Remembering the Titanic 90 years on

Exactly 90 years ago - at around 2.20am on April 15, 1912 - the great ship, hailed as the safest liner ever built, sunk to the bottom of the North Atlantic with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

But for Millvina Dean the disaster formed her life. It was an event that changed everything forever.

Dean was the youngest survivor from the Titanic - and today, aged 90, she believes she is one of just four who are still alive. She was nine weeks old when she was plucked to safety with her mother and brother and lowered into lifeboat 13.

At her home in the New Forest she reflects: "It changed my life because I would have been living in the States, in Kansas. It was all arranged that my father would take a tobacconist's shop and we'd be living there. I would have been American now, instead of English."

Dean's father Bertram, 27, had sold his pub in London to fund third class fares on the Titanic for himself, his wife Georgetta, their 23-month-old son Bertram Jnr and baby Millvina.

As he boarded the ship he was dreaming of starting a new life as a shopkeeper in Kansas City. But Bertram went down with the Titanic, America unseen. After a wretched fortnight in a New York hospital, his distraught widow returned with her children to England.

Dean did eventually make it to the house in Kansas, 85 years later. "It really was a lovely house - quite big, quite lovely," she says of her visit in 1997.

"When I went upstairs to see the nursery where I would have slept, that was the most eerie feeling to think I would have been a baby and would have slept in that room, in that cot."

Dean knew nothing about the Titanic until she was eight years-old when her mother finally told her what had happened. "My mother had only been married for about four years and my father was a very handsome man - she thought the world of him. It was so awful for her that she never wanted to speak about it."

She discovered it was a miracle she had survived for the family had been sleeping in the third-class quarters, in the bowels of the ship.

"I think it was my father who saved us, because when he went to find out what the crash was and found the Titanic had hit an iceberg, he immediately went back down to my mother and said, 'Get the children out of bed and up on deck as quickly as possible'," she says.

"So many other people thought the Titanic would never sink anyhow and didn't bother. Some of them thought it would be perfectly alright. But my father didn't take a chance."

Up on deck, Bertram's never-fulfilled, parting words to his wife and children were, "I'll be along later".

Then crewmen spotted Georgetta struggling with her two babies and pulled them to the front of the queue for the too-few lifeboats.

Georgetta got into lifeboat 13 and her tiny daughter was passed down to her in a mail sack. Her brother Bertram Jnr seemed to disappear and the three were only reunited on board the Carpathia - the ship that picked up the 705 survivors. Another passenger had looked after him.

Dean, of course, has no memory of the father she lost that day. "I knew nothing about him. In fact, I didn't know what he looked like until a few years ago when a relation died and there was a photograph of my father. That was the first time I'd seen his picture."

She can't bear to watch films about the sinking of the Titanic and shudders at the memory of seeing a black and white 1958 movie.

"In America it was arranged for us to watch A Night To Remember some years ago. I watched it with four or five other survivors and we all hated it."

Nothing could persuade her to watch Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet starring in Titanic either. "They wanted me to see it when it first came out and Prince Charles was going to see it. I said, "I would have liked to have seen Prince Charles but I had no intention of seeing the film."

Watching it would have been too painful, she says. "Especially at the end when they panic and jump overboard. I'd wonder what my father was doing and what he did."

She also turned down another invitation - to visit the Titanic in a submarine which takes tourists down to the wreck.

"In the first place, I wouldn't want to go down where my father was drowned. Secondly, I'd hate to go anywhere under the sea. I'd panic," she said.

Dean, who never married, has always detested the idea of diving and has never done much swimming either. But in recent years this still vivacious old lady has enjoyed her role as one of the last remaining Titanic survivors.

People are still fascinated by the Titanic, she says. The public always want to talk to her and request her autograph and she receives "the most extraordinary letters".

She understands the continuing interest, but she also wishes the wreck itself could be left alone. The idea of taking artefacts from inside the ship horrifies her.

Ninety years after it went down, the Titanic's grip on our imaginations is as strong as ever - and the exploitative, modern world has no intention of letting the boat sink gently into obscurity.