Titanic survivor letter to go under hammer
She heard a terrible rumbling noise, then anguished cries for help as her rowboat pulled away from the sinking ocean liner Titanic that dreadful night in 1912. Now Laura Francatelli’s first person account of the disaster, in the form of a signed affidavit that was given to a British board of inquiry, is set to be auctioned.
It is a gripping firsthand account of how she and her two prominent employers — Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon and his socialite wife, Lady Lucy Duff-Gordon — managed to survive, fleeing in a rowboat with a capacity for 40 people even though they only had 12 people on board. “You see a lot of documents that talk briefly about the incident, but this affidavit goes into strong details, it talks about Lady Duff being sick the whole time, about the lifeboat bobbing up and down, about the screams,” said Andrew Aldridge, an auctioneer at Henry Aldridge & Son, which plans to sell the affidavit and other Titanic memorabilia on October 16. He said the letter will likely fetch between £10,000 and £15,000 in part because of the notoriety of Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff.
In her written statement, Francatelli, Lady Duff’s personal secretary, described a scene of utter terror as they tried to get as far as possible from the Titanic.
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