EVA HART
At left is a picture of the crowd awaiting the ship's survivors in New York City. Eva Hart was seven years old at the time of the Titanic disaster. A second-class passenger with her parents, Eva lost her father in the tragedy. She went on to live a vibrant life, and spoke frequently about the sinking of Titanic and her approach to life. "People I meet always seem surprised that I do not hesitate to travel by train, car, airplane or ship when necessary. It is almost as if they expect me to be permanently quivering in my shoes at the thought of a journey. If I acted like that I would have died of fright many years ago—life has to be lived irrespective of the possible dangers and tragedies lurking round the corner." (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)
Elizabeth Shutes
"Suddenly a queer quivering ran under me, apparently the whole length of the ship. Startled by the very strangeness of the shivering motion, I sprang to the floor. With too perfect a trust in that mighty vessel I again lay down. Some one knocked at my door, and the voice of a friend said: 'Come quickly to my cabin; an iceberg has just passed our window; I know we have just struck one.'
No confusion, no noise of any kind, one could believe no danger imminent. Our stewardess came and said she could learn nothing. Looking out into the companionway I saw heads appearing asking questions from half-closed doors. All sepulchrally still, no excitement. I sat down again. My friend was by this time dressed; still her daughter and I talked on, Margaret pretending to eat a sandwich. Her hand shook so that the bread kept parting company from the chicken. Then I saw she was frightened, and for the first time I was too, but why get dressed, as no one had given the slightest hint of any possible danger? An officer's cap passed the door. I asked: 'Is there an accident or danger of any kind? 'None, so far as I know', was his courteous answer, spoken quietly and most kindly. This same officer then entered a cabin a little distance down the companionway and, by this time distrustful of everything, I listened intently, and distinctly heard, 'We can keep the water out for a while.' Then, and not until then, did I realize the horror of an accident at sea. Now it was too late to dress; no time for a waist, but a coat and skirt were soon on; slippers were quicker than shoes; the stewardess put on our life-preservers, and we were just ready when Mr Roebling came to tell us he would take us to our friend's mother, who was waiting above ...
No laughing throng, but on either side [of the staircases] stand quietly,
bravely, the stewards, all equipped with the white, ghostly life-preservers.
Always the thing one tries not to see even crossing a ferry. Now only pale
faces, each form strapped about with those white bars. So gruesome a scene. We
passed on. The awful good-byes. The quiet look of hope in the brave men's eyes
as the wives were put into the lifeboats. Nothing escaped one at this fearful
moment. We left from the sun deck, seventy-five feet above the water. Mr Case
and Mr Roebling, brave American men, saw us to the lifeboat, made no effort to
save themselves, but stepped back on deck. Later they went to an honoured
grave.
Our lifeboat, with thirty-six in it, began lowering to the sea. This was done
amid the greatest confusion. Rough seamen all giving different orders. No
officer aboard. As only one side of the ropes worked, the lifeboat at one time
was in such a position that it seemed we must capsize in mid-air. At last the
ropes worked together, and we drew nearer and nearer the black, oily water. The
first touch of our lifeboat on that black sea came to me as a last good-bye to
life, and so we put off - a tiny boat on a great sea - rowed away from what had
been a safe home for five days.
The first wish on the part of all was to stay near the Titanic. We all
felt so much safer near the ship. Surely such a vessel could not sink. I
thought the danger must be exaggerated, and we could all be taken aboard again.
But surely the outline of that great, good ship was growing less. The bow of
the boat was getting black. Light after light was disappearing, and now those
rough seamen put to their oars and we were told to hunt under seats, any place,
anywhere, for a lantern, a light of any kind. Every place was empty. There was
no water - no stimulant of any kind. Not a biscuit - nothing to keep us alive
had we drifted long...
Sitting by me in the lifeboat were a mother and daughter.The mother had left a husband on the Titanic, and the daughter a father and husband, and while we were near the other boats those two stricken women would
call out a name and ask, 'Are you there?' 'No,'would come back the awful
answer, but these brave women never lost courage, forgot their own sorrow,
telling me to sit close to them to keep warm... The life-preservers helped to
keep us warm, but the night was bitter cold, and it grew colder and colder, and
just before dawn, the coldest, darkest hour of all, no help seemed possible...
...The stars slowly disappeared, and in their place came the faint pink glow
of another day. Then I heard, 'A light, a ship.' I could not, would not, look
while there was a bit of doubt, but kept my eyes away. All night long I had
heard, 'A light!' Each time it proved to be one of our other lifeboats, someone
lighting a piece of paper, anything they could find to burn, and now I could
not believe. Someone found a newspaper; it was lighted and held up. Then I
looked and saw a ship. A ship bright with lights; strong and steady she waited,
and we were to be saved. A straw hat was offered it would burn longer. That
same ship that had come to save us might run us down. But no; she is still. The
two, the ship and the dawn, came together, a living painting."
