By JILL LAWLESS, AP

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Last updated: 10:20 am
October 17, 2008
Posted: 4:39 am
October 17, 2008

LONDON – Millvina Dean was just 2 months old when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat from the deck of the sinking Titanic.

Now, 96 years later, Dean – the last living survivor of the disaster – is selling artifacts of her rescue to help pay her nursing-home fees.

Rescued from the bitterly cold Atlantic night by the steamship Carpathia, Dean, her brother and her mother were taken to New York with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Before returning home to England, they were given a small wicker suitcase of clothing, a gift from New Yorkers, to help them rebuild their lives.

The suitcase and other mementos are expected to sell for about $5,200 at Saturday’s auction, organized by Henry Aldridge and Son, which specializes in Titanic memorabilia.

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said the key item was the suitcase that was filled with clothes and donated to Dean’s surviving family members after the disaster.

“They would have carried their little world in this suitcase,” Aldridge said yesterday.

Dean also is selling letters from the Titanic Relief Fund offering her mother 1 pound, 7 shillings and sixpence a week in compensation.

Dean, 96, has lived in a nursing home in the English city of Southampton – the Titanic’s home port – since she broke her hip two years ago.

“I am not able to live in my home anymore,” Dean was quoted as telling the UK’s Southern Daily Echo newspaper. “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.”

In 1912, baby Elizabeth Gladys “Millvina” Dean and her family were steerage passengers emigrating to Kansas City, Mo., aboard the giant cruise liner.

Four days out of port, on the night of April 14, it hit an iceberg and sank. Billed as “unsinkable” at the time, the Titanic did not have enough lifeboats for all of the 2,200 passengers and crew.

Dean, her mother and 2-year-old brother were among 706 people – mostly women and children – who survived. Her father was among more than 1,500 who died.

Aldridge said the interest in Titanic memorabilia shows no signs of abating.

Last year, a collection of items belonging to Lillian Asplund, the last American survivor of the disaster, sold for more than $175,000. She died in 2006 at the age of 99.

“It’s the people, the human angle,” Aldridge said. “There were 2,200 stories.”