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AN INDIGNANT LETTER from a British aristocrat who survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 has sold for $11,875 today.
Lady Lucy Duff-Gordon, a target of public outrage after she fled the doomed ocean liner on a near-empty lifeboat, penned the two-page letter in London a month after the disaster.
“How kind of you to send me a cable of sympathy from New York on our safety,” the fashion designer wrote to a stateside friend.
“According to the way we’ve been treated by England on our return we didn’t seem to have done the right thing in being saved at all!!!! Isn’t it disgraceful.”
RR Auction, which regularly handles Titanic memorabilia, had expected the letter to fetch as much as $6,000 at Thursday’s live auction in Boston, which followed a week of online bidding.
“We remain fascinated by the Titanic tragedy and will for years to come,” the firm’s executive vice president Bobby Livingston said in a statement Friday.
Duff-Gordon, 48, and her husband Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, 49, were traveling first class on the Titanic on its ill-starred maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York.
They became the subjects of derision when it emerged that their lifeboat carried only 12 people, including seven crew members, despite having room for 40 souls.
Some 1,500 died when the Titanic went down off Newfoundland on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg, in what remains the most storied maritime tragedy of all time.
The couple were alleged to have bribed the crew in order not to go back to rescue other survivors — a claim that a British inquiry concluded was unfounded.
They were the only passengers called to testify before the inquiry, conducted by the British Wreck Commissioner in London from May through mid-July 1912.
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If the coronavirus hadn’t taken over Brexit is all we’d have been hearing about for the past 3 months……. I’m well aware of the importance of both but I’m sick of Brextit and Covod 19.
@Dec:
Well – As Leon T said:
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”
@Michael Kavanagh: A Trotsky quote to make a point re the advancement of capitalism…. however unlikely it may be it’s an excellent quote and very apt in this instance! It’s the reason we keep reading and commenting on Brexit and other such articles even when we’re completely disillusioned with them all!
‘The Duchy of Lancaster’…..God what is it with these people.
It just showed how much the readers of the journal are interested in brexit, this storey is up 2 hours and only 2 post about it. I got bord after the scend line .
@Heisen thing is there is nothing to comment on
“…which was illuminating in showing how little we still don’t know.”
Do you even read what you write?
Boris the Bluffer and his cronies have shown themselves up ti be as useless as most people outside the UK saw them to be.
1000 people a day dying from Covis-19 but they only count hospital deaths! It keeps the numbers low.
All the lies they told about Brexit are being shown as that
@Gary Kearney: there are not a thousand dying each day check worlometers
When the boy cried wolf he gained a reputation. British Perfidy has been around for hundreds of years. Indeed Stalin refused to believe the British when they warned him of imminent German onslaught. He thought they were lying. That’s what reputation does.
Embarrassing shambles, the entire affair. Full of lies and some misplaced Empire nostalgia nonsense. Johnson is a pathological liar and unfit to be the prime minister.
have your say