Eliza “Millvina” Dean
Millvina Dean was only two months old when she boarded Titanic with her parents and elder brother, Bertram. The family was emigrating to start a new life in Kansas, where her father hoped to open a tobacconist shop. The Deans’ were on Titanic purely by chance, having transferred from another ship after a coal shortage incapacitated it. Millvina Dean was the youngest passenger on Titanic– and the youngest person to survive.
On the night of the disaster, Millvina’s father felt the collision with the iceberg. He left the family’s cabin to investigate and quickly returned to tell his wife to dress the children and go up on deck. Millvina, her mother, and her brother were all allocated places in Lifeboat 10. Because of her father’s prompt action, the family was amongst the first third-class passengers to escape. But Mr. Dean was not allowed to join them. He did not survive the sinking, and his body was never found.
Eventually, the remains of the Dean family returned to England on board the Adriatic. Here, Millvina became a tiny celebrity, with first and second-class passengers queuing to hold her. Such was the demand to hold the baby that officers had to place a ten-minute restriction on each passenger. Once back in England, the family settled in Southampton, where Millvina and her brother were educated courtesy of various pension funds. But Millvina was unaware she had even been on Titanic until her mother remarried she was eight years old.
It was not until she reached her early seventies that Millvina became a Titanic celebrity. She was asked to contribute to various documentaries – even though she could not possibly have remembered that momentous night. Millvina did, h0wever, become very outspoken when the British TV series, Doctor Who, made an episode that recreated the Titanic voyage in space. Millvina objected as she felt turning the tragedy into entertainment trivialized her father’s death. She passed on in 2009, a few years short of her hundredth birthday- the last survivor of Titanic to die.