Mayo Titanic pocket watch guided at up to £70,000 at auction

Mary Mangan's Titanic pocket watch is going to auction with a guide price of £60,000 to £70,000, and twenty people from her home parish travelled to Belfast on Saturday to see it one last time.

A bus left Lahardane before dawn carrying the group from Addergoole parish.

They were guests of honour at Titanic Belfast, where the watch is on display alongside the story of the Addergoole fourteen and a hand-drawn portrait of Mary Mangan that hung in her mother's home.

It is 24 years since anyone from the north Mayo village last saw it.

It is the only item recovered from Mary, who died on the Titanic, to make it home.

Her body was recovered with the watch on her, and with her engagement ring on her finger, but the ring never returned home.

Mary herself was buried at sea. Only the watch made the journey home to Carrowskeheen on the slopes of Nephin.

It returned to Lahardane once, in 2002.

Her grandnephew Anthony Mangan carried it to the altar of St Patrick's Church for a commemorative Mass. The parish gathered around it. That day is part of why the village still rings its bell every April 15, marking the night the "unsinkable" Titanic went down.

Mary was one of fourteen people from Addergoole who sailed for a new life in America in 1912. Eleven never arrived. She travelled third class. The case is engraved "MM" and the inside reads "M. Mangan".

Her great-grand-nephew Michael Mangan, who is selling the watch, said it has sat in the family home for as long as he can remember.

He travelled to Belfast on Saturday to see the watch on its final weekend on display.

He says Mary's fiancé in America bought two identical watches before she sailed, one for her and one for her cousin.

For over a century, locals believed its hands had frozen at 2.20 a.m., the moment the Titanic slipped under.

Michael Mangan says that story does not hold up. He cannot recall the watch ever having hands at all.

It leaves Titanic Belfast on Tuesday, October 6, and goes to Wiltshire this week. Henry Aldridge & Son will sell in the coming weeks with a guide price of £60,000 to £70,000.

Bidders from Europe, the UK and America are already circling.

"It's a very poignant event, to bring people from the local community to Belfast to see the engraved pocket watch and the portrait of Mary Mangan in person," said Mary Rowland, chairwoman of the Addergoole Titanic Society.

"There's just no way a local community could begin to fundraise for it.

"It will sell for an eye-watering sum."

Mary Syron Cawley, secretary of the Addergoole Titanic Society, organised the bus, giving the group the chance to meet local historians in Belfast along the way.

William Barrett, the Society's first-ever chairman, remembers how long the story stayed buried.

"There was too much pain around it.

"My parents never told me about it, no one knew.

"People pushed it down because they were hurting," he said.

"Women were sent in particular. Families sent them as the breadwinner, to go and make money and send it back.

"But to get the money to send their daughters and some sons, they had to sell fields of land, livestock and borrow from neighbours."

Eleven of the fourteen they sent never sent anything back at all.