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Survivor's Titanic memento sold | |
(about 17 hours later) | |
Memorabilia from the Titanic, including a lot from the ship's last living survivor, raised thousands at auction. | |
The auction in Devizes, Wiltshire, featured memorabilia belonging to 97-year-old Millvina Dean. | |
She was lowered to safety from the deck of the sinking cruise liner as a two-month-old baby. | |
The spinster faces monthly bills of £3,000 at her Southampton nursing home and sold a canvas bag from her rescue which raised £1,500. | |
'Icy waters' | |
The bag was used to carry her belongings back to England from New York after she, her mother and two-year-old brother were rescued. | |
Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge told BBC News:"There's a really nice story to this. A young man from London bought it, paid the money and then told us he wanted it returned to Ms Dean." | |
We had several hundred people in the sale room and interest in the auction was very good Andrew Aldridge, auctioneer class="" href="/1/hi/magazine/7960933.stm"> The last Titanic survivor | |
Ms Dean's father perished in the icy waters of the north Atlantic, one of 1,517 to die when the ship sank in 1912. | |
Also included in the sale at Henry Aldridge & Son auctioneers was a flask another passenger on the ill-fated ship used to give hot milk to his wife and two daughters. | |
This lot sold for £37,500. | |
The provenance states the man shinned down the rope of a rescue boat to hand over the flask, before returning to the deck and perishing as the ship went down. | |
The sale raised a "substantial sum" auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said | |
A chunky key to a door on the ship's E deck was sold for just under £60,000 - and was the most expensive item sold. | |
A letter from a Henry Wilde on Titanic notepaper went for £27,000, and another by passenger Adolf Saalfeld, reached almost £28,000. | |
Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said the sale had gone well. | |
"We had several hundred people in the sale room and interest in the auction was very good, as is the case with our Titanic auctions. | |
"Overall, we've raised a very substantial sum." |