Last survivor of the Titanic dies, age 97

LONDON — Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the sinking of RMS Titanic, has died, her friend Gunter Babler said Sunday.

Babler said Dean’s longtime companion, Bruno Nordmanis, called him in Switzerland to say Dean had died in her sleep at her nursing home in southern England. He said staff members discovered her in her room Sunday morning. Babler said Dean was hospitalized with pneumonia last week but had recovered and returned to the nursing home.

A staff nurse at Woodlands Ridge Nursing Home in Southampton said no one could comment until administrators came on duty Monday morning.

Dean was just over 2 months old when the Titanic — billed as “practically unsinkable” by the publicity magazines of the period — hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. The ship sank in less than three hours.

Dean was one of 706 people — mostly women and children — who survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died.

Earlier this month, Leonardo diCaprio and Kate Winslet, the stars of the film “Titanic,” donated money to help pay Dean’s nursing home costs.

Babler, who is head of the Switzerland Titanic Society, said Dean was a “very good friend of very many years.”

“I met her through the Titanic society but she became a friend and I went to see very every month or so,” he said.

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