Once there were three sisters. The oldest, Olympia, the middle, Titanic, and the youngest, Britannica. The Olympia is famous for being the only merchant ship ever to attack and sink a German submarine. She encountered it in 1918, two years after her youngest sister, Britannic, was hit by a German mine. Although the Britannic boasted the title of the safest ship in the world, she met her end at the bottom of the sea. It was also the last home of the middle sister, the Titanic, then the world’s largest ocean liner, which sank on her maiden voyage after colliding with a mass of ice. Only the Olympia met a normal shipwreck, although it did not escape without a scratch during its working career. Violet Jessop had the misfortune to be working on all three ships at the very time they ran into trouble.
She spent 42 years at sea, although she never wanted to be a ship stewardess. Given the choice, she would have preferred to continue her education, but when her mother fell ill, she had to provide for her family. Her father was gone. He died while they were still living in Argentina, where her parents, as Irish immigrants, had taken refuge in search of a better life. It was there that Violet felt the breath of death for the first time. She was suffering from tuberculosis. Doctors at a hospital in Buenos Aires had already written her off with a non-functioning lung wing when she made an unexpected recovery in the mountain air of Mendoza, where they had moved for her.
After her father’s death, she returned to the Island with her mother and three brothers, healthy but poor. Nevertheless, the five years my mother worked as a stewardess on the ship were good. She went to school, got good grades, learned to sew and planned for the future. When my mother fell ill, her reality suddenly changed.
She had to find a job. The job of a stewardess was familiar and appealing, but at twenty-one she was too young and too beautiful for it. Crew members and passengers might have caught a glimpse of her, so the ship’s recruiters thought it better not to have her on board. She adapted. She turned up for her interview for the Royal Mail Line job in the worst clothes she could wear and the most dishevelled she could be. Looking older, she got a job on the steamer Orinocco, but soon moved on to the British White Star Line.
She was assigned to the Majestic. The company, which is American-owned, was in good standing, but she was on her feet 17 hours a day for a pittance and slept in a cabin so small that she could not even turn around in it without bumping into something. The stewardesses and stewards were used to cabins with no privacy and bugs crawling around in them, because they were the same on all ships.
But the passengers were different. She realised this when, in 1910, she started working on the RMS Olympia, the largest ocean liner at the time, which the White Star Line had started building two years earlier. She liked the Americans, who, although she found them arrogant, were not as demanding and had a slightly more respectful attitude towards her, unlike the other passengers.
Close encounter with a German submarine
On 20 September 1911, she set sail for New York aboard the Olympia. They were sailing not far from the Isle of Wight when Captain Smith detected that he and HMS Hawke were sailing in the same waters. The Hawke’s captain tried to divert his ship, but to no avail. He was approaching the area between the second and third funnels of the Olympia, which at the time had 1313 passengers on board. The captain of the Olympia accelerated, the captain of the Hawke tried to turn the ship, but both were going too fast and the Hawke crashed into the Olympia. He severely damaged the hull and the propeller shaft.
Olimpija tilted dangerously, but did not fall over. The captains ordered the watertight doors closed, stopped the ships and assessed the damage, just in case. Although the damage was not small, both ships arrived safely in the harbour. They were lucky. No one was hurt, not even Violet Jessop, but it took the masters two weeks to get the Olympia back in order. The propeller shaft was borrowed from the Titanic.
A year later, the propeller gave way when she damaged it on encountering hard ground, although she was lucky to reach the harbour again. Titanic was still awaiting her maiden voyage at the time, so she was an excellent source of spare parts for the then profitable star Olympia.
It seemed safe, but only until the Titanic sank. On the Titanic, people died because there were too few lifeboats. There were not enough lifeboats on Olympia either. Some of the crew needed improvement before they would set sail again. The operator of both ships, White Star Line, provided extras, but they were second-hand and folding, and some did not even open. The crew did not trust them. She only went to sea when she was shown that most of the boats were safe and the non-working ones were replaced.
Six months after the sinking of the Titanic, the Olympia was given a little more security reinforcement, but they were unable to take advantage of the new features because the First World War broke out and the passengers were almost blown away. In October 1914, the White Star Line decided to dock the Olympia, but she was soon recalled by the Navy High Command.
