Titanic last survivor sinks at 97

2002 AFP/Getty Images photo

More death, but this time it wasn't murder. This time a lady who almost died when she was a mere 2-months-old drifted away in her sleep...not unlike Rose, the fictional ship passenger played by British actress Kate Winslet in the 1997 movie "Titanic."

Millvina Dean, who as a baby was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat in the frigid North Atlantic, died Sunday, having been the last survivor of 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, AP reported.

She died in her sleep early Sunday at 97-years-old, her friend Gunter Babler told AP.

He said she had been hospitalized with pneumonia last week but she had recovered and returned to the home where she lived in Southampton, England, the city her family had tried to leave behind when it took the ship's ill-fated maiden voyage, bound for America.

Dean was just over 2 months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. The ship sank in less than three hours. She was one of 706 people--mostly women and children--who survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died.

Dean's family were steerage passengers setting out from the English port of Southampton for a new life in the U.S., AP reported. 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 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 its 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 British Broadcasting Corp. 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, AP reported.

"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, AP reported. 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 mementos to raise funds, prompting her friends to set up a fund to subsidize her nursing home fees. Leonardo DiCaprio and Winslet, the stars of the film "Titanic," pledged their support to the fund last month.

She began to take part in Titanic-related activities in the 1980s, after the discovery of the ship's wreck in 1985 sparked renewed interest in the disaster, AP reported.

Dean had no memories of the sinking and said she preferred it that way. "I wouldn't want to remember, really," she told AP in 1997. She opposed attempts to raise the wreck 13,000 feet from the sea bed.

"I don't want them to raise it, I think the other survivors would say exactly the same," she said. "That would be horrible."

The last survivor with memories of the sinking—and the last American survivor—was Lillian Asplund, who was 5 years old at the time. She died in May 2006 at the age of 99. The second-last survivor, Barbara Joyce West Dainton of Truro, from England, died in October 2007 age 96.

Sources: The Associated Press, USA Today
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