Rare Titanic film sells for £15,000

The film, containing images of the ship as she made her way from a Belfast shipyard to Southampton, was bought yesterday by an anonymous bidder at the annual Titanic convention.

More than 150 Titanic enthusiasts packed the Hilton hotel in Chilworth for the auction that this year fetched in the region of £250,000.

The piece of silent film, which has been transferred on to video tape, was taken by Gaumont cinemas just before Titanic sunk on her maiden voyage to New York from Southampton in April 1912.

The highly sought-after item - discovered by an anonymous Scottish seller who found it in a rusty canister in his father's attic - attracted bids by phone from around the world.

Alan Aldridge, of specialist Titanic auctioneers Henry Aldridge & Sons of Devizes, Wiltshire, said: "Titanic was nothing out of the ordinary - just a lovely ship - but then the disaster happened and that's when people started filming the aftermath.

"This contains footage of her in Belfast docks before she sailed to Southampton and the most poignant pictures - of coffins lined up after the rescue operation.

"Titanic continue to capture people's imagination. She represented the end of an era. It was an elegant era and then the Great War came and so many young men died.

"The country was never the same again. Titanic's demise really was the beginning of the end."

A detailed one-off 9ft-long blueprint of the ship was sold to an anonymous collector for £12,000.

The document had belonged to the family of marine engineer William Wilson an employee at shipbuilders Harland and Wolff.

Mr Wilson had been due to travel to New York as a special guest on board Titanic.

Last-minute work commitments caused him to turn down the offer - saving him from sharing the fate of more than 1,500 people who perished when Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic four days after setting sail from Southampton.