Violet Jessop was born in Argentina in 1887, the daughter of Irish immigrants. Family life was difficult, and only six of Violet’s eight siblings reached adulthood. However, Violet survived the illnesses that took her siblings to their grave, even severe tuberculosis that was supposed to kill her for sure.
She was 15 when her father died and her devastated mother moved to England with Violet and her two younger sisters.
looked bad
Violet’s mother got a job as a maid but had to retire due to illness when Violet was 21. She therefore had to stop her studies and become the breadwinner. Violet decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps and applied for a job as a maid.
Violet Jessup.
During these years, most of the ship’s maids were middle-aged, lest the young and beautiful girls would disturb the crew and passengers too much at sea. Violet was well aware of this rule and took is made as unattractive as possible when she went to the interview. It worked, and in 1908 Violet was employed as a maid by the Royal Mail Line and two years later by the White Star Line shipping company.
Violet didn’t want to work for the White Star Line at first. She disliked the weather on the freezing Atlantic and had heard that the wealthy passengers to whom the White Star particularly appealed were difficult and demanding. But her friends insisted it was a fairy tale, and in 1910 Violet began working as a maid on the magnificent Olympic, the largest passenger ship in the world at that time. .
Another and larger was under construction, the sister ship Titanic.
The first shipwreck – Olympic
The life of a maid was hard, a seventeen-hour day’s work for minimum wage. But Violet was well acquainted with life at sea and was a cheerful and golden maid, with auburn hair and a strong Irish accent, popular with colleagues and passengers.
In fact, Violet is known to have received at least three passenger proposals while performing her duties as a housekeeper.
On September 20, 1911, Olympic collided with a British warship off Scotland. Both ships were heavily damaged, but fortunately there were no casualties. Violet escaped the collision unscathed and was offered another job as a housekeeper sometime later, this time on the newly built Titanic.
Violet sailed from Southampton on April 10, 1912. When she left port there were 2,224 people on board, of whom 705 survived the voyage.
The Second Shipwreck – Titanic
Violet knew her job well, the staff facilities were good, and she liked to walk around the deck of the ship before sleeping and breathing in the fresh sea air. On the evening of April 14, Violet was getting ready for bed when she found a prayer translated into Hebrew that an old Irish woman had given her before the trip.
Violet hadn’t read the prayer, but as a devout Catholic, she did read it that fateful night. The prayer was for protection from water.
Violet escaped from the sinking ship with the Unknown Child in her arms. Painting by Willy Stoewer/Getty Images.
She was about to fall asleep when news of the collision arrived and she called on deck and had to show passengers who did not speak English how to approach the lifeboats.
The abandoned child
Violet saw women and children cling sobbingly to their husbands and fathers, many of whom were reluctant to board the lifeboats. Violet was therefore allowed to board the first to show that the boats were safe, to welcome the children and to help the women. The lifeboat filled up and was lowered. But just before he hit the water, she heard her name called and Violet looked up. She then saw one of the ship’s captains and he had something that looked like a package in his arms.
He tossed the package to her with the words, “Here, Miss Jessop.” Take care of this child.
Violet grabbed the baby and held it to her chest for the next eight hours or until the shipwrecked women were rescued aboard the ship Carpathia that had come to help.
As she boarded the Carpathia, frozen and numb, a woman rushed towards her, grabbed the baby from her arms and fled. She no longer saw either of them. Later, she learned that a mother had left a child on the sinking deck of the Titanic and turned around to look for something, but the child was gone when she returned. Violet just assumed it was that child.
She wouldn’t tell the story until decades later, and she later noted that she was still surprised that she never received so much as a thank you letter from her mother.
Third Shipwreck – Brittanic
Many would have thought Violet would find employment ashore after experiencing two shipwrecks in a short time. This was not the case, and Violet took the Brittanic shortly after recovering from the Titanic crash. The Brittanic was also a passenger ship owned by White Star but considered much safer than her sister ships after the modifications made to her after the fate of the Titanic.
The Brittanic was converted at the start of the First World War and was intended to repatriate wounded British soldiers from the front.
Violet began working on the feeder ship Brittanic after the Titanic disaster.
Brittanic hit a German bomb in the Aegean Sea on November 21, 1916. Violet couldn’t find a lifeboat anywhere, so she closed her eyes and jumped overboard. In fact, not before turning around for a toothbrush. But the currents swept her under the keel, where debris and fragments of the ship rained down on her, so little could be remembered. Violet managed to get away from the debris and was rescued from the sea shortly afterwards.
It wasn’t until years later, when Violet went to the doctor for a bad headache, that it was discovered that she had fractured her skull that night. She definitely believed that her thick hair had saved her life, and the doctors agreed.
Brittanic sank in 55 minutes and was the largest ship sunk during World War I. Of the 1,066 people aboard the ship, 32 died.
About the world’s oceans
As for that, Violet had been involved in three shipwrecks in five years, two of them fatal. However, she was unafraid and found employment on passenger ships when they started sailing again after the first war.
Violet was to travel all the oceans of the world for the next few decades, without even being shipwrecked again. She entered into a short-lived marriage and never had children. Violet worked on passenger ships until she was 63, then retired and settled into a 300-year-old cottage in Suffolk, UK. She filled the house with memories of her four decades of travels around the world, and she was very happy.
Violet wrote her memoir before her death in 1971 at the age of 84.
miss unsinkable
Violet’s story would have been forgotten had it not been for the 1958 film “A Night To Remember”, which told the story of the fateful night the Titanic sank. The film generated enormous interest in the crash, an interest that lives on, but over these years the Titanic disaster has been largely forgotten.
Reporters caught wind of Violet, who was eager to recount her adventures, earning her the nickname “Miss Unsinkable.”
Undated photo by Violet Jessup.
“It was me”
We can add that a few years after Violet retired, her phone rang one evening. When she answered, an unfamiliar voice asked if she was the woman who saved the baby from the Titanic, and Violet confessed. The interviewer then laughed and said; “It was me” and slammed. Later, she told a friend about the incident. He downplayed it and said it was probably a prank. Violet, on the other hand, said he couldn’t bear the call came before she told anyone the story of the baby thrown into her arms.
Whether it was a prank or not, the mystery of the child Violet held in her arms for eight grueling hours at sea has never been solved.
The analysis was already published in March 2022.
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