Thomas Byles in ministry and his final hours on board the RMS Titanic. Thomas Byles Thomas Roussel Davids Byles (26 February 1870 – 15 April 1912) was an English Catholic priest who was a passenger aboard the "RMS Titanic" on its maiden voyage when it sank after striking an iceberg during the night of 15 April 1912. He was reported as being amidst the throng of trapped passengers on the ship's rear deck in its final moments of descent, audibly praying. Thomas Byles was born Roussel Davids Byles in Leeds, Yorkshire, the eldest of seven children of the Reverend Alfred Holden Byles,
RMS Titanic in popular culture romantic tragedies with personal heroism. It has inspired many moral, social and political metaphors and is regularly invoked as a cautionary tale of the limitations of modernity and ambition. The RMS "Titanic" has been commemorated in a wide variety of ways in the century after she sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912. As D. Brian Anderson has put it, the sinking of "Titanic" has "become a part of our mythology, firmly entrenched in the collective consciousness, and the stories will continue to be retold not because they need to be retold, but because we need to tell them."