Violet Jessop
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Violet Constance Jessop (2 October 1887 – 5 May 1971) was an Irish-Argentine-born British ocean liner stewardess and Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during World War I. She is notable for having survived the sinking of both Template:RMS in 1912 and sister ship Template:HMHS in 1916, as well as having been aboard the eldest of the three ships of that class, Template:RMS, when it collided with the British warship Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:WPSHIPS utilities/data' not found. in 1911.[1][2]
Early life
Born in the Pampas on 2 October 1887, near Bahía Blanca, Argentina, Violet Constance Jessop was the eldest daughter of Irish immigrants Katherine (née Kelly) and William Jessop, a sheep farmer.[3][4][5] She was the first of nine children, six of whom survived. Jessop spent much of her childhood caring for her younger siblings. She became very ill as a child with what is presumed to have been tuberculosis, which she survived contrary to doctors' predictions that her illness would be fatal.[6] When Jessop was 16 years old, her father died of complications from surgery and her family moved to England, where she attended a convent school[3] and cared for her youngest sister while her mother was at sea working as a stewardess.[6] When her mother became ill, Jessop left school and, following in her mother's footsteps, applied to be a stewardess. Jessop had to dress down to make herself less attractive to be hired.[7] At age 21, her first stewardess position was with Royal Mail Line aboard Orinoco in 1908.[3][6]
RMS Olympic
In 1911, Jessop began working as a stewardess for the White Star liner RMS Olympic.[8] Olympic was a luxury ship that was the largest civilian liner at that time.[3] Jessop was aboard on 20 September 1911, when Olympic left from Southampton and collided with the British warship Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:WPSHIPS utilities/data' not found..[1][8] There were no fatalities[1] and, despite damage, the ship returned to port unaided.[8] Jessop did not discuss this collision in her memoirs. She continued to work on Olympic until April 1912, when she was transferred to its sister ship Titanic.[6]
RMS Titanic
Jessop boarded Titanic as a stewardess on 10 April 1912, at age 24.[1] Four days later, on 14 April, it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank about two hours and forty minutes after the collision.[9] Jessop described in her memoirs how she was ordered up on deck to serve as an example of how to behave for the non-English speakers who could not follow the instructions given to them.[3] She watched as the crew loaded the lifeboats.[1] She was later ordered into lifeboat 16, and as the boat was being lowered, TitanicTemplate:'s sixth officer, James Paul Moody, gave her a baby to look after. The next morning, Jessop and the rest of the survivors were rescued by the Template:RMS and taken to New York City on 18 April. According to Jessop, while aboard Carpathia, a woman, presumably the baby's mother, grabbed the baby she was holding and ran off crying, without saying a word.[3] After arriving in New York City, she later returned to Southampton.[8]
HMHS Britannic
In the First World War, Jessop became a nurse for the Voluntary Aid Detachment.[3] On the morning of 21 November 1916 she was aboard the hospital ship Britannic, the younger sister ship of Olympic and Titanic, when it sank in the Aegean Sea after detonating a German naval mine.[1][10] Britannic sank within 55 minutes, killing 30 of the 1,066 people aboard.
While Britannic was sinking, Jessop and other passengers were nearly killed by the ship's propellers that were shredding lifeboats that collided with them.[10] Jessop had to jump out of her lifeboat, resulting in a traumatic head injury which she survived.[1][6] In her memoirs, she described the scene she witnessed as Britannic went under: "The white pride of the ocean's medical world ... dipped her head a little, then a little lower and still lower. All the deck machinery fell into the sea like a child's toys. Then she took a fearful plunge, her stern rearing hundreds of feet into the air until with a final roar, she disappeared into the depths."[10] Two other Titanic survivors, Arthur Priest and Archie Jewell, were also aboard and both survived.
Later life
Jessop returned to work for White Star Line in 1920,[1] before joining Red Star Line and then Royal Mail Line again.[11] In her time with Red Star, Jessop went on two cruises around the World on the company's flagship, Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:WPSHIPS utilities/data' not found.. When Jessop was 36, she married John James Lewis, a fellow White Star Line steward. Lewis had served aboard Olympic and Template:RMS. They divorced around a year later. In 1950, she retired to Great Ashfield, Suffolk.
Years after her retirement, Jessop claimed to have received a telephone call, on a stormy night, from a woman who asked Jessop if she had saved a baby on the night that Titanic sank. "Yes," Jessop replied. The voice then said "I was that baby," laughed, and hung up. Her friend and biographer John Maxtone-Graham said it was most likely some children in the village playing a joke on her. She replied, "No, John, I had never told that story to anyone before I told you now." Records indicate that the only baby on lifeboat 16 was As'ad Tannūs, also known as Assad Thomas, and later reunited with his mother on Carpathia. However, Tannūs died on 12 June 1931,[12][failed verification] so he could not have 'phoned Jessop two decades later.
