Unsinkable Violet

Less than a third of the passengers and crew aboard the Titanic survived when the ship sank to the bottom of the ocean.

Lots of things went wrong that day, and plenty has been written about those things. Maybe one day, someone will make a major Hollywood movie about this ship sinking, I don’t know.

Among those 706 survivors were 214 crew members. The survivors had faced even worse odds than the passengers, with more than three quarters of the cooks, sailors, and officers ultimately finding their graves at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Violet Jessop was one of these survivors. She was a stewardess on the Titanic, predominantly focused on the first class passengers. She would tend to their needs, including serving meals and making sure the ultra-rich folks were comfy.

As the ship began to sink, the most British thing imaginable happened to Jessop: she was ordered to stand on deck and—get this—remain calm.

After helping passengers figure out where to go to survive, she herself got into a lifeboat, which began to be lowered down to the water. An officer on board handed a baby to her, absolutely desperate for any chance to save this young life. Violet kept the baby alive and safe until they could both be rescued the next morning.

Now, that’s remarkable enough! If that was the only event from Violet’s life of any note, she could tell everyone, "Remember that one time I was on the Titanic when it sunk, and I saved that baby?”

However, this was not Violet’s first time living through a maritime disaster, nor would it be her last.

Six months earlier, she had been hired on as a stewardess for Titanic’s older sister-ship, the Olympic. This was one of the largest ships ever built, and everything was state-of-the-art.

The Olympic was heading out with just its crew, practicing maneuvers and making sure the vessel was seaworthy. At the same time, a British warship called the HMS Hawke was returning to port near the Isle of Wight, off the coast of England. Both ships were in the same narrow channel.

The HMS Hawke maneuvered to pass the much bigger Olympic, a common enough move in situations like this. The two ships were passing by one another in relatively close proximity, but this wasn’t typically an issue.

It was an issue today. The Olympic was so much larger than the Hawke that it warped the water, creating suction and drawing the smaller ship in, like a larger star devouring a smaller one. When the Hawke’s bow struck the Olympic’s starboard quarter, it caused a nasty gash in both vessels, but the smaller vessel nearly capsized.

Violet Jessop was able to stay on board working while repairs were done, and perhaps she walked away with the feeling that a ship as big as the Olympic was unsinkable. On the other hand, maybe she was deeply rattled by this scary event. All we know for sure is that she ended up on the Titanic just six months later, saving an infant’s life (and probably other passengers).

Jessop’s story is remarkable so far, but there’s more.

In 1916, she found herself working as a nurse on board the The HMHS (His Majesty's Hospital Ship) Britannic, which was eerily similar to both the Titanic and the Olympic. That’s because it was the third and final Olympic class ocean liner, a group of the largest ships in the ocean at the time.

HMHS Britannic had been requisitioned by the British Admiralty, then converted into a hospital ship so that it could contribute to the war effort. On November 21, 1916, the Britannic felt a huge explosion after crashing into a mine. The ship began to sink rapidly.

There was nobody better prepared than Jessop. She sprung into action, helping with evacuation and keeping everyone calm. So far, so good, but when she was escaping in the lifeboat and trying to navigate away from the sinking ship, the Britannic’s propellers created powerful suction.

Jessop and the others in the lifeboat faced a grim decision: stay in the boat and be dragged underneath, or jump out into the open water of the Aegean. They jumped, and Violet suffered a head injury while escaping… but she was rescued (again) by another lifeboat, scooped back up into the realm of the living.

After surviving three major maritime disasters, Violet is often remembered as the “Unsinkable Stewardess.” There were three Olympic-class vessels built, and she was on board all three when they had their disasters.

I’m rather pleased to report that Jessop lived until age 83, dying in 1971. You can’t make this stuff up.