A gold pocket watch recovered from the body of the richest man on the Titanic, businessman John Jacob Astor, was sold at the weekend for a record-breaking £1.2m.
Astor went down with the ship in the 1912 disaster at the age of 47, after seeing his new wife, Madeleine, on to a lifeboat.
The Guardian reports that the watch was sold on Saturday to a private collector in the US by an auction house in Wiltshire, for what the auctioneers described as the highest amount ever paid for Titanic memorabilia.
The previous record was £1.1m, paid in 2013 for a violin that was played as the ship sank.
Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge told the PA news agency that the prices fetched by the Titanic memorabilia ‘reflect not only the importance of the artefacts themselves and their rarity but they also show the enduring appeal and fascination with the Titanic story’.
When the vessel sank in the Atlantic after striking an iceberg, some 1 500 of the ship’s 2 200 passengers and crew perished.
Aldridge added: ‘The thing with the Titanic story (is that it incorporates) 2 200 subplots, every man, woman and child had a story to tell and then the memorabilia tell those stories today.’