The Woman Who Survived Three Shipwrecks

Violet Jessop walked off three sinking ocean liners between 1911 and 1916. Same shipping line, same class of ship, same stewardess. Her coworkers started calling her "Miss Unsinkable."

An Irish Girl From Argentina

Violet Constance Jessop was born in 1887 near Bahia Blanca, Argentina, to Irish immigrant parents. As a child she contracted tuberculosis and was given months to live. She recovered. After her father died she moved with her family to England, and by her early twenties she was working as a stewardess for White Star Line, serving tea and tidying cabins on the biggest liners in the world.

Collision Number One: RMS Olympic, 1911

On 20 September 1911, Jessop was working aboard the RMS Olympic, the first of the three Olympic-class sister ships. Off the Isle of Wight, the Olympic collided with the British warship HMS Hawke. The Hawke punched a massive hole in the Olympic's starboard side. The liner limped back to Southampton. Nobody died. Jessop stayed with the company.

The Night Everyone Remembers: Titanic, 1912

Seven months later, Jessop signed on to the Titanic's maiden voyage. On the night of 14 April 1912, the ship struck an iceberg. Jessop was ordered up on deck, partly to serve as a calm example for non-English speaking passengers. She was placed in lifeboat 16. As the boat was lowered, Sixth Officer James Paul Moody handed her a baby to hold. She wrote later that a woman grabbed the baby from her arms on the Carpathia the next morning and ran off without a word. Jessop never learned who the baby was.

Into The Aegean: HMHS Britannic, 1916

By 1916 the youngest sister, Britannic, had been converted into a hospital ship for the First World War. Jessop volunteered as a nurse with the British Red Cross and joined the crew. On the morning of 21 November 1916, the Britannic struck a German mine in the Aegean Sea and sank in 55 minutes. Thirty of the 1,066 people aboard lost their lives.

Jessop's lifeboat was dragged toward the ship's still-turning propellers. She jumped into the water to escape and was sucked under the keel. "I lept into the water," she wrote in her memoirs, "but was sucked under the ship's keel which struck my head." She survived a fractured skull because, she believed, of her thick hair.

She Went Back To Sea

After the war she returned to the restored Olympic and kept working as a stewardess. She retired in 1950 at the age of 63, moved to a cottage in Great Ashfield, Suffolk, and raised chickens. She died of heart failure in 1971, aged 83, on dry land. Her memoirs were published posthumously in 1997 as Titanic Survivor.