All Aboard: Last Remaining First Class Ticket For The Titanic Goes On Display

Last Remaining First Class Ticket For The Titanic Goes On Display
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The only remaining first class ticket for passage aboard the Titanic has gone on display.

Originally belonging to the Reverend Stuart Holden, a vicar from London, the document is on display in an exhibition at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Titanic shipwreck.

Rev Holden was set to travel to New York on board the doomed ship but had to pull out the day before it sailed from Southampton on April 10, 1912, because his wife had fallen ill.

The lucky priest, who was the vicar of St Paul's Church in Portman Square, central London, later had his ticket framed and kept it above his desk until his death in 1934.

Rachel Mulhearn, director of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, explained that although it belongs to the museum the ticket is not usually on display due to its sensitivity to light.

Commenting on other rare items on show at the Titanic and Liverpool: the untold story exhibition, she said: "We have got the blueprint design of lifeboats, which is really interesting.

"We have actually got the registration of Titanic, which shows it was registered here in the city of Liverpool in 1912, and that is poignant because at the bottom there is a little red annotated note saying that it has been sunk and it hit an iceberg.

"Perhaps the most poignant is a letter by a little girl called May McMurray, she was nine years old and her dad William was a bedroom steward on Titanic.

"She wrote to him from her home in Liverpool and he never got the letter. He very sadly perished and the letter was returned to the family after it was intercepted at Southampton."

Passenger liner RMS Titanic, which belonged to the White Star Line shipping company and had been hailed as unsinkable, was destroyed on April 15, 1912, during its maiden voyage after it hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic.

Its sinking caused the death of 1,514 men, women and children, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.

Passengers on board the ship included some of the world's wealthiest people, including millionaires such as John Jacob Astor IV, Benjamin Guggenheim and Isidor Straus, and thousands of immigrants seeking a new life in America.