After ages Titanic locker key to be auctioned

More than 200 items in the Titanic, including a locker key and letters, are to be auctioned after.

The key to a lifejacket cupboard was used by a steward to save lives as the liner sank in 1912. It could fetch up to £50,000, according to estimates.

A letter to be sold reveals a senior officer had a “queer feeling” about his posting to the boat.

Saturday’s auction in Devizes is among the biggest involving Titanic memorabilia for several years.

RMS Titanic had been four days into a week-long transatlantic crossing from Southampton to Nyc when the supposedly “unsinkable” ship hit an iceberg on 14 April 1912.

The ship sank less than three hours later at about 02:20 on 15 April. And crew were killed.

The letter a part of a set composed over a 20-year period by Chief Officer Henry Wilde, who was second in command to the ship’s skipper, Captain Edward Smith.

Wilde only signed to the Titanic on 9 April 1912, the day before it sailed, and was anticipating to take command of another boat, the Cymric.

On 31 March 1912, he said he was “very disappointed to find the arrangements for my taking command of the Cymric have altered. I ‘m now going to join the Titanic until some other boat turns up for me”.

In another letter to his sister, composed onboard Titanic and posted at Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, he indicated he’d misgivings about the new ship.

“I still do not enjoy this boat… I have a queer feeling about it,” he wrote.

After the wreck, Wilde took charge of the even-numbered lifeboats, and manage their loading and lowering into the water. He was among individuals who died in the disaster.

“It’s without doubt one of the finest Titanic-related letters, written by among the liner’s most senior officers on Olympic stationery.

“This lot reveals previously unknown aspects and demonstrates Wilde’s clear disappointment in being transferred to Titanic.

Also a part of the sale is a postcard in the boat’s senior wireless operator, 25-year old Jack Phillips, from Farncombe in Surrey, who carried on sending distress messages to other boats as the Titanic sank.

Phillips, who drowned, was described as “the guy who saved us all” by survivor and fellow wireless operator Harold Bridge.

The card, signed “Love all, Jack”, describes the weather as the ship left Cowes, Isle of Wight. It truly is expected to fetch about £20,000.

£1,000 each, could be sold for by uncommon photos of Smith the auction house has estimated.