Millvina Dean

Millvina Dean

1912­–2009

On the freezing night of April 15, 1912, in the midst of chaos and panic, Bertram Dean wrapped his baby daughter in a mail sack and lifted her aboard a lifeboat of the sinking luxury liner RMS Titanic. Barely two hours later, he and 1,517 fellow passengers perished as the majestic ship plunged beneath the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Dean’s daughter, 9-week-old Millvina, would become the youngest, and ultimately last, survivor of the most infamous maritime disaster in history. She died at 97 on May 31, the 98th anniversary of the Titanic’s launch.

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Dean’s father, formerly a London pubkeeper, was en route with his wife, Georgetta, and two children to Kansas City, Mo., where he planned to open a tobacco shop, said the Los Angeles Times. They were initially booked on another ship. “But a national coal strike led to a cancellation, and they were offered a place on the Titanic as an alternative.” On their fourth night aboard, about 380 miles southeast of Newfoundland, “the family was awakened by a jolt” as the Titanic plowed into a mammoth iceberg. Bertram Dean went up on deck, quickly returned to his third-class cabin, and told Georgetta to dress the children warmly to go topside. “So many other people thought the Titanic would never sink, and they didn’t bother,” Millvina would later remark. “My father didn’t take a chance.” In the tumult of the evacuation, Millvina’s 23-month-old brother, Bertram Vere Dean, landed in a different lifeboat from his sister and mother. “They were reunited on the RMS Carpathia, the Cunard ocean liner that was the first to respond to the Titanic’s distress signals,” along with 704 other survivors.

Millvina Dean became an international sensation, albeit briefly, said The Washington Post. Abandoning plans to settle in America, her mother returned with the children to England two weeks after the disaster, aboard the RMS Adriatic. She was, the London Daily Mirror reported, “the pet of the liner during the voyage, and so keen was the rivalry between women to nurse this lovable mite of humanity that one of the officers decreed that first- and second-class passengers might hold her in turn for no more than 10 minutes.” But Millvina’s mother did not talk about the tragedy in front of her children, and “it was not until Millvina was 8 and her mother was planning to remarry that she discovered she had been a passenger.” Educated largely through funds from charity organizations, Millvina became a secretary for small businesses in Southampton, England, and later was a cartographer for the British government.

“For most of her life Dean had no contact with Titanic enthusiasts and rarely spoke about the disaster,” said the Associated Press. But after the wreck was finally located in 13,000 feet of water in 1985, she began participating in Titanic-related activities, attending gatherings and signing autographs. “I don’t want them to raise it,” she said. “I think other survivors would say exactly the same. That would be horrible.” The liner remains on the ocean floor. In 1997, Dean finally crossed the Atlantic again, aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2, to visit Kansas City, the site of her father’s unrealized quest. She said she found it “so lovely I could stay here five years.”

Dean never married and spent her last years in an English nursing home, whose fees she paid in part by selling some of her mother’s Titanic mementos. She also received assistance from James Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kate Winslet, the director and stars of the 1997 blockbuster Titanic—a movie she never saw, she said, because of the pain it would stir up. “Although I don’t remember him, I would still be emotional,” she said of her father. “I’d be thinking, How did he go down?”