Titanic’s richest passenger’s watch fetches £1.175m at auction

2024-04-27 20:06:12

A gold watch found on the body of the Titanic’s richest passenger was sold for 1.175 million pounds sterling (1.37 million euros) at auction on Saturday, a record for an item linked to the famous ship, according to the British auction house Henry Aldridge & Son.

This amount, paid by an American buyer, shatters the estimate of 100,000 to 150,000 pounds sterling (116,000 to 175,000 euros) published before the sale.

It exceeds the previous record, for a Titanic artifact at auction, of 1.1 million pounds reached in 2013 by a violin, according to the auction house.

The violin case was sold on Saturday for 360,000 pounds sterling (420,000 euros) during the same sale as the watch.

Engraved with the initials JJA, it belonged to the American businessman John Jacob Astor, who died at the age of 47 in the sinking of the Titanic in the early hours of April 15, 1912.

Reputed to be one of the richest men in the world at the time, with a fortune of $87 million, which would be several billion today, he sank on the ship following seeing his new wife, Madeleine, board a lifeboat.

He was described in his final moments smoking a cigarette in the company of another passenger, the American writer Jacques Futrelle, both of whom were among the Titanic’s 1,500 dead.

His body was found on April 22, 1912, along with his 14-karat gold pocket watch.

“The watch was completely restored following being returned to the family of “John Jacob Astor” and worn by his son, making it a unique piece of Titanic history and one of the most important pieces of the “history of watchmaking relating to the most famous ship in the world”, underlines the auction house.

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