). The Stephens family were among the most recognized and influential in the city of Montreal. Frances Stephens was a well-known and socially committed person within the upper class. After the death of her husband, Frances took care of her son and grandchildren above all else.

F. Chattan Stephens was a reservist in the Canadian armed forces before the war. When World War I broke out, Stephens became a lieutenant in the 13th Canadian Battalion, which was sent to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force . Hazel followed him to Europe with her young daughter and settled in Sunningdale , Berkshire . John and Frances stayed in Montreal for the time being. Chattan did not serve at the front for long, as he soon developed trench fever. Soon the disease had developed into endocarditis and Stephens had to be treated at the Red Cross Hospital in Rouen .

Death on the Lusitania

Due to her son's illness, Frances Stephens decided to travel to Europe with her 18 month old grandson John to bring the family together and help Hazel with the children. She went on May 1, 1915 in New York as a first class passenger on board the ocean liner RMS Lusitania of the Cunard Line , one of the largest and fastest passenger ships of its time. She was accompanied by her Swiss maid Elise Oberlin and the English nanny Caroline Milne, whom she hired to look after John.

Frances and Elise were in cabin D-5, John and Caroline were in D-9. In the first class dining room, Frances shared her table with many other prominent passengers, including Canadian businessman and Baron Sir Frederick Orr-Lewis, William Holt, son of Canadian banker Sir Herbert Holt, and the wife and daughters of shipowner Sir Montagu Allan . Six days after sailing, on May 7, 1915, the Lusitania was sunk by the German U- 20 submarine with a torpedo off the coast of southern Ireland. After lunch, Frances had gone to the veranda café with her dinner party to have a cup of coffee after dinner.

The group stayed together on the boat deck in a panic, Sir Orr-Lewis putting on all life jackets . Frances Stephens was last seen on the towering port side of the ship with John in her arms; she died in the sinking. Her body was lifted out of the sea with a boat hook on the night of May 7th and brought ashore. Orr-Lewis, one of the few survivors of her dinner party, identified her the following day in a Queenstown morgue . She wore a life jacket and expensive jewelry. The bodies of John, Elise, and Caroline were never found.

On the Hesperian

The RMS Hesperian was put into service in 1908, 10,920 GRT passenger ship of the Canadian shipping company Allan Line , of which Montagu Allan was president. On September 4, 1915, the ship, under the command of Captain William Main, left Liverpool with 814 passengers and several hundred crew members on board, destined for Quebec and Montreal. The embalmed body of Frances Stephens was transferred to Canada aboard the Hesperian to be buried next to her husband in the Mont-Royal cemetery in Montreal.

On the evening of the same day, the ship was sighted by the submarine U 20 under the command of Lieutenant Walther Schwieger , who had a torpedo fired at around 20:20. It was the same submarine with the same commander that sank the Lusitania four months earlier . As on the Lusitania , the torpedo hurled a wall of water into the air, which fell on the deck of the Hesperian and caused great damage. The ship quickly listed heavily to starboard and began to sink over the bow. 32 people were killed.

Frances Stephens was thus sunk twice by the same submarine and the same commander.

Posthumously

Her son Chattan has been released from military service because of his poor health. He and Hazel never got over the death of their son John. After the sinking of the Lusitania , they went back to Montreal, where Chattan died on October 16, 1918 at the age of 31 as a result of an influenza infection. Hazel married the lawyer Arthur Boucher Colville (1877-1931) in 1920. After his sudden death, rumors spread in Canadian newspapers that Hazel had become engaged to Richard Bedford Bennett , then Prime Minister of Canada . But this was not the case.

Frances Stephens' granddaughter Frances married Murray Gordon Ballantyne, the son of Canadian Senator Charles Colquhoun Ballantyne, in 1947. In memory of her grandmother, Frances Stephens Ballantyne published the essay Double Jeopardy - Lusitania's Unique Victim , which received great media coverage. She died on September 11, 2014.

Web links

• http://www.garemaritime.com/features/lusitania_victim/
• http://rmslusitania.info/pages/saloon_class/#S