The Truth About What Happened To The Titanic Survivors

the sinking of the Titanic is a story of great loss and hubris but for some it was a tale of extraordinary survival these are some of the most notable people who survived the Fateful voyage and the lives they LED after the wreck Jack Thayer was 17 when he was separated from his parents during the chaos and he remained on board the Titanic until almost the very

end as the ship sank beneath the waves theyre jumped into the cold water and eventually ended up near an overturned Lifeboat some men helped him climb on and he was later picked up by the passengers of another Lifeboat Thayer's mother survived too but his father did not Thayer went on to marry and have six children but he never talked about the Titanic he became a banker

and seemed to have a pretty happy life though he avoided boats but he couldn't ignore his Memories Forever And as his kids started to approach the age he'd been when he boarded the doomed liner he decided to write an account to the sinking for his family after that he became anxious and unsettled by his memories then in 1943 Thayer's 22 year old son was killed when

his plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean a vate that was so similar to his own ordeal that had haunted him six months later Thayer's mother died just one day before the 32nd anniversary of the sinking the two losses triggered a nervous breakdown and prolonged depression and theyre committed suicide on September 18 1945. one of the Titanic's most famous passengers was John Jacob Astor IV a wealthy

financier who was traveling first class with his 18 year old pregnant wife Madeline in the early moments after the Collision Astor scoffed at the idea of getting all lifeboats but by 1 45 AM he changed his mind helping Madeline into a Lifeboat and then standing alone after he was told he couldn't join her he ultimately died with the sinking of the ship Madeleine though survived and

became a fabulously wealthy Widow at the age of 18 but her wealth came with a cruel caveat to keep all of Astor's money she would need to remain unwed for the rest of her life Madeline stayed single for a little while but eventually love got the better of her she chose to forego the fortune so she could marry a childhood friend her second husband wasn't exactly

poor though and she lived comfortably until 1932 and she embarked on assorted affair with an Italian prize fighter the couple married a year later even though they were both already married and even though he frequently abused her by 1937 she was finally rid of him but she gave him 150 000 when they parted he thanked her by selling the story of their tumultuous marriage to a

tabloid Madeleine died in 1940 reportedly of drug-induced heart failure we know a lot about the fate of the Titanic's first class passengers less is known about the people traveling in second and third class we do know they fared poorly in the disaster 76 percent of third-class passengers died in the sinking versus 58 of those traveling in second class and just 39 percent of those In First

Class Michelle and Edmund navratil were second-class passengers and there were also abductees the French father was taking them to America without their mother's knowledge and they were traveling under false names after the ship struck the iceberg their dad loaded the boys ages 2 and 4 into a Lifeboat and then went down with the ship the boys then anonymously boarded the Carpathia a ship that came to

the rescue they were the only surviving children who weren't accompanied by at least one parent or adult Guardian they didn't speak English either so they weren't able to tell authorities who they were even after authorities found someone to translate neither one of the boys would answer questions with anything other than we finally the boy's mother saw a photograph of them in a newspaper and identified them

she had no idea they'd even been on board the Titanic they were reunited did and returned to France where they remained for the rest of their lives Edmund died in his early 40s but Michelle lived to be 92. it takes a special sort of personality to emerge from a disaster not just unscathed but also so unaffected that you immediately make plans to profit from the experience

this particular person was Dorothy Gibson the silent film star who was traveling home from a Paris vacation when the Titanic struck the iceberg Gibson boarded a Lifeboat and she was saved along with her mother and a couple of acquaintances almost immediately after arriving in New York Gibson started shooting the movie saved from the Titanic it was a dramatized account of the sinking in which she wore

the same outfit she'd worn on the night of the disaster she basically played a much more heroic version of herself after filming wrapped she married film Pioneer Jules brulitor but they divorced by 1919. Gibson moved to Paris and ended up in Florence Italy during the worst years of World War II in 1943 she was arrested and taken to a Nazi concentration camp eventually ending up imprisoned

at San bittori she likely would have died there but she styled herself as a Nazi sympathizer and spy to was ultimately smuggled out by a double agent after the war Gibson briefly moved into the Paris Ritz and later died in February 1946. a shipwreck is an awful experience even if you survive it a lot of Titanic survivors were apprehensive about if not downright adverse to ever

boarding the ship again but there were a couple of passengers who proved resilient to the trauma and one of those was Charles Jacqueline the ship's Baker Jacqueline's survival is a bit of a mystery because by his own account he floated in the water for more than two hours before he was helped on board a Lifeboat a secret to his survival it was really really drunk well

that's the legend anyway after his ordeal Jacqueline remained a ship speaker and the Titanic wasn't his last shipwreck either in 1916 he was serving on a ship called the SS Congress when it caught fire then in 1941 the ship he was serving on was accidentally rammed by another ship and in between all those disasters he served on other boats so being in shipwrecks didn't seem to

faze him he died in 1956 not at sea but in a hospital the officers on board the Titanic took the women and children first guidelines so seriously that in some cases it was women and children only well the well the time being I will require Only Women and Children some of the boats launched half empty because there weren't enough women and children willing to leave the

imagined safety of the ship for a tiny Lifeboat as a result some of the male survivors weren't treated especially well take masaba mijo Sono the only Japanese citizen to survive the sinking the officer loading the boats near where hosona was standing announced that there were two seats left and hosono was one of two men who got on board he Survived The Sinking but became Infamous in

