Survivor's Titanic memento sold

The mail bag was bought for £1,500 and is to be returned to Ms Dean

Memorabilia from the Titanic, including a lot from the ship's last living survivor, raised thousands at auction.

The auction in Devizes, Wiltshire, featured memorabilia belonging to 97-year-old Millvina Dean.

She was lowered to safety from the deck of the sinking cruise liner as a two-month-old baby.

Ms Dean faces monthly bills of £3,000 at her Southampton nursing home and sold a canvas bag from her rescue which raised £1,500.

'Icy waters'

The bag was used to carry her belongings back to England from New York after she, her mother and two-year-old brother were rescued.

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge told BBC News:"There's a really nice story to this. A young man from London bought it, paid the money and then told us he wanted it returned to Ms Dean."

We had several hundred people in the sale room and interest in the auction was very good Andrew Aldridge, auctioneer The last Titanic survivor

Ms Dean's father perished in the icy waters of the north Atlantic, one of 1,517 to die when the ship sank in 1912.

Also included in the sale at Henry Aldridge & Son auctioneers was a flask another passenger on the ill-fated ship used to give hot milk to his wife and two daughters.

This lot sold for £37,500.

The provenance states the man shinned down the rope of a rescue boat to hand over the flask, before returning to the deck and perishing as the ship went down.

The sale raised a "substantial sum" auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said

A chunky key to a door on the ship's E deck was sold for just under £60,000 - and was the most expensive item sold.

A letter from a Henry Wilde on Titanic notepaper went for £27,000, and another by passenger Adolf Saalfeld, reached almost £28,000.

Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said the sale had gone well.

"We had several hundred people in the sale room and interest in the auction was very good, as is the case with our Titanic auctions.

"Overall, we've raised a very substantial sum."