THE FACE THAT SUNK A THOUSAND SHIPS. (WELL 3 ANYWAY)

As
any old sea dog will tell you, it’s unlucky to have a woman on board ship.









(Unless the woman is naked, apparently.
Sailors make up the best
superstitions.)




But
in the case of Violet Jessop, you’d have to say the old sea dogs have a point.




Violet
started life as a landlubber, her parents were Irish sheep farmers living in
Bahia Blanca in Argentine. 




Violet was a born survivor - three of her nine
siblings did not live beyond infancy. 




She herself developed tuberculosis when
she was a child and doctors said she would die. But she didn’t.  





As events would
later prove, Violet was pretty much unsinkable.









When
her father died, her mother took Violet and her family back to England. When
Violet left school she joined the navy, to see the sea.




When
she was 23, she sailed on the RMS Olympic as a stewardess. 




At that time the Olympic
was the world’s largest luxury liner and was under the command of Captain Edward
Smith. 




Three months after Violet stepped on board the Olympic collided with the
cruiser HMS Hawke off the Isle of Wight. 




The RN blamed the Olympic for the
crash, but stopped short of blaming Jessop personally.




Taking
this as a warning, Violet decided to sail next on something unsinkable.  





The
Titanic. 










The Olympic and Titanic before Violet got to work





She rubbed shoulders with Jack and Rose for just four days before her
luck ran out again. 




After the ship hit the iceberg, Violet was ordered up on
deck to set an example ‘to the foreign speaking people.’




The
Irish?




She
was ordered into lifeboat 16, and it was from there that she watched the
Titanic go down, - all the while thinking: ‘there’s a great idea for a movie in
this somewhere.’  




She was rescued the next morning by the Carpathia.







A
lesser soul would have given up seafaring but Violet was made of sterner stuff. 





Besides, it was obvious where the problem lay. The captain on the Olympic and the Titanic was Captain Edward Smith. 




Clearly, he was the problem.




So
Violet, fairly confident her bad run was done, joined up on His Majesty’s
Hospital Ship Brittania just in time
for World War One - and you guessed it, it hit a mine in 1916 and sank in the
Aegean in 1916.





just another day at the office for Violet


She
grabbed her toothbrush from her cabin - she was an old hand at being sunk, and apparently
she always said her toothbrush was the one thing she missed when the Titanic
went down (the one thing??) 




Despite being sucked under the water and striking
her head on the ship’s keel she somehow surfaced and was rescued by a lifeboat. 




Years later, when she complained to a doctor about headaches, it was discovered
she had fractured her skull.





Having
gone down with the ship three times in five years a lesser soul might have
looked for a job on dry land. 





Not Violet. She continued to work for the White
Star and Red Star lines after the war. 








Neptune had done his best, and gave up
trying to scuttle her. She spent the next thirty years at sea without further
mishap and made her last voyage when she was 63.




The
unsinkable Violet Jessop lived to a grand old age of 84, finally foundering in
1971.




Some
wags would have you believe she was finally buried at sea. Not true. Violet was
buried in Hartest, in Suffolk, England 





















Colin Falconer is the author of the internationally bestselling CLEOPATRA, DAUGHTER OF THE NILE and over twenty other novels. 



See more history from Colin Falconer at  





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