All about Eva Hart

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.