“Miss Unsinkable” Violet Jessop surviver of three ship wrecks including Titanic

Some people are born lucky. Other people can’t seem to take the hint when things don’t go their way. Violet Constance Jessop was probably both. Over the course of her career as an ocean liner stewardess, Jessop earned the nickname “Miss Unsinkable”. That’s the sort of thing people call you when you survive not one, not two, but three separate shipwrecks.

Jessop’s knack for surviving adversity started at a young age. Born in Argentina to Irish immigrants in 1887, Violet was the seventh of eight children. Six of her siblings died young, and Violet herself nearly made it seven after diagnose with tuberculosis. 

The doctor said she only had a few months to live, but Violet recovered and went on to live a long, healthy, and quite eventful life.

After her father passed away, Violet’s mother moved the family to Britain. At age 23,violet got her first job as a ship stewardess. By 1910, Violet was working for the White Star Line and joined the crew of the HMS Olympic. Violet was on board in 1911 when the Olympic collided with the HMS Hawke, a ship designed to sink other ships by ramming them. Incredibly, being rammed by a ship-rammer was not enough to sink the Olympic, which was able to limp back to port with no casualties. This would be the least dramatic of Violet’s three shipwrecks.

A few years after the Olympic incident, the White Star Line asked Violet to join the crew of their newest and grandest ship. A ship that was supposed to be unsinkable. A ship by the name Titanic. You already know how this ends.

Violet was asleep below deck when the Titanic hit that fatal iceberg. She rushed topside to direct passengers into lifeboats before finally jumping on lifeboat #16 herself. Violet described the scene in her memoir:

She narrated; I was ordered up on deck. Calmly, passengers strolled about. I stood at the bulkhead with the other stewardesses, watching the women cling to their husbands before being put into the boats with their children. Sometime after, a ship’s officer ordered us into the boat first to show some women it was safe.
Just as the lifeboat disembarked, someone put a baby in Violet’s arms. Incredibly, the (presumed) mother of that child found Violet among the survivors on the RMS Carpathia and took the baby back. Violet survived a calamity that took 1,500 lives. But her worst shipwreck was still ahead.

In the buildup to World War I, Violet took a job as a nurse aboard the Titanic’s sister ship, the Britannic. In 1916, the Britannic hit a mine planted by a German U-Boat, and Violet’s luck nearly ran out. The ship was sinking too quickly to make it to the lifeboats, so Violet leapt overboard. She hit her head on the ship’s keel was nearly sucked into the Britannic’s propellers. As she describes it:

I leapt into the water but was sucked under the ship’s keel which struck my head. I escaped, but years later when I went to my doctor because of a lot of headaches, he discovered I had once sustained a fracture of the skull!

Eventually she was pulled into one of the lifeboats and survived her third shipwreck in less than a decade. And even this catastrophe wasn’t enough to deter Violet from a life at sea. She would continue to serve at sea until 1950. Violet Jessop finally died in 1971 of heart failure.

Brittanic