Her beautiful ornaments are gone and she has a new one: weapons. She did not become a battleship, she just had troops and things to transport, mostly from Canada to England and back. Between 1915 and 1918, she safely transported some 200,000 troops and other personnel, and was not sunk by a close encounter with a German submarine, even though the German plans would have required her to be.
It was 12 May 1918, when the nine-month-old submarine U-103, which had sunk eight ships so far, and the ten-year-old ship, painted in camouflage colours to make it harder for submarines to judge her size, course and speed from a distance, came face to face. 500 metres separated them.
The submarine’s captain, Claus Rücker, was preparing to attack but was unable to launch the torpedoes due to technical problems. The first to fire was Olympia’s captain, Bertram Fox Hayes, who was on his way to France with American soldiers on board. He then turned the Olympia towards the submarine. Captain Rücker quickly descended to a depth of 30 metres and positioned his submarine parallel to the ship, but was unable to escape the Olympia. It slammed into him just behind the turret and cut into him with its propeller, killing nine crew members and forcing the rest to abandon the submarine.
Olimpija also suffered. She had to return to Southampton to be repaired, so the surviving German submariners were picked up by the USS Davas. They became prisoners of war, and Bertram Foy Hayes an unfortunate hero. Did he unnecessarily risk the ship and the lives of the soldiers on board by attacking it, because he could very likely have escaped the submarine? He was rewarded by the US Navy for his services and dismissed by the White Star Line. Nevertheless, he later became captain of the RMS Majestic.
Since then, Olimpija has been sailing safely, but slowly ageing. It was clear that she would have to retire, but before she said goodbye, in 1934, she crashed into another smaller ship, the Nantucket LV-117, sending her to the bottom of the sea and six or seven sailors with her. Shortly afterwards, in April 1935, she said goodbye to the sea. She was anchored, sold and scrapped a year later.
The Olympia sailed for 24 years and made 257 return voyages to America, while her younger sister, the Titanic, did not even return from her maiden voyage. Violet Jessop was on board when she first set sail for New York on 10 April 1912. She loved working on the Olympia, but her friends persuaded her to go on the Titanic, then the biggest and most beautiful ocean liner around. At the age of 24, she signed a work contract just days before sailing.
She lived through Titanic and survived
She found her way on the Titanic without any problems. She and Olimpija were similar, only in the details. At least one of them was very welcome for Violet and the stewards. Before he finished the design for the Titanic, the 39-year-old architect Thomas Andrews asked Olympia employees for their suggestions to help improve the Titanic. The stewards and stewardesses were quick to pitch in and ask for bigger cabins. They didn’t expect luxury, just a little comfort and privacy, enough to stop calling their rooms a shiny hole.
On the Titanic, Violet shared a cabin with Ann Turnbull. After a hard day’s work, the two women collapsed exhausted on their bunk beds. At 23.40, they were awakened by a loud crash. The corridor was buzzing. They knew something had happened, but they were far from thinking anything fatal. They hurriedly checked that the women and children they were responsible for were dressed warmly and wearing life jackets, and returned to the cabin to make an exemplary clean-up of the bunk.
They were only alerted to the fact that it was not a normal working night when a colleague knocked on their door and shouted if they were sure that the ship was sinking. They were told to escort the passengers on deck immediately.
Violet quickly got dressed, wrapped a scarf around her neck and put on her life jacket. The hat she had made herself remained in the cabin. She escorted the passengers on deck. They were calm. She was told to show those who did not speak English what to do. According to the maritime rule that women and children have priority, women had to get into the lifeboats. They hesitated. They were afraid, they found it difficult to separate from their husbands. Violet patiently showed them what they had to do and finally got into lifeboat number 16 herself.
Before it was released, one of the crew members pushed the baby into her arms. Let her protect him, he told her. She was clutching him tightly to her lifejacket when the Carpathia, the only ship close enough to arrive in time to answer the call for help, arrived. The Olympia heard the call, but it would have taken several days to reach the Titanic.
