The last survivor of the Titanic, 97-year-old Millvina Dean, is auctioning off her remaining mementos of the doomed ship to pay nursing home bills.
The last survivor of the Titanic, 97-year-old Millvina Dean, is auctioning off her remaining mementos of the doomed ship to pay nursing home bills.
The auction, which is exp-ected to raise up to u00a333,500 (Rs 25 lakh), is set to take place today near her home
in England.
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TRAGIC: Millvina Dean is the last survivor of the Titanic. pic/ap |
It is the second auction in less than a year for Dean, who was a nine-week-old when the ship sank on its maiden voyage in 1912.
A canvas bagAmong the items going under the hammer at Henry Aldridge & Son is a canvas bag that might have been used to lift the infant Dean from a lifeboat to a rescue ship, said Alan Aldridge of the auction house.
"Historical documents say she was lifted from the lifeboat onto Carpathia, the rescue ship, in a mail sack," said Aldridge. After her rescue, Dean, her mother and her brother returned to England with a canvas sack, among other possessions.
"There is speculation that this would have been the bag. You would easily get a child or infant in it," said Aldridge, though he added that research by the Smithsonian, the British Postal Museum and the Liverpool Maritime Museum showed no proof that Dean had been taken off the lifeboat in that particular bag.
Given that the auctioneer cannot prove Dean was rescued in the bag, "we expect it to fetch u00a33,000 (Rs 2 lakh). If it was the bag she was rescued in, it would be u00a330,000 (Rs 22 lakh) to u00a340,000 (Rs 29.5 lakh), but we can't prove it. It depends on what people are prepared to believe."
Aldridge said he was eager to raise as much for Dean as possible. "She's paying u00a33,000 a month in nursing home fees," he said.
"That adds up to u00a336,000 (Rs 26.5 lakh) a year, which is a lot of money," he said. "When she runs out of money, the state will pay for her, but while she can pay her fees, she decides where she gets her care. When the state pays, they decide."
Dean's previous sale, in October, raised just over u00a330,000, Aldridge said.
"It's made a lot of people aware of her plight; a lot of people have sent her funds," he said.
No support systemDean never married and had no children.
"There are cousins, but there is no one directly to support her," Aldridge said. "The property she lived in [before she moved to the nursing home] was not hers. She's just an ordinary little old lady," he said.
Also in the auctionThe auction will include 17 items from her collection, most of them memorabilia related to the Titanic and signed by her, but not from the ship itself.
The auction will also include letters from the estate of Titanic survivor Barbara Dainton-West. The letters include descriptions of her family's trip to board the Titanic and the aftermath of the sinking. Dainton-West, who was 10 months old when the ship went down, died in October 2007, the auctioneer said.
