Henry Aldridge and Son, an English auction house in the UK, will be having a sale of 250 pieces of Titanic memorabilia on October 19, which include the Titanic bandleader Wallace Hartley’s violin and a rare photograph of a burial-at-sea service that was performed on board the ship Mackay-Bennett.
The Royal Mail Steamer (RMS) Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg 565 kilometres south of Newfoundland, Canada.
- 2209 passengers and crew were on board.
- 1497 lost their lives.
As one of the cable steamers based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, CS Mackay-Bennett was the first to search for bodies and recovered 306 bodies from the loss.
Henry Aldridge and Son estimated the value of the burial-at-sea photograph to be about £3,000 [$5,000] to £5,000 [$8,350].
This rare image includes the following remarkable features:
- Historians are certain they can pinpoint the day it was taken.
- “In the foreground, there is a body with a small canvas bag attached to it with the number 177.”
- Nova Scotia Archives constructed an alphabetical list of those lost on the Titanic from various official records of 1912.
- And number 177 as recorded on this list is the number of a person called William Mayo who is a Titanic crew member in the Engine Department.
| Mayo, W. |
177
|
Buried at sea. | On crew list-Engine Dept. |
The person who took the photograph is unknown and probably wanted to be anonymous because the White Star Line (the Titanic’s owner) had told the captains of the cable ships that no one was to be on board the ships with a camera in deference to the solemn burial-at-sea services on board.
Please click here to read CBC News report about the upcoming auction of this rare photograph.