A top-notch dinner menu from the Titanic could fetch thousands of dollars at auction
There were oysters, salmon with Hollandaise sauce, beef, squab, duck, roast chicken, green peas, parsnip puree and Victoria pudding. The feast described is not a Thanksgiving meal, but a snapshot of what first-class passengers on the Titanic ate for dinner on April 11, 1912, when the ship sailed from Queenstown, Ireland, for New York.
A menu from that evening, with a red White Star Line flag embossed at the top and signs of water damage, will will be auctioned on Saturday at Henry Aldridge & Son Ltd in the South West of England. Andrew Aldridge, the auction house’s director, said on Wednesday that while a handful of menus from the ship were known to have survived, this was the only known example from the night of April 11 – three days before the Titanic struck an iceberg. . It is expected to sell for up to 70,000 pounds, or about $86,000.
The auction includes hundreds of other maritime items, including one White Star Line tartan blanket that was recovered from a Titanic lifeboat and a pocket watch owned by a second-class passenger, a Russian immigrant, who did not survive the sinking.
“There are several Titanic dinner menus in existence,” Mr. Aldridge said, noting that three meals a day were served from April 10, the day the ship embarked on its maiden voyage, through April 14, the day whereupon the ship struck an iceberg and began to sink in the North Atlantic Ocean, ultimately killing 1,500 people.
Over the years, some torn menus from the Titanic have been auctioned and commanded high prices. There was a first class menu from the ship’s last lunch sold for $120,000 in 2012. Three years later, a menu from the last dinner was served to first-class passengers sold for over $118,000.
“I’ve talked to several museums around the world, and I’ve talked to some of our Titanic collectors,” Mr. Aldridge said of the April 11 dinner menu being auctioned this weekend. “I can’t find one anywhere anymore.”
“This menu has been in the water,” he added.
The menu was brought to his attention this summer after it was discovered in a 1960s photo album that once belonged to Len Stephenson, a community historian in Dominion, Nova Scotia.
Halifax, a city more than 200 miles southwest of Dominion, was the base for the Titanic search and recovery efforts, according to the BBC. Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. Some Titanic victims were buried at sea, while others were shipped to their home communities or buried in Halifax.
It was unclear exactly how Mr Stephenson obtained the menu, but his son-in-law sent it to Mr Aldridge for a closer look.
“I opened the box and was OMG,” he said.
“Original Titanic menus, they just haven’t been discovered yet,” he continued. “We know where most of them are. So it is very, very exciting to make a completely new discovery of this nature and caliber.”
Other types of Titanic artifacts are offered for sale from time to time. In 2017, a letter written by an American first-class passenger aboard the Titanic sold for 126,000 pounds (about $153,000 at the time). The following year, 5,500 items recovered from the wreckage were sold to three hedge funds for more than $19 million.
Despite the wealth at stake, some see the sale and resale of items from the ship and its passengers as creepy.
Charles Haas, president of the Titanic International Society, Inc., said the items for sale fall into several categories: things that went down with the ship that night and have since been recovered; belongings of surviving passengers and crew; and items removed from the ship as mementos as people fled.
The former category is a source of much controversy, but Mr. Hass believes the menu falls into the latter group.
The owner of the pocket watch that Henry Aldridge & Son will auction, Sinai Kantor, did not survive the sinking, but his wife Miriam did. The watch, rusted by the salt water and its Hebrew numerals now faded, was among the items returned to her when his body was recovered. Her descendants sold it at an earlier auction.
“Items on the ship, taken by passengers or crew, or found floating in the sea, have been sold for more than 50 years by survivors, their descendants, maritime memorabilia dealers and auction houses on both sides of the Atlantic,” he said. said Haas.
For Harry Bennett, an associate professor of maritime history at the University of Plymouth in southwest England, belongings that may have been recovered from the bodies of victims are particularly disturbing. He said selling such items comes down to “a matter of personal morality.”
“I find it very uncomfortable to look at a photo of a pocket watch or a menu and think about the tragic journey it has actually taken,” he said. “These things are probably better in museums than in private hands because it at least creates some kind of context for it where profit issues are more likely to be taken out of it.”