Jessop died of congestive heart failure in 1971 at the age of 83.[13][11]
In media
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This article needs additional citations for verification. (January 2026) |
In the 1958 film A Night To Remember, a scene depicts naval architect Thomas Andrews (played by Michael Goodliffe) instructing a stewardess to be seen wearing her life jacket as an example to the other passengers. Several scenes from this film inspired later depictions of the sinking; in James Cameron's later 1997 blockbuster Titanic, a similar encounter takes place involving Andrews and a stewardess named Lucy, who is also told to wear her life jacket in order to convince the passengers to do the same.
In the 1979 television movie S.O.S. Titanic, Jessop is depicted as an elderly stewardess played by Madge Ryan.
In 2006, "Shadow Divers" John Chatterton and Richie Kohler led an expedition to dive HMHS Britannic. The dive team needed to accomplish a number of tasks including reviewing the expansion joints. The team was looking for evidence that would change the thinking on RMS TitanicTemplate:'s sinking. During the expedition, Rosemary E. Lunn[14] played the role of Violet Jessop, re-enacting her jumping into the water, from her lifeboat which was being drawn into BritannicTemplate:'s still turning propellers.
The character of Jessop is featured in the Chris Burgess stage play Iceberg – Right Ahead!, staged for the first time Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate, March 2012, to commemorate the centenary of the sinking of Titanic. Jessop's role was played by Amy-Joyce Hastings.[15]
Jessop was played by Vicky Allen in Titanic Sinks Tonight , a 2025 BBC 4-part drama-documentary series.
See also
- Arthur Priest, a stoker who also survived the sinking of Titanic and Britannic and was on Olympic during the collision with HMS Hawke, as well as other shipwrecks
- Archie Jewell, lookout and sailor who survived Titanic and Britannic but died in the sinking of Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:WPSHIPS utilities/data' not found..
- Wenman Wykeham-Musgrave, a British sailor who survived three consecutive sinkings in the action of 22 September 1914.
- Helen Repa, heroic nurse who saved lives during the SS Eastland Disaster.
- Mary McCann, heroic nurse from the burning of the PS General Slocum.
References
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- ^ a b c d e f g h Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Damon, Duane (April 2012). "Angel of the White Star Violet Jessop". Cobblestone. Vol. 33, no. 4. p. 16.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Kaplan, David A.; Underwood, Anne (25 November 1996). "The iceberg cometh". Newsweek. Vol. 128, no. 22.
- ^ a b c d e f g Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Jessop, Violet; Maxton-Graham, John (1997). Titanic Survivor. Dobbs Ferry, New York: Sheridan House. ISBN 1-57409-184-0.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Violet Jessop biography". Biography.com. A&E Television Networks. Archived from the original on 17 January 2012. Retrieved 26 April 2016.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Violet Jessop Stewardess Home Titanic Survivors Miss Violet Constance Jessop". Encyclopedia Titanica. 2025. Retrieved 4 March 2025.
Miss Violet Constance Jessop, 24, of 71 Shirley Road, Bedford Park, London was born in the pampas near Bahia Blanca, Argentina, the first child of Irish emigrants William and Katherine (née Kelly) Jessop. Her father was a sheep farmer and she had five younger brothers and sisters. As a child Violet contracted Tuberculosis, Doctors gave her only months to live but she managed to overcome the disease.
- ^ a b c d e Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Solomon Reid, Deborah (1 January 1998). "Titanic survivor: the newly discovered memoirs of Violet Jessop who survived both the Titanic and Britannic disasters". The Women's Review of Books. 15: 9.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Stanley, Jo (April 2000). "With Cutlass and Compress: Women's Relations with the Sea". Gender & History. 12 (1): 232–236. doi:10.1111/1468-0424.00179. ISSN 0953-5233. S2CID 146446083.
- ^ a b c d Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Upton, Emily (28 January 2014). "The woman who survived all three disasters aboard the sister ships: The Titanic, Britannic, and Olympic". Today I Found Out.com. Retrieved 26 April 2016.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Protasio, John (2012). "A Titanic Centennial". Naval History. 26 (2): 48.
- ^ a b c Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Gleick, Elizabeth; Carassava, Anthee (26 October 1998). "Deep Secrets". Time International (South Pacific Edition). No. 43. p. 72.
- ^ a b Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Wynn, Stephen; Wynn, Tanya (2017). Women in the Great War. Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books. p. 87. ISBN 978-1-4738-6542-6.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."As'ad Tannūs". Encyclopedia Titanica.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content.Jessop, Violet (2012). Titanic Survivor. Sheridan House. p. 224. ISBN 978-1-4617-4032-2.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Remembering Britannic's Violet Jessop". The Underwater Marketing Company. 21 November 2016. Retrieved 14 August 2017.
- ^ Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Iceberg – Right Ahead!". Ovation Theatres. Retrieved 14 August 2017.
External links
- Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."Violet Constance Jessop". Encyclopedia Titanica.
- Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css has no content."England via Plymouth" (PDF). Plymouth.gov.uk. p. 6. Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 June 2015.
Violet Jessop third from left; with fellow Titanic Stewardesses at Millbay Dock, Plymouth England after return on SS Lapland April 1912
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