COMMANDER LOFTUS WILLIAM JONES
ROYAL NAVY
31ST MAY 1916 AGE 36
BURIED: KVIBERG CEMETERY, KORTEDALA, GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN
I am cheating here because I have used this epitaph before as epitaph number 1 on the first day of the Centenary, 4 August 2014. The words come from Lord Kitchener's advice to British troops, which he issued on 9 August 1914 as British soldiers prepared to go to war. The message culminates with these words:
Do your duty bravely
Fear God
Honour the King
I am now on epitaph number 666 but Commander Jones' is the first naval epitaph I have included. This is not because few members of the Royal Navy were killed in the war but because so few of them have graves. If you take the Battle of Jutland, more than 6,000 British sailors lost their lives over the two days 31 May and 1 June 1916 yet only about 168 bodies were recovered of which around seventy-five were identifiable. It is estimated that 32,000 members of the Royal Navy lost their lives in the war. If the same ratio of deaths to buried bodies exists for the totality of naval deaths then there will only be about 900 naval graves.
Loftus William Jones won the Victoria Cross for his actions at Jutland. The commander of the 4th Destroyer Fleet, his task was to screen the 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron, part of the Grand Fleet. Although his ship, HMS Shark, was disabled by German gunfire, Jones kept up the attack until eventually forced to order 'abandon ship'. Of a crew of ninety-two, there were only six survivors.
It is thought that the badly wounded Jones went down with his ship. Over four months later, on 23 October 1916, his body was washed up on an island off the west coast of Sweden at the mouth of the Gullman fjord. Buried here with some ceremony, his body was eventually exhumed on 7 October 1961 and reburied in Kviberg Cemetery on the outskirts of Gothenburg.