Violet was lifted on board. There, “a woman jumped up, grabbed the baby and rushed away. It was as if she had put it on the deck of the Titanic and gone to look for something, and when she came back, the child was gone. I was too cold and numb to find it strange that she didn’t even pause to say thank you.”
Many years later, Violet received a call from a woman. She did not introduce herself, but asked if she had saved the baby’s life on the Titanic. When Violet confirmed this, the woman told her that the baby was her. She then hung up. This was even more unusual than her mother’s action, so Violet was persuaded that the children were playing a little game with her. She did not think it was a joke. She never told the story to anyone, so the children could not have known it.
When she arrived in New York after the Titanic-Carpathia disaster, she wasn’t thinking about having a baby. At the time, she just clung to the hope that other ships had found survivors, but when she mingled among the crowds in New York harbour, there was no longer any doubt: there were no other survivors. “The horror came back again and again”, she explained how she felt that day, when New Yorkers set up tables in the harbour and dumped used clothes for the survivors.
Violet just wanted to go home to England, even if she had to go to the seaside again. She arrived safely on board Lapland and was back at work – on a new ship – two weeks after the British inquiry into the tragedy.
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German mine victim with Britannica
She continued to do so until the outbreak of the First World War, when she moved to a hospital to work as a nurse. In the middle of the war, she was transferred to the Britannica, a two-year-old 269-metre-long ship. As a luxurious, organ-equipped ocean liner, she was due to sail between Southampton and New York, but war broke out and she was conscripted. From 1915, under the auspices of the Red Cross, she evacuated the wounded from the then front at Gallipoli as a military hospital ship.
On 12 November 1916, she set sail on her sixth and final voyage with 1065 people on board. She arrived safely in Naples, refreshed herself with coal and water, and then, after some delay due to a storm, set sail. On Tuesday, 21 November, the staff had already had an early service and were just finishing breakfast when they heard the explosion.
Violeta later recalled a sudden deafening bang and shaking, which caused dishes on the table to rattle and things to break. Then everything calmed down. The Britannica slowly continued on its way. “We all knew she’d been hit …” Almost everyone knew. Those in the more distant part of the ship thought she had just hit some smaller ship, but for Private J. Cuthbertson there was no doubt that it was bad. The sea had moved him from G Deck to E Deck, along with the wreckage of the stairs that connected them.
Another soldier was just about to shave when an unknown force pushed him to the other side of his cabin and threw whatever he had in it at him. It seemed to him that the ship rose twice before it came to rest again. He saw nothing for a few seconds because of the smoke from the explosion, then immediately dressed and went to his work station.
At the time, the Britannica was renowned as the safest ship in the world. It had a double hull, was divided into watertight compartments up to B Deck, water could flood the six forward compartments, and could survive a side impact from an iceberg. But the explosion destroyed the lower starboard side between sub-decks 2 and 3 and damaged the watertight bulkhead between sub-deck 1 and the forward part of the ship, leaving the first four watertight compartments immediately under water. Water also flowed into the number 6 firebox.
Theoretically, the ship should have stayed afloat. Captain Charles Barlett stopped her and ordered all the watertight doors to be closed, but the double doors locked, and water flowed into Boiler Room 5. The Britannic quickly listed to starboard. The watertight doors between boiler rooms 5 and 4 were working, but water continued to enter.
In their haste, they forgot to close the vents that the nurses had opened to ventilate the wards, which resulted in a seventh compartment or one too many being flooded with water. The Britannica was leaning more and more to the right side. She was only 5 kilometres from the Greek island of Kea. Captain Barlett, who had previously ordered preparations for evacuation but not evacuation, decided to bring her ashore. He started the engines and with difficulty turned Britannic around.
Fatal propellers
Lifeboats should not have been lowered alongside the hull without the captain’s orders, but someone lowered three into the water on his own. Violet Jessop was in one of them. She later recalled how the boat was quickly lowered along the ship’s side and skimmed along. It broke the glass and it sprayed into the eyes of the passengers. She saw the boat illuminated by light and enveloped in a green glow, and immediately afterwards, the boat hit the surface of the water with a violent crash.
