Man Died on Titanic Wearing Watch That Just Sold for Historic $2.3M. As Ship Sank, Wife Refused to Leave His Side

A pocket watch owned by a first-class passenger on the Titanic has sold for $2.3 million at an auction in England — the highest price ever paid for an item linked to the ill-fated ocean liner.

The gold timepiece once belonged to Isidor Straus, who perished with his wife, Ida, when the ship sank in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912. Their story later inspired a moving scene in the 1997 film Titanic, adding to the watch’s emotional and historical pull.

“The world-record price illustrates the enduring interest in the Titanic story,” auctioneer Andrew Aldridge of Henry Aldridge & Son in Devizes, Wiltshire, told The Guardian. The watch, a gold Jules Jurgensen piece given to Isidor by Ida, sold on Saturday, Nov. 22, according to The Guardian, The New York Times and NBC News.

“Every man, woman and child passenger or crew had a story to tell and they are told 113 years later through the memorabilia,” Aldridge said.

Isidor and Ida Straus were among the more than 1,500 people who died when the Titanic went down. Ida famously refused to leave her husband’s side as lifeboats were loaded. Isidor’s body was later recovered, and the watch was retrieved from his remains, according to the auction house.

“The Strauses were the ultimate love story,” Aldridge said of the couple and the 18-carat watch. “Ida refusing to leave her husband of 41 years as the Titanic sank, and this world-record price is testament to the respect that they are held in.”

The previous auction record for a Titanic artifact was also held by a gold watch, presented to the captain of a ship that rescued 700 survivors from the disaster. That piece sold for more than $2 million, the auction house noted.

Ida had originally given Isidor the watch in 1888 to mark his 43rd birthday, the same year he and his brother, Nathan, became full partners in New York City’s famed Macy’s department store, according to the auction house.

Decades later, aboard the sinking liner, Isidor reportedly declined a place in a lifeboat, insisting other men should go first. No plea could persuade Ida to leave without him.

“I will not be separated from my husband; as we have lived, so will we die together,” she is quoted as saying. Her body was never recovered.

“They were last seen sitting on deck chairs, facing fate by each other’s side,” Henry Aldridge & Son said, calling theirs “the ultimate real love life story.”

Their devotion is believed to have inspired a brief but unforgettable moment in James Cameron’s Titanic, in which an elderly couple holds one another in bed as icy seawater floods their cabin.