A wealthy widow’s glow-in-the-dark walking cane that could fetch $500,000 when it goes under the hammer later this month is now at the center of a Titanic family feud.
The cane — which once belonged to Titanic survivor Ella White — is being offered as part of Guernsey Auctions “A Century At Sea,” set for July 19 and 20 at the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport, Rhode Island.
After reading The Post’s account of the sale, two Manhattan brothers — White’s great-grandnephews — informed the auctioneer that the battery-operated cane disappeared from their Upper East Side childhood umbrella stand in the early ‘70s.
“We’ve always wondered what happened to it,” said John Hoving, 61, who, with his brother, Samuel now intends to challenge the auction.
The then-novel cane has a battery-powered light in its Bakelite hand-grip, and contemporary accounts say the widow White had waved it frantically from her lifeboat to attract rescue boats in the dark Atlantic.
The cane is being offered for auction by its current owner, Brad Williams, 59, of Milford, Conn., is also a great-grandnephew of White, who’s insisted he inherited it fair and square.
“It’s family history, so I do I have trepidation about parting with it,” Williams has said. “But I also have to pay for college,” for his kids, Williams said.
It’s been 107 years since the wealthy widow had boarded the doomed oceanliner at Cherbourg, France, with her maid, her manservant and her longtime companion, Marie Young. She had injured her foot during her trip to Europe, and leaned on the walking stick to help her balance.
White was in her First Class apartment when the vessel struck the iceberg.
“There did not seem to me that there was any very great impact at all,” she later recounted.
“It was just as though we went over about a thousand marbles. There was nothing terrifying about it at all.”
White, still leaning on her cane, boarded Lifeboat No. 8 with her traveling companions.
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“Mrs. J. Stuart White didn’t help to row No. 8,” author and Titanic expert Walter Lord wrote of her in “A Night to Remember.”
“But she appointed herself a sort of signalman,” Lord wrote, in a quote from his book used on Guernsey’s online bidding form.
“She had a cane with a built-in electric light, and during most of the night she waved it fiercely about, alternately helping and confusing everyone.”
Both sides of the dispute over the black enameled walking stick agree that after the childless White, a resident of the Plaza Hotel, died at age 85 in 1942, the treasured artifact wound up in the possession of Mildred Holmes, her beloved niece.
The brothers say Holmes eventually gave the cane to her only son, Harry S. Durand, who was their father.
“I was just reading the New York Post when I came across an article about an upcoming Auction at Guernsey’s for the electric cane that was given to my late father, Harry S. Durand, by his aunt, Ella White who used this on one of the Titanic rescue rafts to signal the ships responding to the ships distress signals,” Hoving wrote Williams in an email he shared with The Post.
“As I recall, and very distinctly, it was always left in the umbrella stand at 340 East 72nd Street New York, NY 10021 until my father moved and relocated to 401 East 88th street. I always wondered where the cane had disappeared to and now I know.”
His father had been very proud of the cane, John Hoving told The Post, and “showed it to guests and talked about it and Ella White’s night on the lifeboat endlessly when we were children.”
Williams, in turn, has offered this lineage for the cane: After inheriting the cane from the Titanic survivor, the niece, Mildred Holmes, gave it to not to her son, but to her daughter — who was his mother.
Williams and reps from Guernsey’s did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment.
“We’re in the process of reaching out to an attorney now,” John Hoving told The Post on Saturday.
“I don’t care about the dough,” he said. “It’s just kind of an injustice. It’s the principal of the thing. It’s a family heirloom. And if he’s going to sell it, there’s ten or eleven cousins and siblings” who are Ella White’s descendants, he said.
“It should be split among all of us.”
Additional reporting by Andrew Denney