Last survivor of Titanic dies, aged 97

(1 Jun 2009) SHOTLIST
1. Various of Titanic survivor Millvina Dean in wheelchair
2. People taking photographs of her
3. SOUNDBITE: (English) Millvina Dean, Titanic Survivor:
"But I hear from so many people. Most of them are quite extraordinary."
(Man in crowd: "You are a celebrity after all.")
"Yes I suppose so. I don't think of, I feel just ordinary as I've always felt just ordinary. But by being ordinary I do like meeting everybody."
5. Wide of Dean surrounded by fans
6. Various of model of the Titanic
7. Various of a copy of the ship's register of passengers
8. Dean talking to a fan
STORYLINE:
Millvina Dean was the youngest passenger on RMS Titanic, just nine weeks old when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered from the sinking ship into a lifeboat bobbing on the frigid North Atlantic.
Dean lived to become the disaster's last survivor. She died on Sunday at the age of 97 in Southampton, the English port from which her family sailed on the ill-fated liner, intending to begin a new life in the United States.
A friend of Dean said she died in her sleep at Woodlands Ridge Nursing Home early Sunday, the 98th anniversary of the launch of the ship that was billed as "practically unsinkable."
The Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. The ship sank in less than three hours.
Dean was one of 706 people - mostly women and children - who survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died.
The pride of the White Star line, the Titanic had a mahogany-panelled smoking room, a swimming pool and a squash court. But it did not have enough lifeboats for all of its 2,200 passengers and crew.
Dean's family were steerage passengers emigrating to the United States. Her father had sold his pub and hoped to open a tobacconists' shop in Kansas City, Missouri, where his wife had relatives.
Initially scheduled to travel on another ship, the family was transferred to the Titanic because of a coal strike.
Four days out of port and about 600 kilometres (380 miles) southeast of Newfoundland, the ship hit an iceberg. The impact buckled the Titanic's hull and sent sea water pouring into six of its supposedly watertight compartments.
Dean said her father's quick actions saved his family.
He felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its third-class quarters and toward the lifeboat that would take them to safety.
Wrapped in a sack against the Atlantic chill, Dean was lowered into a lifeboat. Her 2-year-old brother Bertram and her mother Georgette also survived.
The family was taken to New York, then returned to England with other survivors aboard the rescue ship Adriatic.
Dean did not know she had been aboard the Titanic until she was 8 years old, when her mother, about to remarry, told her about her father's death. Her mother, always reticent about the tragedy, died in 1975 at age 95.
Born in London on Feb. 2, 1912, Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean spent most of her life in Southampton, Titanic's home port. She never married, and worked as a secretary, retiring in 1972 from an engineering firm.
She moved into a nursing home after breaking her hip about three years ago.
She had to sell several Titanic mementos to raise funds, prompting Irish writer Don Mullan, who befriended Dean to set up a fund to help pay her nursing-home bills. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the stars of the film "Titanic," pledged their support to the fund last month.
Mullan said proceeds from the fund would now go to lifeboat charities and to help preserve Titanic graves.
The second-last survivor, Barbara Joyce West Dainton of Truro, England, died in October 2007 aged 96.

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