She Was The Youngest Survivor Of The Titanic Tragedy, Yet She Never Did Watch The Movie Starring Kate Winslet And Leonardo DiCaprio
There are a lot of history buffs out in the world who love to learn about the sinking of the RMS Titanic. But how many people take the time to learn about the survivors?
Millvina Dean was the last living survivor of the Titanic, who passed away at the age of 97 in 2009. This is her story.
Millvina was the youngest person to board the Titanic in 1912 at 9-weeks-old. She boarded with her mother, father, and older brother. Her family boarded the ship in Southampton, England, to move to the United States. They had plans to live in Kansas City, where Millvina’s father had family that owned a tobacco business he was going to work for.
When the Titanic hit the iceberg less than one week after setting sail, Millvina credits her survival to her father, who could feel the ship shudder after the collision.
Many passengers were still under the impression that the ship wouldn’t sink during the first few moments of chaos, but Millvina told the Los Angeles Times that her father “didn’t take a chance.”
Millvina, her mother, and her brother were all put into lifeboats. Tragically, her father died along with over a thousand other passengers when the boat sank in the wee hours of the morning on April 15th, 1912.
Millvina and her mother were on the same lifeboat while her brother ended up on a different one, but they all reunited on the RMS Carpathia, the ocean liner that was the first to respond to the sinking.
The three remaining members of the Dean family spent a few weeks recovering in a New York City hospital before her mother decided to take them back to England aboard the Adriatic to live at her parent’s house.
The three of them were physically okay for the most part, except for her mother, who would suffer from intense headaches at least once a day after the sinking.
Francis Godolphin Osbourne Stuart – pictured above is the Titanic
Millvina and her brother could go to school as kids after receiving some money from the Titanic Relief Fund that was established to support survivors. Millvina’s mother chose not to tell her details about their time on the Titanic until she remarried and Millvina was 8-years-old.
Because she was such a young infant when she boarded the Titanic, Millvina told reporters for the Associated Press that the biggest impact it had on her life was that she remained an English woman instead of becoming an American woman.
When Millvina was older, she attended secretarial school and worked as a mapmaker for the British Army in London during WWII. After the war, she moved back to Southampton, where she worked as a secretary in an engineering firm. She never married or had children of her own. Her mother, Eva Georgette, passed away in 1975 at 96. Her brother, Bertram, passed away in 1992.
She avoided talking about her experience on the Titanic to the public until 1987 when she attended a memorial service for the 75th anniversary of the sinking in Southampton. Then, everyone wanted to know more about her. So Millvina began attending more Titanic-related events and started agreeing to interviews about her life.
I’m sure you’re wondering if she ever saw the iconic 1997 film Titanic. Well, she was invited to a screening along with England’s Prince Charles but declined to go. The tragic depiction of the ship sinking and the passengers struggling to survive would have made her think too much about her father and what he had to endure.
Millvina continued attending Titanic-related events until the 1990s and even got the opportunity to successfully travel from Southampton to New York City in 1998 aboard the reputable ship, the Queen Elizabeth II.
In the early 2000s, Millvina sadly broke her hip, so to raise funds for a decent care home to live in, she auctioned off some of her family’s Titanic memorabilia, including one of their suitcases that they brought on the ship that sold for over $18,000.
The two stars of the Titanic film, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, also donated money to help with Millvina’s care home fees. In May 2009, Millvina died in a care home in Ashurst, Hampshire, England. Not only did she make history as the last living Titanic survivor, but she led a great life.
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