How much would you pay to own a piece of memorabilia from a historical tragedy? One unidentified collector paid $906,000 for a life jacket from the Titanic at an auction last Saturday. The item is the only life jacket from the ocean liner ever sold at auction since the 1912 sinking. After over a century, there’s little to no chance that the cork-stuffed flotation device is still functional, and I don’t have the funds to test it.
During the disaster, the life jacket was worn by Laura Mabel Francatelli, a British first-class passenger. When the Titanic struck an iceberg on the night of April 14, she ignored advice to go back to bed and headed to her employer’s cabin. According to Smithsonian Magazine, she was the secretary of fashion designer Lucy Duff-Gordon. Cosmo, Lucy’s husband, was dismissive of Francatelli’s warning that the ship was sinking. However, all three sought a way off the doomed liner. After the women turned down spots on a lifeboat, choosing not to abandon Cosmo, they found spots on a small emergency boat. Despite having a capacity of 40 people, only a dozen were on board when it was lowered into the Atlantic Ocean.
A unique family heirloom that is now a collector’s item
Titanic’s survivors were eventually rescued hours later by the Carpathia. Francatelli’s lifeboat would quickly become the center of a controversy after the sinking. The lifeboat’s occupants were criticized for not returning to the sinking ship to save more people. Cosmo was even accused of bribing crew members for his spot on the lifeboat. After the disaster, Francatelli kept her life jacket. She signed it along with seven other passengers from the lifeboat. The memento remained in her family’s possession until a private collector bought it 20 years ago. Most other life jackets from Titanic are owned by museums.
Auction house Henry Aldridge & Son holds an annual auction to commemorate the anniversary of the sinking. Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said, “These record-breaking prices illustrate the continuing interest in the Titanic story, and the respect for the passengers and crew whose stories are immortalized by these items of memorabilia.” I didn’t need eye-watering bids to tell me that. Let’s not forget the OceanGate Titan submersible catastrophically imploding as it ferried wealthy tourists to see the Titanic’s remains.
