FRANK Prentice was one of the last crewmen on board the stricken Titanic as its stern rose skywards like a giant finger shortly before it sunk.

He plunged 100 feet into the icy waters, among hundreds of bodies, dead, dying or struggling to survive.

For four hours he was floating in the water and had given up hope when a lifeboat finally picked him up.

Frank – who moved to the Bournemouth area seven years after the disaster and lived for many years in New Road, Ferndown and later on Southbourne Overcliff Drive – had been 18 at the time.

Only a short while before the liner’s fateful maiden voyage, Frank had been transferred from the Adriatic to the Titanic to work as an assistant purser.

However glamorous the job had seemed when she sailed from Southampton, it ended with Frank having to perform the worst job he had to do – parting the women from their husbands and getting them into lifeboats before Titanic sunk.

Then, he told the Echo back in 1980 at the age of 85, he worked his way to the stern.

“I was hanging on to a board on the ship rails. I was one of two warning people to keep clear of the propellers,” before the stern rose in the air prior to sinking.

Then he leapt into the freezing sea.

“I was lucky when I hit the water that I did not hit anything,” he recalled.

“I searched for my friend and he had not been so lucky. He had hit something and was hurt.

“I stayed with him until he died and then I paddled off.

“I was bumping into bodies all the time.”

Recounting his story to the Echo on another occasion he said: “The band were playing when the ship began to go down. I can remember the hymn but as she finally went under there was no-one singing.

“When I dropped down into the water it was among 200 or 300 live or dead bodies.”

Gradually all those around him perished and he was finally left on his own.

How did he survive for four hours? He put it down to being fit and a good swimmer.

“I was half-frozen and had given up hope,” he said.

One of the Titanic’s lifeboats finally picked him up.

“It was only half-full and there was a dead fireman lying in the bottom. There was another trying to get out of the boat.”

Frank was rescued and transferred to the Carpathia and taken straight to the ship’s hospital.

Just a month later, he was on board the Oceanic which returned to the spot where the Titanic had sunk.

They found a drifting lifeboat from the Titanic. Its sole occupants were four dead men.

After the First World War broke out in 1914, the Oceanic was converted into an armoured cruiser and sailed from Southampton.

Three months later she hit a submerged reef off the Faroes and sank.

Again Frank had to jump for his life and was picked up by a lifeboat.

He was landed at Liverpool and his next vessel was the Olympic, the Titanic’s sister ship.

That was the day Frank Prentice decided to join the Army.

He enlisted with the Royal Tank Regiment and became a major, winning a Military Cross.

After the war life must have been much quieter having moved to Bournemouth, where he later relaxed playing golf at Ferndown and for Dorset.

The Titanic, he believed, had been sacrificed for speed.

“They knew there was ice about but we were flat out,” he said.

Throughout his life he kept the watch he was wearing on that fateful night in April 1912.

It had stopped at 2.20am, nearly two and a half hours after the ship had hit the iceberg causing the 300ft gash along her side.

And at the moment Frank Prentice hit the freezing water.

Titanic: Triumph and Tragedy by John P Eaton and Charles A Haas names Frank M Prentice, who died in 1982, as the crewman who was “destined to live the longest”.