Titanic passenger’s gold pocket watch set to fetch £1m

A gold pocket watch recovered from the body of one of the Titanic’s richest passengers is expected to sell for £1 million at auction later this month.

The 18-carat Jules Jurgensen watch belonged to Isidor Straus, a Bavarian-born American businessman, politician and co-owner of Macy’s department store.

Straus and his wife, Ida, were among more than 1,500 people who died when the “unsinkable” ship hit an iceberg and sank in the early hours of April 14, 1912.

Straus’ body was found days later, and among his belongings was a gold watch; It was frozen at 02:20, the moment the Titanic sank beneath the Atlantic.

Believed to have been a gift from Ida in 1888, this piece is engraved with Straus’s initials and was carefully restored by his great-grandson, Kenneth Hollister Straus.

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge, of Henry Aldridge and Son in Wiltshire, said the watch was an “extraordinary piece of memorabilia”.

“We’re retelling Isidor’s story with the watch,” he told BBC Radio Wiltshire.

On the night of the sinking, Ida refused to get into the lifeboat, telling her husband that she would not leave him. His body was never found.

Their final moments together were later immortalized in James Cameron’s film Titanic, in which an elderly couple embrace as the ship is submerged.

The watch will be sold on November 22, along with a rare letter Ida wrote on the ship.

Describing the opulence of the Titanic, Ida said: “What a huge ship! So large and magnificently appointed… the most luxurious.”

The letter, which was put on the ship and dropped off by post in Queenstown, is expected to fetch £150,000.

The auction house says global interest is already “significant”.

If the prediction is correct, Straus’s watch will join the most valuable Titanic artifacts ever sold; At the top of this list will be the £1.56 million gold watch gifted to the captain of the Carpathia ship who rescued the survivors.