Violet Constance Jessop (2 October 1887 – 5 May 1971) was an Irish-Argentine ocean liner stewardess and Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in the early 20th century.
[5] When Jessop was 16 years old, her father died of complications from surgery and her family moved to England, where she attended a convent school[3] and cared for her youngest sister while her mother was at sea working as a stewardess.
[3] Jessop was aboard on 20 September 1911, when Olympic left from Southampton and collided with the British warship HMS Hawke.
[1] Four days later, on 14 April, it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank about two hours and forty minutes after the collision.
[1] She was later ordered into lifeboat 16, and as the boat was being lowered, Titanic's sixth officer, James Paul Moody, gave her a baby to look after.
Then she took a fearful plunge, her stern rearing hundreds of feet into the air until with a final roar, she disappeared into the depths.
Records indicate that the only baby on lifeboat 16 was As'ad Tannūs, also known as Assad Thomas, who was handed to Edwina Troutt, and later reunited with his mother on Carpathia.
But reports also failed to mention Milvina Dean, who was a two-month-old baby during the sinking of Titanic so she also could have been the one who made the call.
[12][10] In the 1958 film A Night To Remember, a scene depicts naval architect Thomas Andrews (played by Michael Goodliffe) instructing a stewardess to be seen wearing her life jacket as an example to the other passengers.
Several scenes from this film inspired later depictions of the sinking; in James Cameron's later 1997 blockbuster Titanic, a similar encounter takes place involving Andrews and a stewardess named Lucy, who is also told to wear her life jacket in order to convince the passengers to do the same.
In 2006, "Shadow Divers" John Chatterton and Richie Kohler led an expedition to dive HMHS Britannic.
During the expedition, Rosemary E. Lunn[13] played the role of Violet Jessop, re-enacting her jumping into the water, from her lifeboat which was being drawn into Britannic's still turning propellers.