THE letter that landed on the doormat of the Dowding family home in Bournemouth’s King’s Road was only written by a humble servant.

But lady’s maid Clear Annie Cameron’s account of the Titanic sinking, and her 17 other letters sent from the ship before the collision paint a valuable account of life on board the ill-fated ship.

Clear was travelling to find work suited to her position in the USA where she had heard the wages were higher.

She found the crew ‘fully up to their work’ and the passengers were ‘the nicest lot one could ever meet’. She wrote: “We all chummed together and were just beginning to enjoy ourselves when this dreadful thing happened.”

On a previous day she had written: “One does feel a wee bit giddy now and again. The boat, one would have thought, would not roll but it is rocking at this present minute like mad.”

Clear went on to recount her version of the sinking, how: “I never heard a thing,” when the liner struck the iceberg and how she tried to get back to sleep but was woken by a man telling them all to get up on deck.

As people started milling around Clear wrote: “The officer on board fired at passengers on the lower decks to deter them from jumping into the lifeboat as it was lowered to sea. He shouted: ‘If any one of you men jump into this boat I will shoot you like the dogs you are.’ ”

Her friend, Nellie Wallcroft recalled later how Clear had taken an oar of the lifeboat, massaged freezing survivors who were pulled on board and how, on the rescue ship Carpathia, she had comforted desperate women whose menfolk had died in the sinking.

After they had rowed away from the vessel they watched her sink.

“She just broke in two and the ends were sticking up only for about five minutes. The cries were dreadful of the poor dying people, one cannot get them out of one’s mind and to think, if there had been more boats, hundreds of those poor sufferers could have been saved.”

Clear’s letters remained in her sister’s home in Charminster until her brother-in-law, Ted Dowding, went to live with his son, Clear’s nephew, also called Ted, near Cerne Abbas.

He kept the letters after moving to Scotland and in 1998 published a book based upon them.