Titanic's Violet Jessop

In spite of the dark memories they might carry, people who survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic were statistically very lucky.  Out of the 2201 people on board (and that number varies between accounts), only about 32% made it through the disaster. Crew members were even less fortunate; less than a quarter of them survived that night.

But statistics hardly tell the story of Titanic and the people who lived and died. As the coverage of Titanic grew, the personal stories of the Ship’s cast began to capture the world’s attention. 

 The first-class was made up of the moneyed elite, but they weren’t able to escape the horror of the sinking Ship. 100 years later, a modern public doesn’t have the same attachments to the once-famous, and the stories of the second and third-class travelers are just as poignant and gripping.

Violet Constance Jessop was an Argentinean-born Irish girl who survived a dangerous bout of tuberculosis when she was young.  Her father died, as did three of her siblings. With a sick mother and five siblings to provide for, Violet left her home in Great Britain to work as a stewardess.  Her job with the White Star Line required 17-hour workdays on the RMS Olympic. At first, Violet’s beauty kept employers from wanting to hire her as they feared romantic complications with passengers.

On September 20, 1911, Violet’s ship, Olympic, collided with the HMS Hawke off the Isle of Wight.  Olympic made it back to port with just two compartments flooded, and Violet survived the accident.

Less than a year later, Violet boarded the RMS Titanic as a stewardess. She was one of the first to leave the Ship after an officer on board left a forgotten baby in her care.

Despite the two separate wrecks Violet Jessop survived, she served on HMS Britannic as a nurse for the British Red Cross. In 1916,Britannic struck a mine left by a German U-Boat in the Aegean Sea.  She was sucked under water towards the sinking ship, and smashed her head on the ship’s keel before she was rescued by a near by lifeboat.

Violet Jessop retired at age 63 after having survived three shipwrecks and 42 years at sea. 

Read more about Titanic on our Stories From The Titanic blog...