Frederick Fleet
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Frederick Fleet (October 15, 1887 – January 10, 1965) was a crewman and survivor of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, after it struck an iceberg in 1912. Employed as a lookout aboard Titanic, it was Fleet who first sighted the iceberg, ringing the bridge to proclaim "Iceberg, right ahead!" Frederic Fleet argued, (under oath at the inquiry), if he had been issued binoculars, he would have seen the iceberg sooner.
Fleet was one of the Titanic crewmembers assigned to man the lifeboats after the ship started to go down. As such, he survived the ship's sinking and served in the merchant service through World War I and again in World War II after having been unemployed in the 1930s.
After Fleet's wife died shortly after Christmas 1964, he became depressed and committed suicide by hanging two weeks later in January 1965. Many have said that in many ways Fleet was also the last victim of Titanic. People who knew him said he suffered from terrible guilt all his life because he had lived while so many perished. Out of 1,662 men on Titanic, he was one of only 315 who survived. Fleet was buried in a paupers grave at Hollybrook Cemetery, in Southampton. The grave went unmarked until 1993, when a headstone bearing an engraving of Titanic was erected through donations by The Titanic Historical Society.
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