References:
Elizabeth Shutes' account first appeared in: Gracie, Archibold, The Truth About the Titanic (1913), reprinted in: Foster, John Wilson (editor), The Titanic Reader (1999); Lord, Walter, A Night to Remember (1955); Davie, Michael, Titanic: The Death and Life of a Legend (1986)
MILLVINA DEAN
LONDON — 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. She died Sunday at a nursing home in Southampton, the English port from which the Titanic embarked on its fateful voyage, according to staff at the home.
She was 97 and had been in poor health for several weeks.
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 fact that Ms. Dean, in an interview at the Southampton nursing home last month, attributed partly to the fact that the Dean family was traveling in third class, or steerage, as the cheapest form of passage was known.
Some versions of the disaster have contended that the crew was under orders to give priority aboard lifeboats to first- and second-class passengers, and even that doors were kept locked that would have given people in steerage faster access to the lifeboats through parts of the ship dedicated to higher-paying passengers. Though these assertions have been disputed, Ms. Dean said that she believed them to be true, and that her father might otherwise have survived.
“It couldn't happen nowadays, and it’s so wrong, so unjust,” she said, emphasizing her point with a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem about class distinctions in the British Army in colonial India: “What do they say? ‘Judy O’Grady and the colonel’s lady are sisters under the skin.’ That’s the way it should have been that night, but it wasn't.”
Mr. Dean, 29, who had been running a pub in London, was taking his family to a new life in Kansas City, Mo., where a cousin who immigrated before him had helped buy a tobacconist’s shop that Mr. Dean planned to run. But with the family breadwinner gone, his widow spent only a week in New York before returning with her children to England.
Millvina Dean — a name she used throughout her life, though she was christened Elizabeth Gladys Dean — spent her early years on a farm owned by her grandfather, a Southampton veterinarian.
She never married and spent her working life as an assistant and secretary in small businesses in Southampton. Among other jobs, she worked at a greyhound racing track and, during World War II, in the British government’s map-making office. For more than 20 years, until she retired, she worked in an engineering office.
The celebrity that came from being part of the disaster, and eventually living almost a century beyond it, was something she always had trouble grasping. She told visitors in later years that she was “such an ordinary person” that she found it surprising that anybody took much interest in her.
In the nursing home interview, she said that for decades after the sinking, she never spoke of it or her part in it to people she met or worked with. She said she had not thought it appropriate, partly because she remembered nothing about it and partly because she did not want to be seen as drawing attention to herself.
But that changed, she said, after Sept. 1, 1985, when a joint French-American team located the wreck of the Titanic, in water more than 2 miles deep, 370 miles east of Mistaken Point, Newfoundland. That set off a wave of interest in the ship and its fate that crested in 1996 with James Cameron’s blockbuster movie “Titanic,” starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
“Nobody knew about me and the Titanic, to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either,” she said. “But then they found the wreck, and after they found the wreck, they found me.”
In the last 20 years of her life, she went to gatherings in the United States, Canada and a handful of European countries to participate in events related to the sinking.
Ms. Dean said all she knew of what happened during the sinking she had learned from her mother: “She told me that they heard a tremendous crash, and that my father went up on deck, then came back down again and said, ‘Get the children up and take them to the deck as soon as possible, because the ship has struck an iceberg.’ ”
On deck, mother and daughter were separated from father and son, and it was only at daylight, hours after they boarded the Carpathia, that she and her mother were reunited with her brother, Bertram Vere Dean. A carpenter, he died in 1997.
After failing health forced her to move to the nursing home, Ms. Dean, struggling to pay the residential cost of nearly $5,000 a month, began selling her Titanic mementos at auction, including a canvas mailbag that her mother used to carry the few belongings the family acquired during its week in New York.
She had hoped that the mailbag would prove to be the one used to lower her into the lifeboat, but when experts decided it was not, it brought only £1,500, about $2,400.
“Such a pity,” Ms. Dean said in the interview, with a quick smile. “If it had been the mailbag they used for me, it would have been £100,000!”
In recent weeks, news accounts of her plight caught the attention of Ms. Winslet and Mr. DiCaprio, and they, together with Mr. Cameron, contributed to the Millvina Fund, set up to meet the nursing home costs.
Ms. Dean died, on the 98th anniversary of the ship’s launching, without ever having seen the movie, which she attributed to reluctance to be reminded of what happened to her father. “It would have made me think, did he jump overboard or did he go down with the ship?’” she said. “I would have been very emotional.”