The hard landing was not dangerous, but what was dangerous was that the ship’s propellers were spinning with considerable power and were almost on the surface due to the ship’s list. The pressure was pulling the boats straight towards them. The propellers literally crushed the first boat.
“… a look of unexpected horror accompanied it. There were wrecks and red marks all over the surface.” Violet heard not a word or a bullet fired, yet “hundreds of men were running into the sea as if fleeing from a pursuing enemy”. They jumped from the boats into the water “like a boundless army of rats”.
“I turned to see the reason for the exodus and to my horror saw Britannic’s huge propellers grinding and chopping everything in their vicinity – men, boats, everything was just one deadly whirlpool.” Her lifeboat was also being pulled towards the propellers. Violet didn’t know how to swim, but she had no choice. She was facing certain death, and by jumping into the water she had at least some chance of survival.
“I jumped into the water but was pulled under the keel. It hit me in the head. I escaped, but years later, when I saw my doctor for headaches, he found that my skull had fractured.” At that moment she felt nothing, she just clung to someone’s hand under the water and held it until she remembered that drowning fingers do not split even when they die. She let go of the hand and, after a few terrifying seconds, surfaced again.
The first thing her eyes saw was a head split in two and a brain fused to a khaki-coloured uniform. “All around were heartbreaking scenes of agony.” She found herself amidst a sea of body parts that seemed to have been “torn off by some giant in his fury. The dead were now floating calmly by, the men had only risen to the surface enough to descend beneath him one last time with expressions of horrible terror on their faces…” She struggled to keep her head above the water. The life jacket did not support her, so she could easily have slipped under it.
The captain knew nothing about all this, but he noticed that the water would enter the boat even faster if it was moving. He stopped the engines. The propellers stopped turning just as a third boat was coming towards them. He quickly scrambled to safety.
Confronted with the tragedy, the captain ordered the launching of a speedboat to pick up survivors from the sea. Only five bodies were recovered from the deceased. Lifeboats were launched, although the ship was now tilted so much that it was difficult to lower them.
Almost everyone had left Brittanica, but Captain Charles Bartlett could not. He tried once more to get her ashore, but as soon as he started the engines, the water began to come in even more fiercely. He switched them off and almost walked out of the sinking ship into the sea. It took only 55 minutes for the Britannic to capsize on its side and sink to the bottom, but all those who followed the captain’s orders survived. The Titanic took about 160 minutes to sink.
Violet returned home and met the end of the war on land, while Britannica remained 122 metres below sea level, resting there until her peace was disturbed by explorer Jacques Cousteau in 1975. Even today, she is still at peace. The Titanic lies in the cold waters of the North Atlantic, decaying rapidly thanks to iron-eating bacteria. The Britannica lies in warm waters and is perfectly preserved. There is a lot of interest in it, but access to it is difficult because the Greek authorities protect it from unwanted views that could easily descend from it, despite the ungrateful currents of the sea.
But they cannot protect her from speculation about what happened to her. The information known so far suggests that she hit a German mine, but it is not convincing enough for those who suspect that she was sunk by a German torpedo. During the war, German propaganda also spread lies that the Britannic, which was sailing under the auspices of the Red Cross, was being used to transport troops and weapons, although there is no evidence of this, and it has not been reported by the Keo islanders who helped the survivors.
Sailing around the world and peace in the garden
Violet said nothing about it in her memoirs either. Even though she was dragged onto a lifeboat at the last minute and this was her third near-fatal boat accident, she was not ready to give up her love.
In 1920, she returned to sea, back to Olympia, which by then had been converted back into an ocean liner. She remained there for five years. After a seven-month break, she started working for the Red Star Line, but by then shipping was already different. Ocean liners were no longer just a means of transport between Europe and America, but were also starting to offer cruises. She sailed around the world twice on board the Belgenland before changing ship again in 1931.
It also faced the Second World War at sea. Unlike the first, she spent it at her desk, but after it, in 1948, she went to sea once more. At the age of 61, she signed a new two-year contract and retired at the age of 63. She settled in Suffolk, reared chickens and sold eggs and gardened for extra income until her heart failed and she died in 1971, aged 83.
