Eva Hart was just seven years old when her family left
Ilford, England, and boarded the Titanic in Southampton. They were saying
good-bye to England to make their future in Winnipeg, Canada.
Eva’s parents were Benjamin Hart, a builder who had fallen
on hard times, and his wife, Esther Bloomfield Hart. Eva had often told the
story of how her father had made the monumental decision to try their luck in
Canada in a single evening based on a lively visit from an old friend. The
friend had come to see the Harts on his holiday, and he was brimming with
enthusiasm for the many opportunities he had found in Winnipeg. The discussion
was known to be music to the ears of Eva’s father.
Left to right: Benjamin Hart, Eva Hart, Esther Hart.
As Eva told the story, her father was thrilled when he was
informed their tickets had been transferred to a second class cabin on the
Titanic. Her mother, however, was terrified. Benjamin thought Esther would be
delighted, because the new ship was said to be unsinkable, but instead, his
wife was sick with worry, claiming to have great apprehension about their
safety. Eva remembered her mother felt strongly that something very bad was
going to happen in the night. She napped in the daytime, and every night she
sat up in a chair, fully clothed and forced herself to stay awake. On the night
of the sinking, Eva was asleep in her bed when Titanic struck the iceberg. Her
father wrapped her in a blanket and brought her up to the deck with her mother,
and saw them into the heavily crowded lifeboat number 14.
Eva Hart age 7
“Hold Mummy’s hand and be a good girl,” he told her. That
was the last time she saw her father. There was pandemonium on the deck as the
last of the boats were being loaded. “Women and children only” was the cry that
went up as she and her mother were lowered away. When the Titanic sank a short
while later, Eva, a tiny child, could not take her eyes off of the spectacle.
With screams in the night as people hit the water and drowned, she watched as
the ship broke apart, and then slipped into the sea. The sea was glassy smooth
with only the stars casting eerie illumination on the death scene. Chairs,
debris and bodies floated about. “The worst thing I can remember are the
screams,” Eva said, in a 1993 interview. “And then the silence that followed.
It seemed as if once everybody had gone, drowned, finished, the whole world was
standing still. There was nothing, just this deathly, terrible silence in the
dark night with the stars overhead.”
The body of Benjamin Hart was never recovered. Eva and her
mother were taken aboard the rescue ship, the Carpathia, and continued on into
New York with all of the survivors. They then returned to England and Esther
remarried. Eva suffered from nightmares for years. She remained deeply attached
to her mother and sought her out to calm her night terrors. She was 23 when
Esther died and finally defeated her fears of ocean travel by taking a long
voyage to Singapore and then Australia. Eva never married. She worked in many
jobs over her life, which included a career as a professional singer in
Australia. She later became, a Conservative party organizer and magistrate in
England. In her later years, Eva also became one of the most
outspoken critics of salvage efforts of the Titanic and considered the removal
of items from the shipwreck to be grave robbing. Eva Hart died on February
14th, 1995 at the age of 91. Her death was considered the end of the last living
memory of the Titanic, as the remaining survivors at that time were either too
frail of memory to be interviewed, or too young at the time of the sinking to
have stories to share.
Ruth Becker Blanchard age 12
Titanic approaches the iceberg
His Grave
Joseph Dawson 1911