Violet Jessop was born in Argentina in 1887, the eldest of nine children. She survived tuberculosis as a child, contrary to doctors' predictions. At 21, she became a stewardess for Royal Mail Line. Then she boarded three White Star ships, and all three met with disaster.
First, on September 20, 1911, she was aboard RMS Olympic when it collided with the British warship HMS Hawke. No one died. Then on April 14, 1912, she was on RMS Titanic when it struck an iceberg. She was ordered into lifeboat 16, where the sixth officer handed her a baby to look after. "According to Jessop, while aboard Carpathia, a woman, presumably the baby's mother, grabbed the baby she was holding and ran off crying, without saying a word."
Four years later, on November 21, 1916, she was aboard HMHS Britannic — the Titanic's sister ship — when it hit a German mine in the Aegean Sea. She had to jump from her lifeboat to avoid being shredded by the ship's propellers, suffering a traumatic head injury. She survived that too. In her memoirs, she described watching Britannic go under: "The white pride of the ocean's medical world … dipped her head a little, then a little lower and still lower." Jessop kept working at sea until she retired in 1950. She died in 1971 at 83.
