This autumn's sale came back from Southampton to land-locked Devizes, but it made no difference. The collectors of Titanic memorabilia laid siege to the telephones and internet and once again we are left wondering what flights of financial madness we shall see when the centenary year of 2012 dawns.

Not that Alan and Andrew Aldridge will be worrying about that.

The most poignant of the mementoes of Malcolm Johansson, a 33-year-old third class passenger who was returning from his native Sweden to his home in the United States, was a watch that stopped the second its wearer plunged into the icy Atlantic.

"The hands were frozen in time at 1.37," says Andrew Aldridge. "The time difference at that time was 42 minutes, so when this is taken into account the watch reads 2.19 – the moment before Titanic started her final journey to the bottom of the ocean."

Battered and heavily corroded as the watch was, it sold for £58,000. Which is pretty astonishing until you consider that Malcolm Johansson's Titanic luggage ticket fetched £59,000 and his manifest ticket from the ship brought in a further £28,000.

How did these items survive? His body was recovered and later buried in Massachusetts, but the personal effects on him were passed on to his surviving family.

Though Johansson had travelled to Sweden to buy a farm, the deal fell through and he was left with $1,000 in cash, which was apparently sewn into his socks.

His family always swore his body had been robbed after it was fished out of the Atlantic, but that's a question to which we shall never have an answer.

Another highlight of the day came when £19,500 changed hands for a photograph of a small family group – a world record for a postcard-sized image.

It showed the Rev John Harper, his daughter Annie Jessie ("Nana") and his niece Jessie Leitch.

It was postmarked March 31, 1911, so shows the three of them little more than a year before their Titanic voyage, in which widower Mr Harper perished and the woman and child were saved.

A Glaswegian working at the Walworth Road Baptist Church in London, he was invited to host a series of revival meetings at the Moody Church in Chicago in the spring of 1912.

Passage to New York was arranged for them aboard the Lusitania but on the morning of April 2, 1912, Mr Harper was told that the coal strike would keep that great liner in dock and the Cunarder Carmania would take her place.

Not keen on that trade-in, he booked second class on Titanic instead.

Just after midnight on April 14, he told his travelling companions that the ship had hit an iceberg and had them put on their life jackets.

He then wrapped Nana in a blanket and she and Jessie boarded lifeboat No. 11.

Inevitably, it was the last they saw of him. Mr Harper apparently spent his final moments devoted to prayer and consoling others.

Another evocative postcard, showing the launch of the Titanic at Harland and Wolff's yard at Belfast, was another huge seller at £10,000.

And the framed oil portrait we noted last week, showing first class survivor Eleanor Elkins Widener painted in her youth by Edward Schnabel, was pushed up to £15,000 by two very determined American bidders.