The gold watch worn by Titanic’s richest passenger, John Jacob Astor, has set an auction record as the most expensive item of Titanic memorabilia.
A private collector in the US paid $1.5 million for a 14-karat gold Waltham pocket watch engraved with the initials JJA. The item was part of the sale “Titanic, White Star and Transport Memorabilia” held by British auction house Aldridge & Son on April 27th. The watch was one of about 250 items and easily surpassed its high estimate of $150,000.
Astor, a real estate developer and member of the New York dynastic family that grew rich from the fur trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, died at age 47 when his ship sank in 1912. Astor sparked scandal by marrying a woman in her late 30s and was returning to New York after an extended honeymoon in Europe and Egypt designed to quell the gossip.
He was last seen smoking a cigarette with author Jacques Futrelle after escorting his wife, Madeleine Talmadge Force, and her friend Margaret Brown safely to lifeboat four. Both women survived.
Astor’s body was found on April 22 by CS MacKay-Bennett, a steamship that was repurposed as a recovery ship by the White Star Line, the operator of the Titanic. In addition to the pocket watch, cufflinks, a diamond ring, a gold pencil and a wallet were recovered, as well as money in various currencies.
The possessions were returned to Astor’s son, Vincent, who restored the pocket watch before gifting it to his father’s longtime secretary, William Dobbyn, in 1935. The Dobbyn family kept the item until sending it up for auction in late 1990s.
“[Os itens] reflect not only the importance of the artefacts themselves and their rarity, but also show the enduring appeal and fascination with the story of the Titanic,” said auctioneer Andrew Aldridge. “It is effectively a large ship that hits an iceberg with a tragic loss of life, but most importantly there are 2,200 stories, every man, woman and child had a story to tell.”
The previous auction record for a Titanic memorabilia item came in 2013, when the violin that bandleader Wallace Henry Hartley played to calm passengers as the ship sank sold for $1.4 million. Henry Aldridge & Son was the seller. In the most recent auction, Hartley’s violin case, with the monogram initials WHH, sold for $450,000.
Also of note was a black and white photograph of an iceberg believed to be the crash of the Titanic, taken by John R. Snow Jr., an undertaker who traveled on the CS MacKay-Bennett. It sold for US$22,000.
