Last Titanic survivor dies

[Flashermac]

Bangkok Post

1 Jun 2009

 

 

London - The last survivor of the sinking of the Titanic, Millvina Dean, died on the 98th anniversary of the launch of the ship, aged 97.

 

She died Sunday in her sleep, her friend Gunter Babler said, at her nursing home in southern England.

 

A staff nurse at Woodlands Ridge Nursing Home in Southampton said no one could comment until administrators came on duty Monday morning.

 

Dean was just over two months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. The ship sank in less than three hours.

 

Dean was one of 706 people who survived, most of them women and children. Her father was among the 1,517 who died.

 

Dean's family were steerage passengers setting out from Southampton for a new life in the United States. Her father had sold his pub and hoped to open a tobacconists' shop in Kansas City, Missouri, where his wife had relatives.

 

Initially scheduled to travel on another ship, the family was transferred to the Titanic because of a coal strike. Four days out of port and about 600 kilometers (380 miles) southeast of Newfoundland, the ship hit an iceberg. The impact buckled the Titanic's hull and sent sea water pouring into six of her supposedly watertight compartments.

 

Dean said her father's quick actions saved his family. He felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its third-class quarters and toward the lifeboat that would take them to safety. "That's partly what saved us - because he was so quick. Some people thought the ship was unsinkable," Dean told the BBC in 1998.

 

Wrapped in a sack against the Atlantic chill, Dean was lowered into a lifeboat. Her 2-year-old brother Bertram and her mother Georgette also survived.

 

"She said goodbye to my father and he said he'd be along later," Dean said in 2002. "I was put into lifeboat 13. It was a bitterly cold night and eventually we were picked up by the Carpathia."

 

The family was taken to New York, then returned to England with other survivors aboard the rescue ship Adriatic. Dean did not know she had been aboard the Titanic until she was 8 years old, when her mother, about to remarry, told her about her father's death. Her mother, always reticent about the tragedy, died in 1975 at age 95.

 

Born in London on Feb. 2, 1912, Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean spent most of her life in the English seaside town of Southampton, Titanic's home port. She never married, and worked as a secretary, retiring in 1972 from an engineering firm.

 

She moved into a nursing home after breaking her hip about three years ago. She had to sell several Titanic mementoes to raise funds, prompting her friends to set up a fund to subsidise her nursing home fees. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the stars of the film Titanic, pledged their support to the fund last month. (Compiled from agency reports)