OF THE 706 people who survived the sinking of the Titanic, Lillian Asplund was the last left alive who could remember the disaster. Among the 1,523 who perished were her three brothers and her father. The sight of their faces peering down over the ship’s rail as her lifeboat descended haunted her for the rest of her life.

Carl and Selma Asplund and their five children were a middle-class family of Swedish origin who, after several years back in Sweden settling Carl’s father’s estate and caring for his elderly mother, decided to return to the life they had built in Worcester, Massachusetts, where their daughter Lillian Gertrud had been born in 1906. They joined the Titanic at Southampton as the world’s largest passenger liner prepared to make her maiden voyage to New York in April, 1912.

Among those travelling in first class were such American nabobs as John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim, able to avail themselves of comforts that included the ship’s Turkish bath, a squash court and even lifts. As third-class ticket holders, the Asplunds had no such luxuries, and their compartments were also further away from the lifeboats, but such was the design of the vessel’s watertight bulkheads that journalists had pronounced her virtually unsinkable in any case.

When, on the night of April 14, the Titanic brushed an iceberg in the North Atlantic, buckling her hull below the waterline and allowing sea to pour in, the Asplunds were initially instructed to put on their lifebelts, and then told that there was no danger and that they should go back to bed.

The great ship was sinking, but sinking so slowly at first that no one realised it. Carl Asplund, however, thought it better that the children — Filip, who was 13, Clarence, 9, Lillie and her twin brother Carl, who were 5, and young Felix — should keep their lifebelts on.

Then came the call to take to the lifeboats, with women and young children being separated from men and boys. Selma Asplund did not want to part from her husband, but with a smile he told her that he would follow on with their sons. Afterwards she remembered how cold it was, and that she could see icebergs all around as, clutching Felix, she clambered into one of the boats and beckoned Lillie to follow. Then, suddenly, the lifeboat began to be lowered away down the side without Lillian in it, and the girl’s abiding memory of the night was of being passed through a window on the promenade deck into the boat and looking back up at the sinking ship. Her last sight of her father was of him holding her twin Carl, with the other two boys standing either side of him.

Lillian and her mother and brother were rescued by the steamship Carpathia and brought to New York, but there was only room in the lifeboats carried by the Titanic for some 1,700 of the 2,200 souls on board, capacity then being assessed with regard to a vessel’s tonnage rather than to her complement. As it was, many of the first boats had left the ship less than fully laden, and though most of the first and second-class passengers were saved, the greater number of those in third class were not, including the Asplunds. There was a report at first that Carl and one of the boys had been saved, but it proved a false hope.

The lives of the three surviving Asplunds were shattered by the tragedy. They had lost all their savings when the vessel went down, and had to be supported by a fund raised by the townspeople of Worcester. Lillian later worked as a secretary, but she did not marry and took early retirement to look after her mother, who never recovered from the night’s events. Selma Asplund died on the anniversary of the disaster in 1964, and Felix Asplund, who had no recollection of it, died a bachelor in 1983.

Lillian Asplund talked only rarely about her memories of the Titanic, preferring to tend her roses. When James Cameron’s blockbuster film was released in 1997, she asked to be left in peace by reporters. There are thought to be two other survivors remaining, both British women, but both too young at the time to recall the sinking.

Lillian Asplund, survivor of the Titanic, was born on October 21, 1906. She died on May 6, 2006, aged 99.