Isidor Straus pocket watch from Titanic sinking fetches $2.3 million at auction

A gold pocket watch belonging to one of the Titanic’s most famous passengers has sold at auction for a record $2.3 million.

Isidor Straus, co-owner of Macy’s, took the watch with him on his wife’s ill-fated trip to New York after a trip to Europe.

“Pocket watches are incredibly personal objects,” Andrew Aldridge, managing director of Henry Aldridge and Son, where the watch was sold last Saturday, said in a statement.

“Every man, woman and child passenger or crew member had a story to tell and it is told 113 years later through the items they owned,” Aldridge added. “Objects like this keep history alive and bring us closer to remembering one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.”

PASSENGER TITANIC’S RARE GOLD POCKET WATCH COULD BECOME THE MOST EXPENSIVE ARTIFACT EVER SOLD

Isidor Straus, passenger of the Titanic, and his gold pocket watch sold at auction. (Bettmann via Getty Images, Henry Aldridge & Son/BPNS)

The 18-karat gold Jules Jurgensen pocket watch was an 1888 birthday gift to Straus from his wife, Ida, who refused to go in a lifeboat and died on the boat with her husband.

“My place is with you,” she allegedly told him. “I lived with you. I love you and, if necessary, I will die with you.”

Instead, her maid was taken to a lifeboat and given Ida’s fur coat to keep warm.

The pocket watch reportedly stopped ticking at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, when the ship was submerged.

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Titanic passengers Isidor and Ida Straus (Bettmann via Getty Images)

Their love was depicted in James Cameron’s Oscar-winning epic “Titanic,” showing the couple holding hands in their cabin bed as the ship sank.

The watch was recovered from his body and returned to his family until the auction this month.

1912: The ill-fated White Star liner RMS Titanic, which hits an iceberg and sinks on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic. (Hulton Archives)

The pocket watch broke the Titanic memorabilia sales record, a year after another pocket watch – given to the captain of the RMS Carpathia by John Jacob Astor’s widow and two other survivors in gratitude for their rescue – sold at the same auction house for $1.97 million.

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“Some of the prices seen in this sale indicate the continuing fascination with this amazing story,” Aldridge said.