What an amazing start to a young life. Millvina Dean, who as an infant passenger aboard the Titanic was lowered into a lifeboat in a canvas mail sack and lived to become the ship’s last survivor, died Sunday at a nursing home in Southampton, the English port from which the Titanic embarked on its fateful voyage.
She was 97 and had been in poor health for some time, followers say.
The youngest of the ship’s 705 survivors, Ms. Dean was only 9 weeks old when the Titanic hit an iceberg in waters off Newfoundland on the night of April 14, 1912, setting off what was then considered the greatest maritime disaster in history.
She survived with her mother, Georgetta, and 2-year-old brother when they, like many other survivors, were picked up by the liner Carpathia and taken to New York.
Her father, Bertram Dean, was among more than 1,500 passengers and crew members who died in the sinking. A brother survived the sinking and was later reunited with his family. He died in 1997.
Plucky and profound, Ms. Dean attributed her father's death the night of the sinking to the fact that the family had been travelling in steerage and were not given the same chances for survival as more advantaged passengers - though many of them perished, as well.
A mail sack believed to have been the one the crew of the Titanic used to lower her into a lifeboat and safety was later found to have come into the family well after the sinking and could not have come from the ship. Nevertheless, it later sold for $2,000 as Ms. Dean auctioned her possessions to pay for her care.
"Just think," she once said. "If it had been from the ship it would have been worth a hundred thousand pounds."
Actors who portrayed passengers aboard the ill-fated ship in a hit movie about the sinking later contributed to a fund created to help Ms. Dean in her later years.
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