Last first class Titanic ticket goes on show in 100th anniversary exhibition

Originally belonging to the Reverend Stuart Holden, a vicar from London, the document is on display in an exhibition at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Titanic shipwreck.

Rev Holden was set to travel to New York on board the doomed ship but had to pull out the day before it sailed from Southampton on 10 April, 1912, because his wife had fallen ill.

The lucky priest, who was the vicar of St Paul’s Church in Portman Square, central London, later had his ticket framed and kept it above his desk until his death in 1934.

Rachel Mulhearn, director of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, explained that although it belongs to the museum the ticket is not usually on display due to its sensitivity to light.

Commenting on other rare items on show at the Titanic and Liverpool: the untold story exhibition, she said: “We have got the blueprint design of lifeboats, which is really interesting.

“We have actually got the registration of Titanic, which shows it was registered here in the city of Liverpool in 1912, and that is poignant because at the bottom there is a little red annotated note saying that it has been sunk and it hit an iceberg.

“Perhaps the most poignant is a letter by a little girl called May McMurray.

“She was nine years old and her dad William was a bedroom steward on Titanic.

“She wrote to him from her home in Liverpool and he never got the letter.”