How one woman survived the Titanic and 2 more shipwrecks

The Titanic disaster has fascinated us for over a century, including those on board the doomed Titan submersible who lost their lives just trying to get a close-up look. Equally entranced was a 23-year-old ship’s nurse—a Titanic survivor who amazingly also survived the wrecks of both of Titanic’s sister ships and continued to work on cruise liners for 40 years.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Okay, come on, what is it? I keep trying to
figure out why it is we're so fascinated with the
Titanic disaster, like the folks who lost their lives on
the titan submersible a few months back, just for an
in person peak at the wreckage. Well, imagine you're twenty
three years old. You survived the wreck of the giant ship,
the RMS Olympic, only to narrowly survive the Titanic just

(00:23):
a few months later, and three years after that getting
sucked under the keel of the RMS Britannic. Was Violet
Jess kind of nuts to keep taking jobs on chips.
I'm Patty Steele. Her unbelievable tale of survival is next
on the backstory. The backstory is back. We are obsessed

(00:45):
with the wreck of the Titanic, and that was true
long before the movie. Is it because something that was
so impossibly beautiful could have led to such impossible tragedy?
Maybe this is a story about a Titanic survivor so
spent her entire career working on these gorgeous ocean liners,
only to be involved in three shipwrecks right early on,

(01:08):
getting dumped into the sea. More than once, and even
cracking her skull on the keel of one as it sank.
Beginning in nineteen eleven, twenty three year old ship's nurse
and stewardess Violet Jessop spent four decades at sea. She
began her career first on the Olympic and then on
the Titanic and finally on the Britannic. It's spring of

(01:31):
nineteen eleven. Violet has just started working on the brand
new RMS Olympic at the time. This thing is like
the biggest ocean liner in the world. But this will
creep you out. The ship's captain is Edward Smith. A
year after Violet began working for him on the Olympic,
Captain Smith was made captain of the doomed Titanic. Anyway,

(01:53):
the Olympic has its maiden voyage in June of nineteen eleven,
and it heads from England to New York City. It
is a massive success, like at least ten thousand people
show up at the dock in New York City just
to get a peek at it. Everybody wanted to see it,
even if they couldn't afford to travel on it, which
most people couldn't. The Olympic makes a number of successful

(02:16):
cross atlantic trips, and the owners they were the White
Star Line, use those five trips to promote the upcoming
launch of the White Star's next big thing, their next
big ship, that was the Titanic. Just four months after
her maiden voyage, the Olympic is out to sea, sailing
parallel to a big British Navy cruiser, the Hawk. Captain

(02:38):
Smith has the Olympic make a sudden turn, but the
Hawk is sucked into her draft and slams into the Olympic,
tearing two big holes in its side. Kind of eerie,
not much different than what happened to the Titanic less
than a year later, anyway. Even though she's heavily damaged,
the Olympic isn't far off the coast of Great Britain
and manages to get back to dock. Months later, the

(03:00):
ship is repaired and once again seaworthy, and once again
while it returns to the Olympic as a nurse and stewardess.
But within months, Violet and a lot of other White
Star employees are offered a chance to work on board
the biggest and most luxurious cruise ship in the world.
It's the Titanic. How can anybody turn that down? Right? Well,

(03:22):
she didn't. She took the job. Okay. Now it's April
of nineteen twelve. Violet is again a ship's nurse and stewardess,
this time on the Titanic. She and the ship sets
sail from England for New York City. It's the Titanic's
maiden voyage. It's late on the night of April fifteenth.
Violet is already in bed, She's not quite asleep when

(03:45):
she hears a commotion out in the corridor. She sits
up and she realizes something is very wrong. There's very
excited noise outside her stateroom. Immediately she gets dressed and
she rushes up on deck. It's clear the ship is sinking.
Violet kicks into gear. She begins helping women and children

(04:06):
get into life jackets and then into the lifeboats. Finally,
she's handed a baby and told to get into the
lifeboat number sixteen, herself one of the last ones to
make it off the ship. Now, just imagine being in
a creaky lifeboat with panicked people clutching a baby you
don't even know, in a rough twenty eight degree icy

(04:29):
North Atlantic sea in the middle of the night. Wow,
GISs me chills. The next morning, still clutching that little baby,
Violet and the other fortunate survivors are picked up by
another ship. It's the Carpathia, which arrived on the scene
almost five hours after Titanic hit the iceberg. Violet survived.

(04:51):
Captain Smith, that's so lucky. He went down with the ship,
as captains do, along with over fifteen hundred other folks.
So you would think Violet would be done with ships, right,
not even clothes. After surviving the wreck of the Titanic,

(05:14):
she went back to work on the Olympic, but, being
a nurse, with World War One raging, she soon decided
to shift to the RMS Britannic, which was being used
as a hospital ship. Then, in nineteen sixteen, with Violet
on board, the Britannic hits a German underwater mine and
it starts sinking fast. This time, she can't get into

(05:36):
a lifeboat, and maybe that's just as well, since a
lot of the folks who did make it into lifeboats
found themselves sucked into the ship's propellers. Violet decides to
take her chances, and she simply jumps overboard that's a
long jump. Let me tell you, on this big ships,
how does that work out for well? In her memoir,
she says, I leapt into the water, but I was

(05:59):
sucked under the ships keel and hit my head. I
managed to escape from underneath the ship, and eventually he
was picked up. But years later, when I went to
my doctor because of a lot of headaches, he told
me that all those years ago, I had actually fractured
my skull and that's where the headaches came from. Amazingly,

(06:19):
after the war, Violet left the White Star Line, but
went to work for another cruise company and continued to
work doing world cruises all the way until nineteen fifty,
when she retired. She died in nineteen seventy one at
the age of eighty four. One gutsy woman with a
lot of great stories, right after having jumped from not one,

(06:41):
not two, but three massive ships and lived through it
all To share those tales, I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory
is a production of iHeartMedia and Steel Trap product. Our
producer is Doug Fraser. Our executive producer is Steve Goldstein

(07:04):
of Amplify Media. We're out with new episodes twice a week.
Thanks for listening to the backstory, the pieces of history
you didn't know you needed to know.