Meet ‘Miss Unsinkable’ aka ‘The Queen of Sinking Ships": this is the nurse who survived three disasters at sea
Violet Jessop survived the Titanic, its sister ship Britannic, and a third disaster, and still went back to sea.
If someone told you they survived the Titanic – you know, the ship they said was unsinkable – and still got back on a boat, you’d probably question their sanity. But Violet Jessop, nicknamed “Miss Unsinkable,” did just that – at least three times, in fact. And yes, she lived to tell the tale, dying peacefully in 1971 at the age of 83.
Her story, as told by National Geographic, begins far from the sea, in Argentina, where she was born to Irish immigrants and nursed back to life from tuberculosis as a child. After her father’s death, she moved with her family to England, trained as a stewardess, and joined the White Star Line – the company behind the era’s most famous (and ill-fated) ships.
The Olympic, the Titanic... and the Britannic
At 23, Violet’s career aboard ocean liners kicked off with the RMS Olympic, the largest ship afloat in 1911. On just its fifth voyage, the Olympic collided with a Royal Navy cruiser. It limped back to port, and no lives were lost. Violet didn’t even mention it in her memoirs.
But the next year, she was assigned to the Titanic. When the ship hit the iceberg, Violet was ordered to help guide non-English-speaking passengers to lifeboats. She boarded lifeboat 16, holding an infant handed to her by an officer. Both survived.
If that sounds like enough trauma for one lifetime, two years later she was working as a nurse on HMHS Britannic, converted into a WWI hospital ship. It struck a German mine and sank in under an hour. Violet leapt from her lifeboat moments before it was sucked into the ship’s propellers. She hit her head, but lived.
Titanic survivor at the theater
After the war, Jessop kept working at sea. Why? According to actress-historian Leslie Goddard, whose one-woman play Violet Jessop: Titanic Survivor returned to the Theatre at the Center in Munster, Indiana, in March, Jessop was proud, stoic and, it would appear, simply unstoppable.
Three ship disasters, one woman. No wonder they called her the Queen of Sinking Ships.
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