Titanic sale to pay care fees

Millvina Dean, 96, hopes to raise more than £3,000 by auctioning the items.

She has lived at a nursing home for two years following a hip operation and now says that she must sell her valuables to cover the cost.

Among her treasures is a 100-year-old wicker suitcase that was filled with clothes then given to her destitute family when they arrived in the US after being rescued.

The auction will also include compensation letters sent to Miss Dean’s mother from the Titanic Relief Fund and rare prints of the liner that have been signed by the artists.

Miss Dean, from Southampton, was two months old at the time of the 1912 disaster. She said: “The case was given to my mother when we were in New York and she brought it back with us.

“It wasn’t in too bad a condition and I used to take it away on holidays with me.

“When the wreck of the Titanic was found 20 years ago I was invited to conventions all over the world and I took it with me then.”

She added: “I am not able to live in my home any more. I am selling it all now because I have to pay these nursing home fees and am selling anything that I think might fetch some money.”

The Dean family were travelling on the Titanic to start a new life in Kansas.

After the luxury liner struck an iceberg Miss Dean, her toddler brother Bertram and mother Eva were put into lifeboat 13. Miss Dean, the youngest person to escape, was lowered into the boat in a sack.

The family were rescued by the ship Carpathia but her father, Bertram, 27, drowned along with 1,500 others.

Miss Dean, who lives at a nursing home in Ashurst, in the New Forest, said: “My mother didn’t really speak about the disaster because she was broken-hearted. She had been married to my father for four years and he was a very handsome man.

“When she married my stepfather it was rather awkward for her to speak about it.”

The auction will take place on Saturday at Henry Aldridge & Son in Devizes, Wiltshire.