London — A rare first-class meal from the Titanic is likely to fetch up to £70,000 ($86,000) when auctioned off on Saturday in an auction of Titanic memorabilia.
Heavily water-stained, with parts of the letters partially erased, this menu likely wound up in the North Atlantic for a period when the Titanic fell in the early hours of April 15, 1912, according to the lot description from British auction house Henry Aldridge and Son Ltd.
The menu, which was eventually recovered, depicts the first meal served on board after the ship set sail from Queenstown, Belfast, and reveals the magnificence that the ship’s first-class passengers would have enjoyed.
On that April 11th night, dinner options included:
- Oysters
- Sirloin of beef with horseradish cream and pureed parsnips
- Desserts including apricot Bordaloue – a type of tart – and Victoria pudding
Rare Titanic First-Class Menu Up For Auction Sheds Light On Life Aboard
After checking museums with ship collections and communicating with top memorabilia collectors, the auction firm discovered that there appear to be no other surviving versions of the first-class meal for that precise night.
Other objects in the auction provide a brief peek into the life of the Titanic’s 2,223 passengers and crew, only 706 of whom survived.
A tartan blanket used by one of the survivors to keep warm in a lifeboat has been described as “one of the rarest three dimensional objects we have seen” and is estimated to fetch up to £100,000 ($123,000).
The blanket had previously belonged to Frederick Toppin, who had acquired it at a New York pier when he met rescued passengers coming ashore in his job as Assistant General Manager in New York of the firm that owned the Titanic, according to the auction house.
However, 1,517 people died aboard the Titanic, and a pocket watch belonging to Sinai Kantor, a Russian immigrant traveling to the United States in second class, marks the minute he entered the water and died.
Rare Titanic First-Class Menu Up For Auction Sheds Light On Life Aboard
A face slip used to mark mail bundles illustrates the fate of the postal clerks aboard, all of whom died while attempting to take mail bags to the ship’s upper decks to save them from water, according to the auction house.
The Titanic was a British passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in April 1912 after hitting an iceberg during its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. The sinking of the Titanic resulted in the deaths of over 1,500 people, making it one of the deadliest commercial peacetime maritime disasters in modern history.
The tragedy led to significant changes in maritime safety regulations and practices, and it continues to capture public interest and imagination to this day.
SOURCE – (CNN)
