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A gold pocket watch, once belonging to one of the wealthiest Titanic passengers, is set to be auctioned with an estimated price of £1 million. The watch was retrieved from Isidor Straus’s body, who, along with his wife Ida, tragically perished when the Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg on April 14, 1912. Straus’s body was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean shortly after the disaster, and the 18-carat Jules Jurgensen timepiece was found among his belongings. This valuable artifact will be offered for sale on November 22.
Isidor Straus, an American businessman and politician of Bavarian origin, was a co-owner of Macy’s department store in New York. Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge of Henry Aldridge & Son in Wiltshire described the watch as “a phenomenal piece of memorabilia,” emphasizing the personal story it represents. He recalled how the famous couple, Isidor and Ida Straus, were depicted at the end of James Cameron’s film *Titanic*, shown as an elderly pair embracing as the ship sank.
On the night Titanic found its tragic end, Ida Straus famously declined a place on a lifeboat, choosing to remain by her husband’s side. Her body was never recovered. The watch itself stopped precisely at 2:20 a.m., marking the moment the ship vanished beneath the waves. Believed to have been gifted by Ida to Isidor in 1888, the watch features his initials engraved and has been preserved through generations of their family until his great-grandson, Kenneth Hollister Straus, had the mechanism repaired and restored.
Alongside the watch, a rare letter penned by Ida from aboard the Titanic will also be auctioned, with an estimated value of £150,000. In her letter, she praised the ship’s luxury, stating, “What a ship! So huge and so magnificently appointed. Our rooms are furnished in the best of taste and most luxurious.” The letter carries a “TransAtlantic 7” postmark, indicating it was stamped aboard the Titanic’s onboard post office and offloaded in Queenstown, Ireland. The sale has already begun to attract considerable interest worldwide. A spokesperson for Henry Aldridge & Son highlighted the deep emotional resonance of these items, describing the Straus couple’s story as “the ultimate love story” and noting that such personal histories continue to captivate collectors more than a century later
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