Edith Eileen Brown was born on 27 October 1896 in Cape Town, South Africa, the daughter of Thomas William Solomon Brown, a hotel manager and property owner, and Elizabeth Catherine Ford, who had English and Dutch Boer heritage. Edith had one younger sister, Dorothy Beatrice, who died in 1906 at the age of seven, and five older half-siblings from her father’s first marriage.
By 1912 the Brown family’s finances in Cape Town had declined, and Elizabeth’s sister Josephine Acton, who lived in Seattle, Washington, encouraged them to emigrate to the United States. The family booked second class passage on the Titanic, ticket number 29750, for £39, and boarded at Southampton on 10 April 1912. Edith later recalled the ship’s handsome paintings, fine linens and excellent meals, and remembered her father having an uneasy premonition about the voyage.
On the night of 14–15 April 1912, Edith felt „a crash and slight jar“ and was told by her father to dress warmly and put on a life preserver. On deck she witnessed an officer firing his revolver into the air to keep order as the lifeboats were loaded. Edith and her mother were placed in lifeboat 14; her father remained aboard the sinking ship and did not survive. From the lifeboat, Edith heard the ship’s band playing and later the screams of those left in the water as the Titanic went down.
Edith and her mother were rescued and taken aboard the Carpathia, arriving in New York on 18 April 1912. Early, contradictory survivor lists briefly caused confusion over who in the family had lived or died. Mother and daughter eventually travelled on to Seattle before returning to Cape Town, and later moved to Johannesburg around 1914.
In Johannesburg, Edith met Frederick Thankful Haisman at the Wemmer Sailing Club, and the couple married on 30 June 1917. They went on to have ten children and emigrated to England in 1920, later living for a time in South Africa during the Second World War before settling permanently in Southampton in 1948.
Edith became active in the Titanic survivor community from the late 1970s onward, attending conventions and memorial events. In 1996, at the age of 99, she sailed to the wreck site and cast flowers in memory of her father. She became one of only five Titanic survivors to live to the age of 100, and died on 20 January 1997 in Southampton, where she is buried at St Mary Extra Cemetery.
This artwork by Dodo Newman commemorates Edith Eileen Brown’s survival of the Titanic disaster as a young girl and her long life that followed, forming a companion piece to the artwork dedicated to her father, Thomas William Solomon Brown.
Sources: Encyclopedia Titanica, WikiTree.