As for her own survival, she said that as a “very down-to-earth person,” she had little time for the metaphysical speculations urged on her over the years about why fate, or divine providence, had chosen her to survive the sinking as an infant, then allowed her to outlive everyone else who escaped.
“Heaven and hell — how can you believe in something up in the sky?” she said. Then, smiling again, she added, “Still, I’d love to be proved wrong.”
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: May 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/world/europe/01dean.html
She was 97 and had been in poor health for several weeks.
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 fact that Ms. Dean, in an interview at the Southampton nursing home last month, attributed partly to the fact that the Dean family was traveling in third class, or steerage, as the cheapest form of passage was known.
Some versions of the disaster have contended that the crew was under orders to give priority aboard lifeboats to first- and second-class passengers, and even that doors were kept locked that would have given people in steerage faster access to the lifeboats through parts of the ship dedicated to higher-paying passengers. Though these assertions have been disputed, Ms. Dean said that she believed them to be true, and that her father might otherwise have survived.
“It couldn't happen nowadays, and it’s so wrong, so unjust,” she said, emphasizing her point with a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem about class distinctions in the British Army in colonial India: “What do they say? ‘Judy O’Grady and the colonel’s lady are sisters under the skin.’ That’s the way it should have been that night, but it wasn't.”
Mr. Dean, 29, who had been running a pub in London, was taking his family to a new life in Kansas City, Mo., where a cousin who immigrated before him had helped buy a tobacconist’s shop that Mr. Dean planned to run. But with the family breadwinner gone, his widow spent only a week in New York before returning with her children to England.
Millvina Dean — a name she used throughout her life, though she was christened Elizabeth Gladys Dean — spent her early years on a farm owned by her grandfather, a Southampton veterinarian.
She never married and spent her working life as an assistant and secretary in small businesses in Southampton. Among other jobs, she worked at a greyhound racing track and, during World War II, in the British government’s map-making office. For more than 20 years, until she retired, she worked in an engineering office.
The celebrity that came from being part of the disaster, and eventually living almost a century beyond it, was something she always had trouble grasping. She told visitors in later years that she was “such an ordinary person” that she found it surprising that anybody took much interest in her.
In the nursing home interview, she said that for decades after the sinking, she never spoke of it or her part in it to people she met or worked with. She said she had not thought it appropriate, partly because she remembered nothing about it and partly because she did not want to be seen as drawing attention to herself.
But that changed, she said, after Sept. 1, 1985, when a joint French-American team located the wreck of the Titanic, in water more than 2 miles deep, 370 miles east of Mistaken Point, Newfoundland. That set off a wave of interest in the ship and its fate that crested in 1996 with James Cameron’s blockbuster movie “Titanic,” starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.
“Nobody knew about me and the Titanic, to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either,” she said. “But then they found the wreck, and after they found the wreck, they found me.”
In the last 20 years of her life, she went to gatherings in the United States, Canada and a handful of European countries to participate in events related to the sinking.
Ms. Dean said all she knew of what happened during the sinking she had learned from her mother: “She told me that they heard a tremendous crash, and that my father went up on deck, then came back down again and said, ‘Get the children up and take them to the deck as soon as possible, because the ship has struck an iceberg.’ ”
On deck, mother and daughter were separated from father and son, and it was only at daylight, hours after they boarded the Carpathia, that she and her mother were reunited with her brother, Bertram Vere Dean. A carpenter, he died in 1997.
After failing health forced her to move to the nursing home, Ms. Dean, struggling to pay the residential cost of nearly $5,000 a month, began selling her Titanic mementos at auction, including a canvas mailbag that her mother used to carry the few belongings the family acquired during its week in New York.
She had hoped that the mailbag would prove to be the one used to lower her into the lifeboat, but when experts decided it was not, it brought only £1,500, about $2,400.
“Such a pity,” Ms. Dean said in the interview, with a quick smile. “If it had been the mailbag they used for me, it would have been £100,000!”
In recent weeks, news accounts of her plight caught the attention of Ms. Winslet and Mr. DiCaprio, and they, together with Mr. Cameron, contributed to the Millvina Fund, set up to meet the nursing home costs.
Ms. Dean died, on the 98th anniversary of the ship’s launching, without ever having seen the movie, which she attributed to reluctance to be reminded of what happened to her father. “It would have made me think, did he jump overboard or did he go down with the ship?’” she said. “I would have been very emotional.”
As for her own survival, she said that as a “very down-to-earth person,” she had little time for the metaphysical speculations urged on her over the years about why fate, or divine providence, had chosen her to survive the sinking as an infant, then allowed her to outlive everyone else who escaped.
“Heaven and hell — how can you believe in something up in the sky?” she said. Then, smiling again, she added, “Still, I’d love to be proved wrong.”
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: May 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/world/europe/01dean.html