A treasure store of Titanic memorabilia, kept in a shoe box by a woman who survived the 1912 disaster, has sold at auction for £100,000. Among Lillian Asplund”s shoe box treasures was one of the last four remaining tickets for the Titanic”s doomed maiden voyage.
It was sold for £33,000 by auctioneers Henry Aldridge and Son in Devizes, Wiltshire, at the weekend.
Titanic sank when she hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York on 15 April 1912 with the loss of 1,522 lives.
The liner was built at Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast.
Miss Asplund was five years old when she boarded the White Star liner with her parents and four siblings in 1912, to emigrate from Sweden to Worcester, Massachusetts.
Lillian, her mother Selma and one of her brothers were all saved when they were thrown into one of the last lifeboats, but her father Carl and her other three brothers died.
She was one of the last remaining survivors of the disaster. She died on 6 May 2006, aged 99, and left the collection to her second cousin from Massachusetts, US, who sold everything on Saturday.
A pocket watch that stopped at the exact moment the great liner sank sold for £31,000 and a unique emigrant forwarding order went for £27,000.
Other items auctioned included two pocket books owned by Miss Asplund”s father Carl, which sold for £5,000, a photo of him and his wife Selma, which sold for £5,000, and his gold wedding ring, which sold for £3,000.
Bidders called in from around the world and about 150 crammed into the Devizes salesroom for Saturday”s auction, which lasted nearly five hours.
Andrew Aldridge, who runs the family auction business with his father Alan, said: "There were bidders from China, America, Sweden, Ireland and the UK calling in, and the room itself was so packed we had to fetch more chairs."
The Asplund collection, which had been kept in a shoe box in Miss Asplund”s home until after her death, was sold for more than £100,000.
Mr Aldridge added: "The relative who inherited the items did not want to hold on to them because when you”re keeping things of that value, and you”ve got to insure them, it”s not cheap."
A total of 364 items of Titanic memorabilia were auctioned at the weekend.
Among them was an original piece of artwork from the 1958 film A Night To Remember, which sold for £12,000.
Foreign News – Resource: BBC News
