Overview
- An April 10, 1912 letter written and posted at Queenstown by second-class passenger Henry Price Hodges is live in an online sale at Henry Aldridge & Son and has never before been offered publicly.
- Bidding was reported around £26,000 with an auction estimate up to £35,000 and the online sale is scheduled to close in late July.
- Hodges’s letter describes everyday scenes—marching and singing on the top deck, dominoes and cards in the saloons—that give an unusually detailed, mundane account of second-class life days before the ship sank.
- Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge calls the note a “historically priceless snapshot” because documents from second-class passengers are rare; Hodges later died in the April 15, 1912 sinking and was buried in Fairview Cemetery, Halifax.
- Coverage of the find has driven attention to provenance and reporting accuracy after at least one outlet misattributed the resurfaced letter to Archibald Gracie, underlining the need to verify primary-source claims when artifacts reappear.