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gold pocket watch A car owned by one of the Titanic’s most famous passengers who died has sold at auction for a record $2.3 million.
Macy’s co-owner Isidore Strauss brought the watch with his wife on his ill-fated voyage back to New York after a trip to Europe.
“Pocket watches are incredibly personal items,” Andrew Aldridge, managing director of Henry Aldridge & Son, which sold the watch last Saturday, said in a statement.
“The men, women and children passengers and crew all had stories to tell, and 113 years later they are being told through the objects they owned,” Aldridge added. “Items like this bring the story to life and bring us closer to the memory of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.”
Titanic passenger’s rare gold pocket watch could become the most expensive artifact ever sold
Titanic passenger Isidore Strauss and a gold pocket watch sold at auction. (Bettman via Getty Images, Henry Aldridge & Son/BPNS)
18 carat gold jules jurgensen pocket watch The painting was a gift from Strauss’s wife Ida on his birthday in 1888, and Ida famously refused to board a lifeboat and died with her husband on the boat.
“My place is with you,” she reportedly told him. “I have lived with you. I love you, and if I have to, I will die with you.”
Instead, her maid was shuffled onto a lifeboat and given Ida’s fur coat to keep out the cold.
The pocket watch has probably stopped ticking. April 15, 1912 2:20 a.m.when the ship was submerged.
Titanic passengers Isidore and Ida Strauss (Bettman via Getty Images)
Their love was portrayed in James Cameron’s Oscar-winning blockbuster Titanic, which shows the pair holding hands on a stateroom bed as the ship sinks.
The watch was recovered from the body and returned to the family pending auction this month.
The ill-fated White Star liner RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and sank during its maiden voyage across the Atlantic in 1912. (Hulton Archive)
The pocket watch broke sales records. titanic memorabilia A year later, another pocket watch given by John Jacob Astor’s widow and two other survivors to the captain of the RMS Carpathia as a thank you for their rescue, sold for $1.97 million at the same auction house.
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“Some of the prices we’re seeing in this sale demonstrate the continued fascination with this great story,” Aldridge said.
