Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the legendary ocean liner Titanic, which sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 after colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic, died today. She was 97.
She died at a nursing home near Southampton, England, the port where she and her family boarded the ship on its only voyage, according to Charles Haas, the president of the Titanic International Society. Her death came on the 98th anniversary of the launching of the Titanic on May 31, 1911.
“She was a remarkable, sparkling lady,” Haas said. “She knew her place in history and was always willing to share her story with others, especially children. She was the last living link to the story.”
Dean was about 8 weeks old when she and her family set sail, third class, on the luxury ocean liner on April 10, 1912. Five days later, she was among about 700 passengers and crew rescued off the coast of Newfoundland. She and her mother, Georgetta, 32, and her brother Bertram, 23 months old, were put into lifeboats. Her father, Bertram, 27, stayed on board the ship and was among more than 1,500 passengers and crew members who went down with the Titanic.
At age 8 her mother told her what happened. “It was so awful for her that she never wanted to speak about it,” Dean said of her mother in a 2002 interview with the Irish News. Georgetta Dean suffered severe headaches for years after the ship’s sinking.
Before the family left England, Bertram and Georgetta Dean sold the pub they owned in London. They planned to sail to New York City and continue by land to Kansas City, Mo., where they were going to open a tobacco shop.
They did not expect to travel on the Titanic but had booked on another ship that was also owned by White Star. A national coal strike led to a cancellation, and they were offered a place on the Titanic as an alternative.
On their fourth night at sea, April 14, the family was awakened by a jolt when the ship sideswiped the iceberg that cut into the ship.
Bertram Dean went to see what was wrong and returned to tell his wife to dress the children warmly and take them to the lifeboat deck.
“I think it was my father who saved us,” Dean said in 2002. “So many other people thought the Titanic would never sink, and they didn’t bother. My father didn’t take a chance.”
In the confusion, Dean and her mother were separated from her brother, who was put in a different lifeboat. They were reunited on the Carpathia, the Cunard ocean liner that was the first to respond to the Titanic’s distress signals and took in all the lifeboat passengers.
Dean, her mother and brother sailed to New York City on the rescue ship and spent several weeks in a hospital. Georgetta Dean then returned to England, sailing on the Adriatic.
Passengers who knew what the family had been through lined up to hold baby Millvina, the youngest survivor of the Titanic. To keep the line moving, a ship’s officer ordered that no one could hold the baby for more than 10 minutes.
Asked what difference the incident made in her life, Dean was never sentimental. “It changed my life because I would have been American now instead of English,” she told The Associated Press in 2002 without further comment.
Georgetta Dean took her children to live with her parents in their home near Southampton. Millvina and her brother were educated with help from a Titanic Relief Fund established in England for the surviving family members of victims of the wreck.
Dean attended secretarial school. During World War II, she moved to London and worked as a map maker for the British Army. She later returned to Southampton and was a secretary at an engineering firm. For many years, she lived in a house in nearby New Forest. She never married.
In 1998, Dean finally completed the sea voyage from Southampton to New York City that she had set out to make 86 years earlier. She traveled on the Queen Elizabeth II, compliments of Michael Rudd, a Titanic enthusiast and travel agent in Missouri. “She hadn’t been on a ship since 1912,” Rudd said in a 2007 interview with the Times. “People crowded around her; they just wanted to touch her.”
As part of that same trip, Dean went to Missouri to see the house where her parents planned to begin their new life, an experience she described as eerie.
She refused to watch “Titanic,” the Academy Award-winning movie of 1997, even though she was invited to a screening with Prince Charles of England. “I’d wonder what my father was doing, what he did,” she said, referring to the last scenes of the film.
Dean’s mother died in 1975, at 95. Her brother died in 1992 on the 80th anniversary of the ship’s sinking. He was 81.
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