Let’s All Meet Someone Topical
This is Violet Jessop:
Enemas on doctor's orders only, sir
As we join the story, Violet is twenty-two and fairly unremarkable, but in a few years, thanks to her courage (and lunatic disregard for personal safety) she will become world famous. It all started in 1911, when Violet took a job as a stewardess aboard a ship called the Olympic.
At the time, Olympic was the world’s largest and most luxurious ocean liner. Her three engines consumed 650 tons of coal a day to move 46,399 tons of steel through the water. It took 3,000,000 rivets to hold her together and 3,000 men labored 3 years to build her . She had a squash court, a gymnasium and a Turkish-style bath house. She was also novel, exciting. Super liners like Olympic were a new thing for a society still emerging from the age of sail, magnificent floating cities and point of pride throughout the British Empire.
At the helm of this marvel of technology and luxury, stood Captain Edward Smith, a respected mariner and possessor of an imminently seaworthy beard.
Majestic as a narwhal
In September of 1911, Olympic was underway for her fifth Atlantic crossing, when, off the Isle of Wight, her enormous displacement sucked in a smaller ship, the HMS Hawke and the two collided. Neither vessel sank in the accident, but both were mauled and Olympic had to limp home with two ruptured compartments and a bent drive shaft.
The friendly little lizard will not be happy
Unemployed while Olympic was undergoing repairs, Violet found a job on another ship, called the Titanic.
This new ship, Titanic, was a technical marvel, fitted out with every luxury, the pinnacle of comfort and also the largest ship ever built, taking the prize from none other than Olympic, though only by a thousand tons or so. In fact, the two ships were quite similar. In further fact, the two ships were twin sisters.
But which one is evil?
Both had been ordered by the same company, White Star Lines. Both were built to the same specifications. They had the same grand stairways, the same profile, the same silverware, the same mantlepieces, the same boilers, the same bathhouse.
The same captain.
Edward Smith, Violet’s old boss, and the man ultimately responsible for her unemployment on the Olympic was now captain of the Titanic. Violet, once again serving as a stewardess, apparently didn’t hold grudges.
Titanic set out for her maiden voyage on 10 April, 1912. Almost immediately, the world’s largest ship nearly collided with…
…another ship, under circumstances strangely similar to the Hawke accident. This time the potential crashee, another luxury liner called The City of New York, snapped her mooring lines when she fell into the much larger Titanic’s wake and they nearly collided, but a tugboat managed to pull the New York out of Titanic’s path and the two ships missed each other by about four feet.
Crisis narrowly averted, Titanic went on to crash into an iceberg and then sank, killing most everyone on board, including Captain Smith.
But not Violet. She escaped on a lifeboat.
When world War I broke out, Violet volunteered as a nurse. Remember the picture up top? Since she had experience at sea, she was assigned to a hospital ship called the Britannic.
Britannic was built as a luxury liner, but the British government drafted her into the navy before she could even leave drydock. Given a quick coat of paint and a few minor refits–but otherwise still a luxury liner–she set sail for the first time, tasked with hauling British casualties back from Turkey.
At this point, a person could wonder why Violet kept venturing back onto oceans that obviously wanted to kill her, but at least Britannic had a solid, even comforting sort of name, without the hubris implied by superlative of the word ‘big.’
Except that early in her construction, Britannic’s proposed name had been Gigantic, because she was to be the largest ship ever built, a marvel of her day and yes, the younger sister to both Olympic and Titanic.
Different uniform, same dame.
In an effort to hide the ship’s heritage after Titanic sank, White Star Lines had quietly changed Gigantic’s name to something a little humbler, a little less divine-wrath-daring, but it didn’t matter because, whatever her name, Britannic remained an Olympic class ship.
It almost goes without saying that Violet was there to watch her sink beneath the waves.
On the 21st of November, 1916, Britannic struck a mine and ruptured. Unperturbed by a little sea water, nurse Jessop calmly climbed into a lifeboat. Being an old hand at catastrophic maritime disasters, she even thought to bring a toothbrush. Unfortunately for Violet’s oral hygiene, the sinking Britannic’s enormous, exposed, and still spinning propellers sucked her lifeboat in and tore it to flinders, killing a number of her fellow passengers. Violet had to jump into the sea, Last Crusade style, where she lost her toothbrush and nearly her life when the Britannic’s keel slammed into her head.
Nearly, not actually. She later credited her thick auburn hair for saving her when the world’s largest ship landed on her skull.
Undaunted another minor sinking, Violet went back to work for White Star Lines after the war. Unfortunately, as there were no more Olympic class ships to sink, her remaining career was uneventful. Violet died in 1971. At eighty-four years old. Of congestive heart failure. On land.
Yet somehow it was Molly Brown who won the nickname ‘unsinkable.’
