A life jacket worn by first-class passenger Laura Mabel Francatelli as she escaped the sinking RMS Titanic on a lifeboat sold at auction today for £670,000 ($906,000), far exceeding its pre-sale estimate of £250,000 to £350,000. The jacket is signed by Francatelli and other survivors from the same lifeboat, making it a uniquely personal artifact from the disaster. It was the headline item in a sale of Titanic memorabilia held by Henry Aldridge and Son auctioneers in Devizes, western England, and sold to an unidentified telephone bidder. A seat cushion from one of the Titanic’s lifeboats also sold at the same auction for £390,000, purchased by the owners of two Titanic museums in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri. The record auction price for any piece of Titanic memorabilia remains £1.56 million, paid in 2024 for a gold pocket watch belonging to the captain of the RMS Carpathia, the ship that rescued around 700 survivors. The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, killing approximately 1,500 of the 2,200 passengers and crew on board.
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