I survived the sinking of Titanic

MONDAY, April 15, 1912, is a day that will be forever writ large in the history of Southampton.

The sinking of Titanic has haunted generations in a city that was home to so many of those that died on that fateful night.

Five hundred residents lost their lives when the "unsinkable" liner went down, leaving every street in Southampton with at least one family in some way scarred by the shock waves of the disaster.

Monday, April 15 will mark the 90th anniversary of the tragedy that in total saw 1,523 lives taken by the ice-cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

The fascination with the maritime disaster - now retouched with Hollywood gloss - has ensured that the anniversary will be commemorated across the globe.

Here, on our own doorsteps, one woman will find a quiet moment to reflect on an event that has shaped her life.

Millvina Dean is the youngest of the 705 survivors of the RMS Titanic.

Now 90 years old herself, Millvina is today one of only four passengers still alive.

Not surprisingly, this year she has been much in demand by Titanic enthusiasts holding conventions, exhibitions and services as far afield as China, Switzerland and, of course, America.

Despite the fact that the sinking took away her father before she even had a chance to know him, the resilient survivor focuses only on the positive.

Millvina, who lives in Ashurst in the New Forest but has travelled the world on the back of her Titanic connection, said: "I have no regrets. I've found it all most interesting and I always like meeting people.

"Before they found the wreck I was just living an ordinary simple life."

Perhaps her stoic attitude to the tragedy owes much to the fact that she did not even know she had been aboard the ill-fated vessel until eight years after it went down.

It was then that her mother Georgetta, who was about to marry for a second time, told Millvina the truth.

"I was never brought up with the Titanic at all because my mother was so broken-hearted at losing my father that she would never speak about it.

"She had not been married that long - about four years, I think - and she adored her husband.

"When she told me it was quite extraordinary. I had always looked on my grandfather as my father. I can't say I was upset. I was surprised by it all but I cannot remember saying much about it," explained Millvina.

To unfold the Dean family's story alongside that is to put a human face on a tragedy that is fast being overtaken by image and myth.

For them, it began with Bertram Dean's desire to take his wife and two children - Millvina, who was just nine-weeks-old, and toddler Bertram Vere - to a new life in America.

Bertram sold up, bought a house in Wichita, Kansas, and hoped to open a tobacconist shop.

"We had relations in Kansas who wrote to my father who said we would make more money in America.

"I recently saw the house we would have lived in there. It was lovely.

"I imagine my father had spent all the money we had on getting it. That was why we were in steerage," said Millvina.

On Wednesday, April 10, the family - who had been booked on another White Star liner but were transferred to the Titanic because of the coal strike - boarded at Southampton.

At noon Titanic's whistles blew, the visitors debarked and the ship steamed away from port.

It must have been an amazing sight for Georgetta's parents, who had come down to the dock in their horse-and-trap to see them off.

Titanic was one of a trio of ships designed to show how travelling by sea had been revolutionised - not only in terms of engineering achievement, but in terms of luxury.

The price of crossing the Atlantic for first class passengers was £870 and, for that, they received the very best that any hotel on land could provide.

Even third class passengers like the Deans enjoyed a comfort surpassing that to be found in steerage on other liners.

It was a comfort they were able to enjoy during the uneventful days before tragedy struck.

After an early near miss with the berthed liner New York, which had broken her moorings and drifted perilously close to Titanic, the initial stages of the journey went as planned with scheduled pick-ups at Cherbourg, France, and Queenstown in Ireland.

At the latter stop-off, Georgetta sent her parents a postcard, which read: "Dear Mother, just a card to say we are enjoying ourselves fine up to now. Little baby was very restless. With best love, Ettie."

On April 11, with just over 2,200 passengers and crew, she set sail for New York.

Three days later, RMS Titanic was steaming towards Newfoundland, sailing at 23 knots.

Despite its crew being warned of icebergs a total of six times, at 11.40pm on April 14 Titanic steamed into a huge black mass of ice.

Scraping against the iceberg for ten seconds on her starboard side, Titanic was left with six thin slits that were to seal its fate.

Many of the passengers had no idea the ship was in grave danger.

But Bertram Dean, woken by the sound of the collision, left his cabin to investigate and returned to tell his wife to get the sleeping children dressed and up on deck.

"A lot of people thought the ship was unsinkable and stayed in their cabins but he wanted us out straightaway," said Millvina.

There on deck, for the most part, only women and children were allowed to get in the lifeboats.

The mounting chaos saw the few lifeboats there were on board the liner lowered into the water with far fewer people in than they were able to take.

By 2am, after Titanic's bow had plunged beneath the surface, hundreds of passengers were praying, crying and jumping for their lives.

Seventeen minutes later the stern rose almost vertically into the sky before sinking below the surface of the water.

The cries and screams of those struggling in the freezing water rang in the ears of those in the safety of the lifeboats.

To this day Millvina does not know whether her father managed to jump over the side of Titanic or whether he was taken down to the ocean floor with the wreck.

She was among the lucky ones.

Together with her mother, she had been placed into lifeboat 13 by Bertram who told his wife that he would follow later.

But toddler Bertram Vere was not with them.

"He was separated from Mother in the crowd and the chaos. I know that she was reunited with him when we were all picked up by the Carpathia. Mother brought us back on the Adriatic three weeks later," said Millvina.

It was on that journey home that Millvina first experienced the fascination her role as Titanic survivor would provoke.

Amazed that such a tiny baby could have survived the ordeal, first- and second-class passengers queued to hold her, taking photographs, many of which appeared in newspapers at the time.

Indeed one national paper reported on May 12, 1912, that she "was the pet of the liner during the voyage and so keen was the rivalry between women to nurse this loveable mite of humanity that one of the officers decreed that first and second class passengers might hold her in turn for no more than ten minutes."

It was not until decades later that Millvina was to experience such intense interest again, with the 1985 discovery of the wreck and the release of the 1997 Hollywood blockbuster.

Now, on the eve of the sinking's ninetieth anniversary, Millvina happily accepts she will never be able to escape the legacy of the Titanic.

Millvina, who is planning to put her experiences down on paper for the first time, said: "I think the interest will go on as it has done for all these years.

"There's something about it, some type of myth, that will always have people's attention."