It may not be Rose’s (fictional) blue diamond, but a gold pocket watch found in the wreckage of the Titanic sold for £1.175 million (about $1.5 million) at an auction of Titanic artifacts held April 27 by London-based Henry Aldridge & Son.
It is believed to be a record price for a piece of Titanic memorabilia.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the watch was purchased by Patrick Gruhn, a former executive of FTX, the now-shuttered cryptocurrency exchange. That led to a certain amount of snark, as in this Dealbreaker headline: “Executive of one disaster spends $1.5 million on trinket from another.”
The 14k gold watch belonged to real estate magnate and investor John Jacob Astor IV and is inscribed with the initials “JJA.” It was recovered along with the 47-year-old Astor’s body a week after the Titanic‘s 1912 sinking. Astor was considered the richest passenger on board the ship. His net worth was estimated at $87 million, equivalent to several billion dollars today, the London-based auction house wrote in its product description. Among his business interests were the original Waldorf Astoria hotel.
“The watch itself was completely restored after being returned to Colonel Astor’s family and worn by his son, making it a unique part of the Titanic story and one of the most important pieces of horological history relating to the most famous ship in the world,” according to Aldridge & Son.
The sale raised some controversy. Save Titanic Memorial Lighthouse, a group organized by descendants of Titanic passengers, wrote on X: “We are increasingly uneasy with the auctioning of recovered #Titanic family artifacts. John Jacob Astor’s watch…must be in a museum, not fall into the hands of a private collector never to be seen again.”
The auction house told the Daily Mail that “an extremely small number of individuals” have complained and that many Titanic items do end up in museums after they’re purchased.
(Photo courtesy of Henry Aldridge & Son)
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