Titanic Passenger’s Letter Sells For Record £60,000 After Revealing Life On Board Before Disaster

A letter written by a second-class passenger aboard the RMS Titanic just days before the ship sank has sold for a record £60,000 ($81,000) at a UK auction.

The handwritten letter was written by Henry Price Hodges on April 10, 1912, the day the Titanic left Southampton on its maiden voyage.

It was sold on Sunday by auction house Henry Aldridge and Son in Devizes, Wiltshire, well above its estimated price of up to £35,000 ($47,000).

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said the sale set “a record price for an onboard letter written by a second-class passenger.”

Hodges, a musical instrument salesman, was travelling to Boston to visit relatives. He boarded the Titanic in Southampton as a second-class passenger with ticket number 250643, which cost £13.

The letter was addressed to his friend Hector Young of the Newtown Conservative Association in Southampton. In it, Hodges thanked Young for a telegram wishing him well before describing the atmosphere on board.

“We have had a fine time up to now,” Hodges wrote.

“You do not see anything of the movement of the ship, but the weather is very fine.”

He also described how passengers were spending their time during the voyage.

“On the top deck there are about 200 boys (from 20 upwards) marching round & singing, others are playing dominoes & cards in the saloons, some reading, some writing, everything is quite different to what you would expect to see at sea,” he wrote.

Hodges added that the president of the association had come to see him off before departure and said he was going to bed early because he felt “as tired as a dead dog.”

The letter, dated April 10, was postmarked Queenstown, the former name of the Irish port of Cobh in County Cork. Queenstown was the Titanic’s final port of call on April 11, 1912, before the ship began its journey across the Atlantic.

When the Titanic left on its maiden voyage, it was the largest passenger ship in service and was widely considered “unsinkable.”

On the night of April 14, 1912, the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40 p.m. local time. It sank in less than three hours.

The Titanic was carrying about 2,220 passengers and crew but did not have enough lifeboats for everyone on board. More than 1,500 people died in the disaster.

Hodges was among those who lost their lives. His body was later recovered and buried at Fairview Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Aldridge said the letter is especially important because very few letters from second-class passengers have survived.

“Everyone knows about third class, the emigration element, starting a new life. Everyone knows about the richest people in the ship of first class,” he said before the auction. “But the story of second class really hasn’t been told that much.”

He described the letter as “an exceptional letter on multiple levels,” saying it provides an “absolutely fascinating” look at the everyday life of passengers on board.

According to the auction house, the letter had never been offered for sale before and was “completely fresh to the market.”

Another Titanic item sold at the same auction was an “extremely rare” U.S. one-dollar bill recovered from the body of third-class passenger Ernest Tomlin.

The note, which had been sewn into his waistcoat, sold for £37,000 ($50,000), nearly four times its estimated value. Aldridge said it also set a record price.

References: CNN, BBC