Her father felt its collision with the iceberg on the night of 14 April 1912 and, after investigating, returned to his cabin, telling his wife to dress the children and go up onto the deck.

As was the case with many of Titanic's immigrant widows, Ettie Dean surrendered any notion of remaining in the United States once it was clear her husband had not been saved.

In the 2000 PBS documentary Lost Liners, in giving her account of the disaster, Millvina described the state her mother was in during the aftermath of the disaster: [W]e stayed in a hospital for two or three weeks for my mother to recover a little bit, and then we came back to England; because we had nothing, we had no clothes, we had no money and of course she was so broken-hearted, she just wanted to get home.The White Star Line offered Ettie and her children passage back to England aboard RMS Adriatic.

An article in the Daily Mirror dated 12 May 1912 described the ordeal: [She] was the pet of the liner during the voyage, and so keen was the rivalry between women to nurse this lovable mite of humanity that one of the officers decreed that first and second class passengers might hold her in turn for no more than ten minutes.

[7][8][9] Dean worked for the British government during World War II by drawing maps, and later served in the purchasing department of a Southampton engineering firm.

She recalled having nightmares after seeing A Night to Remember (1958), the film based on Walter Lords book with the same title, and did not wish to imagine her father as one of the people in the crowd of passengers stranded on the sinking liner.

"[14] In April 2008, Dean had accepted an invitation to speak in Southampton at an event commemorating the 96th anniversary of the sinking, but ill health resulting from a respiratory infection forced her to cancel.

[15] In December 2008, at age 96, Dean was forced to sell several of her family's possessions to pay for her private medical care following a broken hip.

It was given a boost by the Irish author and campaigning journalist Don Mullan at the opening of his worldwide Nokia photographic exhibition, A Thousand Reasons for Living (featuring a portrait of Dean), in Dublin on 22 April 2009.

[17] Mullan introduced an additional portrait of Dean's hands, as she signed a card for a Titanic autograph collector, which he produced as a limited edition of 100 copies.

He made the edition available at €500 each and then challenged the director and stars of the film Titanic (1997) – James Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kate Winslet – singer Celine Dion, and the corporations Sony Music, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount Pictures to match him euro-for-euro to support her with her bills.

Dean died of pneumonia on the morning of 31 May 2009, aged 97 at a care home in Ashurst, Hampshire;[2][20] her death coincided with the 98th anniversary of the Titanic's launch on 31 May 1911.