Henry Aldridge and Son Ltd
The water-stained menu for the Titanic’s first class passengers
Editor’s Note: This article was updated with the final selling price and other details after the auction closed.
London CNN –
A rare first-class menu from the Titanic sold for 83,000 pounds ($102,000) on Saturday as part of an auction of memorabilia related to the doomed ocean liner.
The menu was heavily water-stained and partially erased and was probably stranded for a time in the North Atlantic when the Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, British auction house Henry Aldridge and Son Ltd said in the lot description.
The ultimately salvaged menu describes the first dinner on board after the Titanic set sail from Queenstown, Belfast, and reveals the opulence that the ship’s first class passengers would have experienced.
Henry Aldridge and Son Ltd
A tartan blanket recovered from one of the lifeboats fetched £96,000 ($117,000).
Dinner options that evening on April 11 included oysters, beef tenderloin with horseradish cream and pureed parsnips, as well as desserts such as apricot bordaloue – a type of tart – and Victoria pudding.
There appear to be no other copies of the top-notch menu for this special evening, the auction house determined after consulting museums with Titanic collections and speaking to leading memorabilia collectors.
Other auction items offer a glimpse into the lives of the 2,223 passengers and crew aboard the Titanic, of whom only 706 survived.
Henry Aldridge and Son Ltd
A pocket watch belonging to a second class passenger named Sinai Kantor sold for £97,000 ($119,000).
A tartan blanket that one of those survivors used to keep warm in a lifeboat was hailed by the auction house as “one of the rarest three-dimensional objects we have ever seen” and sold for £96,000 ($117,000).
The blanket previously belonged to Frederick Toppin, who acquired it in New York on a New York pier in his capacity as deputy general manager of the company that owned the Titanic when he met rescued passengers coming ashore, the auction house previously said for sale on Saturday.
But 1,517 of the passengers aboard the Titanic did not survive, and a pocket watch belonging to Sinai Kantor, a Russian immigrant who traveled second class to the United States, marks the moment he entered the water and later died. At £97,000 ($119,000), it became the most expensive lot sold at Saturday’s auction.
Other items for sale included a flyer used to mark bundles of mail, illustrating the fate of the ship’s postal workers, all of whom died trying to drag mail bags to the ship’s upper decks to keep them safe from flooding. added to the auction to save house.