Titanic stewardess’s fur coat fetches £181,000

A FUR coat that helped keep a Titanic survivor warm in the aftermath of the 1912 disaster yesterday sold for £181,000.

Mabel Bennett, a stewardess on the doomed liner, grabbed the garment from her room before climbing into a lifeboat as the ship sank in the icy Atlantic.

In a state of shock, she wore it against the cold while she waited four hours waiting for the rescue ship Carpathia to arrive.

Aged 33 at the time, she still had the coat with her two weeks later when she was photographed wearing it on board the SS Lapland, which transported the surviving Titanic crew members back to England.

She kept the beaver lamb fur coat for the next 50 years before giving it to her great niece because it had become too heavy for her to wear in old age.

It was sold to a Britishbased collector at auctioneer Henry Aldridge and Son of Devizes.