Titanic tussle over auction of deckchair

THE grandson of the man supposed to have taken a deckchair from the Titanic poured cold water on the story last night ahead of its auction in America, where it’s expected to fetch up to €82,500.

The wooden chair is said to have been taken as a souvenir, moments before Titanic left Queenstown (now Cobh), Co Cork, by local photographer Thomas Barker - the man who took the only known photographs of Titanic passengers embarking.

Mr Barker, the first staffed photographer in any Irish newspaper, was working for the then Cork Examiner.

While on board the Titanic as it took on passengers at Cobh, he is said to have admired the chair and asked a White Star official if he could keep it.

Permission was granted and he took it home, intending to use it in his garden.

But the events of April 14-15, 1912, in which 1,523 lives were lost when Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic, changed his mind.

He no longer wished to keep the chair and instead gave it to his housekeeper, a Mrs O’Brien, whose family brought it to England.

A letter of provenance will be sold with the chair when it goes under the hammer at a Bonham and Butterfield marine auction in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 7.

But Mr Barker’s grandson, Tommy Barker, Irish Examiner property editor, disputed the story last night, and the authenticity of a letter which is being used to validate the chair at auction.

“Yes, my grandfather was on the Titanic. Yes, he did photograph the famous deckchairs on the White Star vessel. But, did he walk off the ill-fated ship, onto a bobbing boat tender off the mouth of Cork Harbour, with a hefty ‘souvenir’ deckchair under one arm and his bulky camera gear under another?” he asked.

“And then giving it away? But, if it is all true, can we please have it back?” he joked.

Although hundreds of deckchairs would have been built for the first-class passengers for use on the ship’s promenade deck, only six are believed to have survived.

Marine ephemera specialist Lionel Willis, of Bonham and Butterfield, said questions have been raised about the authenticity of each of those, and about the letter written in 1959 being used to authenticate this latest deckchair.

“We are presenting the story as it came to us, with the letter and chair. A buyer will have to take their own view on its authenticity,” Mr Willis said yesterday.

He added such stories sometimes “have to be taken with a grain of salt”.

The letter was supposedly written by a Thomas Barker who lived in Cobh.

But Tommy said that to his knowledge, his grandfather never lived in Cobh.

Thomas Barker also photographed the victims and survivors of the Lusitania in another memorable series of historic images.

“But we don’t think he had any souvenirs of that disaster either, other than copies of photographs and interview notes,” Tommy said.