Millvina Dean

LONDON — Millvina Dean was the youngest passenger on RMS Titanic, just nine weeks old when she when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered from the sinking ship into a lifeboat bobbing on the frigid North Atlantic.

Dean lived to become the disaster's last survivor. She died Sunday at the age of 97 in Southampton, the English port from which her family sailed on the ill-fated liner, intending to begin a new life in the United States.

Dean's friend Gunter Babler said she died in her sleep at Woodlands Ridge Nursing Home early Sunday, the 98th anniversary of the launch of the ship that was billed as "practically unsinkable."

Dean was just over 2 months old when the Titanic 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.

The pride of the White Star line, the Titanic had a mahogany-paneled smoking room, a swimming pool and a squash court. But it did not have enough lifeboats for all of its 2,200 passengers and crew.

Dean's family were steerage passengers emigrating to the United States. Her father had sold his pub and hoped to open a tobacconists' shop in Kansas City, Mo., where his wife had relatives.

Initially scheduled to travel on another ship, the family was transferred to the Titanic because of a coal strike. Four days out of port and about 380 miles southeast of Newfoundland, the ship hit an iceberg. The impact buckled the Titanic's hull and sent sea water pouring into six of its supposedly watertight compartments.

Dean said her father's quick actions saved his family. He felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its third-class quarters and toward the lifeboat that would take them to safety. "That's partly what saved us — because he was so quick. Some people thought the ship was unsinkable," Dean told the British Broadcasting Corp. in 1998.