IN THE last moments before the Titanic sank beneath the waves, a frightened woman was wrapped in a rug by admiring male friends and helped into a lifeboat.
As she peered at the raging seas below, author Helen Churchill Candee thrust a treasured heirloom and a silver brandy flask into the hands of fellow first-class passenger Edward Kent with the words: "You stand a better chance of living than I do."
Mr Kent, a 58-year-old architect, knew better - but accepted the items, headed for the bar and died like a gentleman, drink in hand, as he was engulfed by the freezing sea.
His body was later recovered by the crew of a rescue ship, the Mackay-Bennett.
The heirloom, an antique cameo containing a picture of Mrs Churchill Candee's grandmother Mary Churchill, together with the battered flask, were found in his jacket pocket and returned to Mrs Churchill Candee, who survived in lifeboat number six to be picked up by the Carpathia.
The extraordinary echo of the tragedy which cost 1,523 lives on the night of 14-15 April, 1912, emerged yesterday when Mrs Churchill Candee's grand-daughter, who has a home in Buckinghamshire, put up the brandy flask for auction.
The severely dented memento is expected to fetch about £15,000 at the specialist auctioneers Aldridge's in Wiltshire, on 17 September.
Auctioneer Alan Aldridge said yesterday: "It is a very evocative item - one which went down with the ship but rose again from the deep to be reunited with its owner.
"Mrs Candee Churchill was, at 52, still a strikingly attractive woman and the flask is a reminder of the days when gentlemen formally offered their services to 'unprotected ladies'."
Mrs Candee Churchill, an author, war correspondent and early supporter of women's lib, boarded the "unsinkable" liner alone at Cherbourg and found herself at the centre of an in-crowd which became known as "our coterie" - a group of predominantly male intellectuals, artists, writers and successful businessmen.
So when the Titanic hit the iceberg and began sinking in the North Atlantic there was no shortage of volunteers to see the well-connected Helen was given a lifebelt and rug, and safely escorted to a lifeboat.
Thinking she was going to die, she pressed the antique cameo and flask into the hand of Mr Kent, her new-found protector.
On his body - starkly listed as "Body number 258" - were found the miniature portrait of her grandmother and the flask engraved with the Churchill family crest and the legend "Faithful but Unfortunate".
Both were returned to the owner by Mr Kent's grieving sister Charlotte, together with a letter on mourning paper containing the words: "The flask is badly out of shape, the lovely miniature is not."
While wishing to keep the tiny portrait, Mrs Churchill Candee's granddaughter, who wishes to remain anonymous, has decided to part with the flask.
Mrs Churchill Candee, a prolific author whose titles included How Women May Earn a Living, had been to France to see her son who had been injured in an air crash.
She boarded the Titanic on 10 April and was befriended by the group which included Hugh Woolner, 45, a London businessman who survived; the unfortunate Edward Kent; Edward Colley, an Irish civil engineer who died in the disaster on the morning of his 37th birthday; Colonel Archibald Gracie, 53, an independently wealthy intellectual who lived; and J Clinch Smith, 56, an American army officer whose body was never recovered.
Mrs Churchill Candee, whose story is recounted in Walter Lord's A Night to Remember, turned into a 1958 film starring Kenneth More, later wrote an account of her experiences aboard the Titanic, receiving a letter expressing interest from William Taft, the then president of the United States, and his wife. She died in 1949.
The full article contains 672 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
