Miss Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean

ith the death of Barbara Dainton on November 14, 2007, there remains but one living survivor of the Titanic disaster, Millvina Dean.*

She was a mere nine weeks old when rescued.  Even before she reached the Carpathia, everyone in lifeboat no. 13 wanted to hold the tiniest Titanic victim.

She had boarded Titanic at Southampton with her father Bertram Frank, mother Georgia Eva, and older brother Bertram.  Her father was taking his family to Wichita, Kansas, in hopes of opening a tobacconist shop.

With her father's death on Titanic, the rest of the family returned to England aboard the Adriatic.  Once again she was quite a celebrity.  Passengers queued up to be photographed holding her and several pictures were published in contemporary newspapers.

"[She] was 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 ten minutes" - Daily Mirror, 12 May 1912

Millvina knew nothing of her adventure until she was eight years old and her mother was planning to remarry.  She was never herself married, she drew maps for the British government during World War II, and she later worked at an engineering firm in Southampton.

With the discovery of the lost Titanic by Robert Ballard in 1985, she stepped into the spotlight again when she was in her seventies, appearing on radio and television documentaries and at conventions and exhibitions.  She was invited to cross the Atlantic once again in 1997, this time aboard the QE2.  Now she lives in a retirement home in Southampton where she stays busy still attending those conventions, appearing in documentaries and radio shows, signing autographs, and speaking to school groups.

With a twinkle in her eye she vows that, to this day, she never takes ice in her drinks.

When she recently heard that unscrupulous salvagers were selling Titanic artifacts on the black market, she made a public statement.

"My father is still on there. It's awfully wrong to take things especially from a ship where so many people perished. I don't suppose these people thought of that - they just thought of the money."

* Ellen Mary Walker, born on January 13, 1913, disputes this claim. It seems that her mother, who once held Baby Dean in lifeboat 13, was pregnant with Mary at the time of the sinking.  Therefore she believes that she too is a living Titanic survivor.