The last living survivor of the Titanic, ­Millvina Dean, has died at the age of 97 in Southampton after catching pneumonia.

As a two-month-old baby, Dean was the youngest passenger on board the giant liner when it sank on its maiden voyage with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

Her parents had decided to leave England for America, where her father had family in Kansas and hoped to open a tobacco shop.

The Deans had not chosen to be aboard the Titanic, but because of a coal strike they were transferred to the ship and boarded it as third-class passengers at Southampton.

Her father felt the crunch of the ship's collision with the iceberg on the night of 14 April 1912, and went up to investigate. He returned to their cabin telling his wife to dress the children and go up on deck.

Dean, her mother, and brother were placed in lifeboat 10 and were among the first off the liner out of the 706 passengers and crew who escaped.

Her father, however, remained aboard and was among those who drowned when the giant ship finally went down in the early hours of next day.

Dean, born on 2 February 1912, had been in hospital last week with pneumonia, having worked as a secretary until her retirement. Her death came just a month after Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, stars of the Hollywood blockbuster about the disaster, stepped in to help pay her nursing home fees. The pair joined with James Cameron, the director of the Oscar-winning film, to donate £20,000 to The Millvina Fund.

Dean lived at Ashurst in the New Forest, not far from where she set sail on the liner. In the last year she had to sell some of her family's possessions at auction to pay for her stay in the nursing home.

Items included a suitcase filled with clothes given to her family when they arrived in America, and compensation letters sent to her mother from the Titanic Relief Fund. The mementoes sold at auction were returned to her by the buyer.

Dean had enjoyed her celebrity status as the last survivor, but remembered the doomed voyage with sadness. She said: "Until the wreckage of the Titanic was found in 1985, nobody was interested in me. Who expects to become famous at that age?"

Dean had become the very last survivor of the Titanic when another woman who had been a baby on board, Barbara Dainton, from Cornwall, died in October 2007, aged 96. The last American survivor, ­Lillian Asplund, had died aged 99 in 2006.