his home country Hosanna was shamed by the Japanese public because he'd lived while so many others had perished his story even appeared in textbooks as an example of shameful and unethical Behavior osano lived until 1939 but he never recovered from the stain of his survival his family suffered two and for a couple of generations the name hosono was synonymous with shame in Japan it wasn't until

hosono's grandchild published some of his writings that the shame finally began to lift but sadly it didn't happen in her son's lifetime the Titanic had two lesser-known sister ships the Olympic and the Britannic between the Olympic and the Titanic Titanic was billed as the largest but it was only around three inches longer as for the Britannic it was built after the Titanic disaster so it had

all the latest safety features but it still sank three times as fast as its sister did passenger ships need weight staff and one of the servants on board the Olympic was 24 year old Violet Jessup Jessup experienced her first accident at Sea in 1911 when the Olympic collided with the HMS Hawk the ship didn't sink though she went on from there to survive the Titanic and

then moved on to the Britannic where she served as a nurse during World War One Jessop also survived when the Britannic sank after striking a mine in 1916. despite the much faster sinking only 30 of the 1066 people on board the Britannic perished undeterred Jessup continued to work on ships first for the White Star Line and later for the red star line and the Royal Mail

line she retired in 1950 and died in 1971 at the age of 84. a lot of people who survived the sinking of the Titanic suffered lifelong trauma many had survivors killed but some lived with the feeling that they could have done something to prevent the whole horrible disaster one of those people was Frederick Fleet who spotted the iceberg from the Crow's Nest at around 11 40

pm he rang the bell and called down to the bridge warning about an incoming Iceberg iceberg but he wasn't fast enough and the iceberg scraped along the starboard side of the ship as the crew swung to port to avoid it fleet was ordered to row a Lifeboat which is how he managed to escape the sinking for the rest of his life he maintained that the tragedy

could have been avoided if the Crow's Nest had a pair of binoculars Fleet left the White Star Line a few months after the disaster and continued to work at Sea until 1936. after that he worked as a shipbuilder he married and had a daughter but after his wife died in 1964 his brother-in-law kicked him out of the home he owned that the couple had been living

in Bleek committed suicide just two weeks later when you boast to the world that your ship is Unsinkable and then your ship sinks you should maybe make sure that you sync with it at least that was a public consensus about Jay Bruce Isme president of the White Star Line he boarded the Titanic for its Maiden journey and was one of only a few men to get

a spot on a Lifeboat once on board the Carpathia Ismail insisted on a private cabin and spent the rest of the journey under the influence of opiates when he left the Carpathia Ismail became the subject of deep criticism it had been his decision to limit the number of lifeboats on board the ship and he had decided to speed through the icefield on the night of the

Collision this may was officially cleared of wrongdoing but his reputation never recovered he resigned his position with White Star Line in 1913 and then left London for self-imposed Exile in Ireland he lived in a stately manner until the early 1920s when it was burned To The Ground by the Irish Republican Army he rebuilt and lived in relative anonymity until 1937 when he died from a stroke

collapsible Lifeboat B turned over as officers were trying to get it down from where it was stored and at that point the Titanic was practically sunk about 30 men including 59 year old first-class passenger Archibald Gracie IV found their way to it and survived by standing on top of it with that many people standing on it the boat was pretty heavily weighed down so they were

all knee-deep in water eventually Gracie was picked up by another Lifeboat but by the time he boarded the Carpathia he had hypothermia Gracie never recovered from the disaster he died in December 1912 roughly eight months after the sinking he did spend his final days productively though as he wrote a book entitled the truth about the Titanic which was posthumously published in 1913. my book will differ

from the others that having been written presented almost entirely from The Human Side and given my personal experience one of the Titanic's most famous passengers was Molly Brown who after the disaster became deservedly known as The Unsinkable Molly Brown after the ship struck the iceberg Brown immediately set herself to the task of helping other people board lifeboats she didn't try to get on one herself and

she only ended up on board when she was chucked into one unceremoniously the boat wasn't at capacity and she implored the man put in charge to go back and save people from the water everything that was humanly possible has been done once on board the Carpathia Brown took no time out for her own recovery she started a charity fund to help Port passengers and she gathered

blankets to give to the people who were sleeping in corridors and the dining room of the rescue ship after disembarking in New York Brown went on to become an outspoken advocate for causes like women's suffrage and workers rights she even ran for Senate after World War one broke out she joined the Red Cross and eventually traveled overseas to help rebuild France she died in her sleep

in 1932 at the age of 65. third class passenger Melvina Dean was just two months old when the Titanic went down she her mother and her brother were among the first passengers to escape the sinking ship her father who helped get them to the boat deck before the crowds arrived did not survive Dean had no memory of the events and she went on to live a

very long mostly ordinary life after the sinking her family abandoned their plans to immigrate to Kansas and returned to England on board the RMS Adriatic she became a secretary and lived pretty quietly until there was sudden renewed interest in the sinking in the 1980s Dean was the youngest survivor of the Titanic as well as the last surviving passenger she died in 2009 at the age of

97. her ashes were scattered in Southampton at the same docks where the Titanic set scene thank you [Music]