The Last Titanic Survivor Remembers Hitting the Iceberg

and so everybody was gambling on this sunday night they were making books i think service and having sweepstakes as to what time she would get in so many minutes past and so my father would have nothing to do with it and so he went to bed quite early for him anyway and my mother sat down to sew and read and she looked up at him he was reading he said he got a very interesting book but quite quickly he went to sleep and she got up and took the book from him and settled down again and she said at 10 minutes to 12 she felt a slight bump and she said it was just like a train pulling into a station it just jerked it was very slight but she said she knew that it was this dreadful something and she awakened my father he awakened me my father said no he wasn't going up on deck again after the night before but she literally pulled him out of bed and made him go up and she then said you're going to dress me and i being sleepy and very naughty said i wasn't going to be dressed nothing to be dressed for i came back to bed my father came back very quickly because he could get up to the boat deck in the lift very quickly from where our kevin was and um he came back and he picked me up and wrapped his blanket tightly around me as if i were a baby and my mother said nothing to him and i used to say to her sometimes years afterwards i can't understand why you didn't say to him what was it which she certainly did not say and she said i didn't have to say what was it i didn't know what it was but i knew it was this dreadful something that i had to live with for months and there was nothing more i could say so he put his very thick coat on her and put another one on himself and without any words at all we went out to the cabin and into the lifted up onto the boat deck now if we hadn't done that at that time i pretty much doubt i'd be talking to you today because as you know there were less than there was accommodation for less than 800 people in the lifeboats and she was carrying 2 200. so it was a question of who was there in time to get into one of the all too few lifeboats well they weren't launched very quickly because at first no one thought anything was going to happen but my father went away and spoke to an officer and he said um they are going to launch lifeboats but you're all back on board for breakfast and so they launched these boats and my father helped he knew a lot about the sea and he put me in the lifeboat and told me to be good said to me hold mummy's hand and i thought he was coming after me but he didn't then it dawned on me of course that he wasn't coming that i wouldn't see him anymore and that collision was 10 minutes to 12 and the titanic sank at 20 past two so if we had had enough lifeboats no one would have died that night at all and it would have been a nine days wonder there's a ship sank on its maiden voyage it didn't matter nobody died that would have been that and here we are all these years after with the whole world still interested in the titanic

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Id: HRAGMW4n4mc

Length: 3min 20sec (200 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2012