The Greatest Story You’ve Never Heard
For those of you who don't know, the Titanic was not alone in its creation. It had 2 sister ships of equal size known as, the Olympic and the Brittanic. But this story is not about them. This story is about Violet Jessop, who is simultaneously both the unluckiest and luckiest woman in history.
Violet Jessop was born in 1887, she contracted tuberculosis as a young child and was given just a few months to live. She managed to fight off the disease and ended up becoming a ship stewardess. She managed to work her way up to the Olympic getting a good reputation with her coworkers and passengers. In 1911, the Olympic collided with the HMS Hawke (a ship designed to sink ships by ramming them). Both ships sustained considerable damage, but miraculously didn't sink. They were able to make it back to port, and Violet disembarked without being harmed.
A couple years later she heard about a cruise liner looking to hire people to work aboard the unsinkable ship, the Titanic. As you all know the Titanic inevitably sunk after striking an iceberg killing nearly 1500 people on board. While she was being placed on a lifeboat, a stranger handed her a baby. After she and the baby were rescued, a woman came up to her and literally snatched the baby out of her hands. She said she genuinely did not know if that woman was the child's mother.
In the years leading up to WW1 she volunteered to be a nurse on a Britanic, the other sister ship to the titanic. Unfortunately, the ship sailed over a mine planted by a German U Boat and began sinking. There was no time for her to get to a lifeboat so she jumped overboard and ended up striking her head which cause a fracture to her skull, something she would not discover for another year.
She would not go through another ordeal like those for the rest of her life. She continued to serve on cruise ships before retiring at 61. She died at the age of 84.