Millvina Dean

London, June 1: Millvina Dean, who as an infant passenger aboard the Titanic was lowered into a lifeboat in a canvas mail sack and lived to become the ship’s last survivor, died yesterday at a nursing home in Southampton, the English port from which the Titanic embarked on its fateful voyage.

She was 97 and had been in poor health for weeks.

The youngest of the ship’s 705 survivors, Dean was only nine weeks old when the Titanic hit an iceberg in waters off Newfoundland on April 14, 1912.

She survived with her mother, Georgetta, and two-year-old brother when they, like many other survivors, were picked up by the liner Carpathia and taken to New York.

Her father, Bertram Dean, was among more than 1,500 passengers and crew members who died, a fact that Dean, in an interview at the Southampton nursing home last month, attributed partly to the fact that the Dean family was travelling in third class, or steerage, as the cheapest form of passage was known.

Some versions of the disaster contend that the crew was under orders to give priority aboard lifeboats to first- and second-class passengers.