Miss Violet Constance Jessop, 24, of 71 Shirley Road, Bedford Park, London was born in the pampas near Bahia Blanca, Argentina, the first child of Irish emigrants William and Katherine (Kelly) Jessop. Her father was a sheep farmer and she had five younger brothers and sisters. When her father died in Mendoza the family returned to Britain, her mother found a job as a stewardess for the Royal Mail Line while Violet attended convent school. When her mother’s health deteriorated Violet gave up school to became a stewardess herself, first with the Royal Mail Line, then later with White Star. She served on board the Olympic before joining the Titanic and was aboard the Olympic when she was in collision with HMS Hawke in 1911.
In her memoirs she [articularly remembers Thomas Andrews and, like all other crew members it seems, she greatly admired him. Mr Andrews was the only person who seemed to heed the requests of the crew for improvements in the crew’s quarters. The stewards and stewardesses were quite pleased with their quarters on Titanic. “Often during our rounds we came upon our beloved designer going about unobtrusively with a tired face but a satisfied air. He never failed to stop for a cheerful word, his only regret that we were ‘getting further from home.’ We all knew the love he had for that Irish home of his and suspected that he longed to get back to the peace of its atmosphere for a much needed rest and to forget ship designing for awhile.” After the collision she recalls "I was ordered up on deck. Calmly, passengers strolled about. I stood at the bulkhead with the other stewardesses, watching the women cling to their husbands before being put into the boats with their children. Some time after, a ship’s officer ordered us into the boat first to show some women it was safe. As the boat was being lowered the officer called: ‘Here, Miss Jessop. Look after this baby.’ And a bundle was dropped on to my lap.’’
After eight hours in the boat she and the others were picked up by the Carpathia:. "I was still clutching the baby against my hard cork lifebelt I was wearing when a woman leaped at me and grabbed the baby, and rushed off with it, it appeared that she put it down on the deck of the Titanic while she went off to fetch something, and when she came back the baby had gone. I was too frozen and numb to think it strange that this woman had not stopped to say ‘thank you’".
Later she served as a nurse with the British Red Cross during World War I and was on-board the Britannic when that vessel was sunk in the Aegean in 1916. In her late 30’s she had “a brief and disastrous” marriage and they had no children. She retired to a sixteenth-century thatched cottage in Great Ashfield, Suffolk. When the film A Night to Remember was released in 1958 she was interviewed for Woman magazine .