Sunk by the Germans – the secrets of the ‘other Titanic’

seawater was flooding through the forward part of the ship. The Britannic was sinking faster than the Titanic.

It was also listing to starboard, so Lifeboat 4 scraped down the port side, catching on open portholes. Soon after the lifeboat hit the water, Violet discovered that, apart from one doctor, it was empty; everyone else had seen what she had not – that they were being sucked towards the ship’s giant propellers. Violet looked in horror at the blades “mincing up everything near them – men, boats and everything were one ghastly whirl”, she recalled. The water was red with blood. Violet couldn’t swim.

She jumped into the sea and immediately her coat started to pull her down. Then, a heavy object smashed repeatedly on the back of her head – it was the starboard propeller. “My brain shook like a solid body in a bottle of liquid,” Violet wrote later. Swallowing water, she panicked and fought her way to the surface, only to face “a scene of slaughter”. She held on to another lifeboat and stared ahead to avoid looking at the bodies around her. Thirty people were killed by the propellers.

The Britannic finally capsized 55 minutes after hitting the mine. Violet and the other survivors were rescued by the Royal Navy. Despite this second shipwreck, Violet worked as a ship’s stewardess until she retired in 1950.

The Titanic may be the more famous of the liners, but her sister will survive longer. Simon Mills, who last dived on the wreck of the Britannic in June, explains: “There is an iron-eating bacteria slowly destroying the Titanic, but when I see the Britannic, I struggle to see any way in which she’s changed much in 20 years. Apart from the break in the hull where the explosion occurred, and where the bow hit the seabed, the ship is completely intact. Everything is still inside the wreck. We even found the ship’s Marconi wireless telegraph tuner looking as good as the day she sank.”

As for Violet, she lived until 1971, dying at the age of 83. Only in the last years of her life would she discover that the Britannic’s propeller had fractured her skull.