Ninety-six years after Titanic sank, a third-class passenger ticket of the doomed ship which sank on its maiden voyage, today sell for 33,000 pounds at an auction in south west England. The ticket was part of a collection of Lillian Asplund, one of the few survivors of the ship, who as a five-year-old, was on-board Titanic along with her parents and four brothers.

The ticket was sold by auction house of Henry Aldridge and Son in Devizes, Wiltshire. Also in the collection, a pocket watch that stopped at the exact moment the Titanic sank sold for 31,000 pounds. It was bought by a Swedish collector, the auctioneers said.

The organisers of the auction were taken by surprise by the kind of interest it generated.

"There were bidders from China, America, Sweden, Ireland and the UK calling in. The room itself was so packed we had to fetch more chairs," Andrew Aldridge, who runs the family auction business said.

The Asplund collection was sold for more than 100,000 pounds, he said.

Asplund, who died on May 6, 2006 at the age of 99, kept the ticket in a shoe-box at her home in the United States and left the collection to her second cousin who sold them.

She was five-years-old when she boarded the ship along with her family to emigrate from Sweden to the US.

While Asplund along with her mother and one of her brothers survived when they were thrown into a lifeboat, her father and three other brothers drowned.

More than 1,500 people died when the Titanic hit an iceberg on its way from Southampton, southern England to New York and sank on April 15,1912.

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