The last remaining survivor of the Titanic has been forced to sell her mementoes from the liner to help pay for her nursing home fees.

Millvina Dean, who was a two-month-old baby when the ship sank in 1912, is to auction off items including a suitcase filled with the clothes given to her family by the people of New York when they arrived in America after being rescued.

She is also to part with compensation letters sent to her mother by the Titanic Relief Fund and rare artists-inscribed prints of the ship.

Miss Dean's family were in the process of emigrating to the US to live in Kansas when the Titanic went down. As 1,517 passengers and crew died around her, she was placed in a sack and carried to safety. Her mother and brother also survived but her father, Bertram, was killed.

She has been the last living survivor of the Titanic since last year when Barbara Dainton, from Cornwall, died aged 96.

Miss Dean, 96, is hoping to raise some £3,000 from the sale after finding herself unable to cope with the cost of her nursing home in Ashurst, Hants. She has been resident in the private home for two years after breaking her hip.

Miss Dean told the Southern Daily Echo: “I was hoping to be here for two weeks after breaking my hip but I developed an infection and have been here for two years. I am not able to live in my home anymore.

“I am selling it all now because I have to pay these nursing home fees and am selling anything that I think might fetch some money.”

The auction is to take place this Saturday at Henry Aldridge and Son auctioneers in Devizes Wiltshire.

"The suitcase is a very emotive and unusual item and epitomises what the people of New York did for the Titanic survivors," Andrew Aldridge said.

"It also highlights what state the survivors were in when they got to New York. Many people lost everything down to the clothes they were standing in."

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