Titanic to Concorde

I read the other day about the death at the age of 97 of Elizabeth Gladys Millvina Dean. Millvina as she preferred to be known was the last living survivor from the sinking of the RMS Titanic which occurred during the night of 14 /15th April 1912.

The Dean family, consisting of parents Bertram and Georgette and elder brother Bertram had boarded RMS Titanic at Southampton and were en route for what they thought of as a 'Better Life' in Wichita Kansas where Bertram Dean had family and he had planned to open a tobacco shop.

Millvina was only eight or nine weeks old at the time of the sinking and as she explained many times in interviews that she was too small to be fitted into a life jacket and so was placed in a sack and lowered over the side of the ship into a waiting life boat with her mother and brother. Her father remained on board and he did not survive, if his body was one of those later recovered then it was never identified. Though Georgette Dean's first plans after rescue were to continue to America to fulfill her husbands dream the family returned to England in May 1912.

Despite the ordeal of the sinking the Dean family went on to live a long and happy life. Georgette died in 1975 aged 96 and Bertram died on the 14th April 1992 80 years to the day of the sinking aged 81.

I remember my [paternal] Grandmother often talking about the RMS Titanic whenever she could gain an audience of one or more. She was born on the 4th December 1886 and was 26 years old and married at the time of the sinking. She and my Grandfather, [a Norwegian] merchant seaman, Conrad Theodore Olsen, lived in Liverpool the home port of RMS Titanic.

The story according to Grandma was that Grandfather had just paid off from a ship in Glasgow and returned home Liverpool. After a day or so at home a friend of Grandfather called at the house at 6 Horatio Street to ask if he wanted to sign up for a trip to America, the local White Star Line agency office in Liverpool was trying to make up a shortage of merchant seaman for a ship laying at Southampton. Grandfather declined the offer apparently because he wished to stay a little longer at home before looking for the next job which he hoped might be out of Liverpool. His friend and some others took the job and according to Grandma the ship was the RMS Titanic, so it appears according to Grandma's tale, that the wish of Grandfather to stay a little longer at home saved him from going down with the Titanic.

Now if this story, which was recounted on what seems alomst like a weekly basis, is true or not I don't know. I never knew my Grandfather he died or otherwise went missing long before my father, who like Grandfather was a merchant seaman and also named Conrad Theodore, met and married my mother. In fact Grandfather is a slight mystery because at some point Grandma changed the family name from Olsen back to her maiden name.

I remember in 1969, sitting with Grandma, who was then aged 83, and watching on television Neil Armstrong stepping with one small step for man onto the surface of the moon. I asked Grandma what she thought of it all, there was a slight pause and she replied that she was 17 years old when 'those two Americans' [the Wright brothers] managed to fly their heavier than air machine and now here she was watching television, that had not even been invented in the accepted form we know it, until she was 39 years old, watching man land on the moon.

She had now seen the full history of aviation in her lifetime, from the Wright brothers in 1903 to Armstrong landing on the moon in 1969. In fact by the time of her death in the early part of 1979 aged 93 Concorde had been flying commercial daily flights at faster than the speed of sound for three years.

Millvina it occurs to me also had been old enough to see the whole vista of aviation unfolding on the world, though powered flight had advanced by the time she was born in 1912 she certainly lived to see space travel and beyond Concorde flying faster than the speed of sound. They are now a lost generation, Millvina and my Grandma, they saw and experienced so much in one lifetime much more than any of us alive today will ever hope to experience but the one thing they both have in common is the RMS Titanic.