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A gold pocket watch owned by one of the most famous passengers to die on the Titanic has sold for a record-breaking $2.3 million at auction.
Isidor Straus, who was the co-owner of Macy’s, brought the watch with him on the ill-fated voyage he was taking with his wife home to New York following a trip to Europe.
“Pocket watches are incredibly personal items,” Andrew Aldridge, managing director of Henry Aldridge and Son, where the watch sold last Saturday, said in a statement.”
“Every man, woman and child passenger or crew had a story to tell and they are told 113 years later through the objects that they owned,” Aldridge added. “Items like this keep the story alive and bring us closer to the memory of one of the biggest tragedies of the 20th century.”
TITANIC PASSENGER’S RARE GOLD POCKET WATCH COULD BECOME PRICIEST ARTIFACT EVER SOLD
Titanic passenger Isidor Straus and his gold pocket watch that sold at auction. (Bettmann via Getty Images, Henry Aldridge & Son/BPNS)
The 18-carat gold Jules Jurgensen pocket watch was an 1888 birthday gift to Straus from his wife, Ida, who famously refused to get into a lifeboat and instead died on the boat with her husband.
“My place is with you,” she reportedly told him. “I have lived with you. I love you, and, if necessary, I shall die with you.”
Instead, her maid was shuffled into a lifeboat and given Ida’s fur coat to keep warm.
The pocket watch supposedly stopped ticking at 2:20 a.m. April 15, 1912, when the ship became submerged.
Titanic passengers Isidor and Ida Straus (Bettmann via Getty Images)
Their love was depicted in James Cameron’s Oscar-winning epic “Titanic,” showing the couple holding hands in their stateroom bed as the ship went down.
The watch was recovered from his body and returned to his family until this month’s auction.
1912: The ill-fated White Star liner RMS Titanic, which struck an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. (Hulton Archive)
The pocket watch broke the record for the sale of Titanic memorabilia, a year after another pocket watch — that was given to the captain of RMS Carpathia by John Jacob Astor’s widow and two other survivors as thanks for their rescue — sold at the same auction house for $1.97 million.
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“Some of the prices seen at this sale indicate the continued fascination with this amazing story,” Aldridge said.