“About that time,” Betty recalled, “my mother gave me a diamond and sapphire necklace and a [leather] purse with a pair of room keys inside. I didn’t realize their importance, because she could never speak to me about the Titanic. Years later, I was told by her sisters that my father gave her the necklace as a token of love just before she was ordered to get into lifeboat 13.”
The whole story was as strange and almost as distressing to Betty as it had been for her mother. “She was cruel to me, her own child; yet [as Phillips’s sisters told it], while she was being rescued from the Titanic, she cradled a baby, Millvina Dean, in the lifeboat.”
Every night before Betty went to sleep, she would kiss the photograph of the father she never knew. Despite her love for him and for the last symbol of a love destroyed and a future derailed, by 1999 economic hardship forced Betty to sell the necklace, the purse, and the keys to a dealer of Titanic memorabilia, who made them available for exhibition in Freemantle, England.
Clearly taking advantage of the blue sapphire surrounded by diamonds and set in platinum—and of its outward similarity to the central prop in Jim Cameron’s blockbuster film involving a necklace with a stone named the Heart of the Ocean, entwined around a story of forbidden love—a promoter evidently named Betty’s previously unnamed necklace the Love of the Sea. According to Betty’s friend John Hodges, the dealer gave her a pittance for the necklace—barely more than the weight value of a sapphire, small “old cut” diamonds, and platinum-gold alloy.
Hodges had come to know Betty through a shared sense of tragedy. He lost his son in 1998 and missed him beyond words. He and the boy had been planning to start a restaurant together, but after he died, “there did not seem a lot of point,” Hodges said, so he began to immerse himself in the Titanic. When Hodges met Betty, the bond between them was instant. He too, had grown up without parents.
Hodges described Betty as “a grand old lady with a great sense of humor, and she has a very moving story. The only problem is that she insists on being the youngest survivor. I have had a chat with her on occasion stating that she has a great connection [with the ship]—and the story, with both [of] her parents on board the Titanic, and that she was born just nine months later.” Hodges tried to advise his friend that her story should have been enough, without any necessity of challenging Millvina Dean for the title of who was the youngest Titanic survivor.
In his letters, Hodges referred to Dean as “an equally grand and humorous lady (‘I never take ice in my drinks’), and equally strong-willed.” He believed, like most observers, that Betty’s fight for Dean’s title went back to the story of how, even before boat 13 reached the Carpathia, everyone including Phillips, wanted to touch the littlest Titanic victim.
The point at which Dean drew her own personal line in the sand was when British Titanic enthusiasts, ostensibly taking her side, circulated rumors that a DNA test had proved Betty to have been conceived by a man other than Henry Morley “Marshall” after the Carpathia reached New York and that she was therefore illegitimate by another man and not by Morley. “Poppycock,” Dean said in defense of her adversary, to which she added scornfully, “There are no ‘illegitimate’ children.” As late as 2001, Betty was still trying to get the DNA test that would finally put Morley’s name in the blank space on her birth certificate.
When Hodges read a letter to Betty from one of the scientists who was headed out on the Titanic XIII expedition, she enjoyed very much the mention of a hope to send a robotic probe into the second-class quarters. “And when I mentioned her father, her eyes filled with tears,” Hodges wrote. “I did ask which stateroom her parents would have shared, as they traveled under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Marshall (as shown on the passenger list), but she did not know.”
She had been in contact with relatives of her father’s for several years, but they repeatedly (and rudely) refused to allow a DNA test.
Betty’s story, Hodges wrote, had “obviously upset one or two people [in] the British [Titanic] Society.” The organization finally claimed that she (unlike Madeline Astor’s unborn child), was not a survivor in any way, shape, or form. The word fraud was even bandied about, and she became the only Titanic survivor, or unborn child of a survivor, ever to have been expelled from a Titanic organization anywhere in the world on account of not having actually been aboard the Titanic. There was considerable mockery attached to the claim of having boarded the Titanic as a sperm and an egg and exited as a zygote.
Dean, who was nine weeks old when she survived the Titanic in boat 13, was, if anything, amused to be an honored member in a strange porthole-measuring and rivet-counting subculture of human beings who would be feuding into the twenty-first century over which of the Titanic’s children deserved the title of youngest survivor or even legitimate survivor.
John Jacob Astor VI, who was born four months after the sinking, was universally accepted as having been present, albeit as a borderline last-trimester fetus. Joseph Lemercier Laroche was younger stilclass="underline" a first-trimester fetus when his mother, Juliette, boarded the Titanic. He was born on December 17, 1912, and was considered an unborn passenger of the Titanic. Only in the case of Betty, born (as Ellen) three and a half weeks after the Laroche child and most likely conceived about three weeks before her parents boarded the Titanic, was the status of any “unborn survivor” questioned.
There was no question that Betty had lived her entire life in the shadow of the Titanic. Her dispute with British Titanic scholars over which of Boat 13’s children—Betty or Millvina—was “really” the youngest survivor was but another demonstration of the never-ending resonance of odd coincidence and even odder psychology that seemed always to have surrounded the Titanic.
Human thinking and the laws of clubs and organizations could try to make either-or arguments; but nature rarely works within humanity’s either-or fallacy. Dean was the youngest already-born, breathing, and actively vocalizing survivor the night the Titanic went down. Astor, Laroche, and Ellen (Betty) Phillips were also aboard the ship. Betty was the wreck’s Schrö dinger’s cat scenario. To some historians, she was simultaneously there as the youngest Titanic survivor and simultaneously not.
By the spring of 2001, the combination of resurging interest in the lost liner and the scarcity of survivors had brought Betty invitations to attend numerous Titanic conventions, to address school groups, and to appear on talk shows.
And so it ended with debates about survivors and the ever present multigenerational scars of the unthinkable. In November 2005, Betty would die knowing that she deserved, to one degree or another, a rightful place in the roll call of Titanic survivors. After Betty passed away, Millvina Dean held the title of the youngest and—more significant—the last survivor, until May 2009, when, at the age of ninety-seven, she single-handedly carried the entire legend from the realm of living history into archaeological time frames.
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