Titanic menu fetches £84,000 at UK auction
This image obtained Aug. 31, 2015 courtesy of Lion Heart Autographs shows an April 14, 1912 menu from the R.M.S. Titanic. (Photo by Agence France-Presse from a handout from Lion Heart Autographs)
LONDON — A first-class dinner menu from the Titanic’s ill-fated maiden voyage offering oysters, beef, and mallard duck has sold for £84,000 ($103,000 or around P5.7 million), the UK auction house responsible for its sale said on Sunday.
The menu, for a meal served on April 11, 1912, is decorated with a red White Star Line burgee, but the original gilt lettering is no longer visible.
More than 1,500 passengers and crew died when the vessel sank after hitting an iceberg on the evening of April 14, 1912.
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The menu “shows signs of water immersion having been partially erased, the reverse of the menu also clearly displays further evidence of this,” said auctioneer Andrew Aldridge.
“This would point to the menu having been subjected to the icy North Atlantic waters on the morning of April 15 either having left the ship with a survivor who was exposed to those cold sea waters or recovered on the person of one of those lost,” he added.
It is believed to be the only surviving copy of a first-class April 11 dinner menu and was discovered in a photo album belonging to late Canadian amateur historian Len Stephenson.
The menu was sold on Saturday at Henry Aldridge & Son auction house in Wiltshire, southwest England.
Other items in the sale included a Swiss-made pocket watch recovered from passenger Sinai Kantor, which sold for £97,000 (P6.7 million) while a tartan-patterned deck blanket likely used during the rescue operation fetched £96,000 (P6.6 million).
