The album contained 23 photographs of the Titanic

A family photograph album, including the last existing picture of the ill-fated vessel sailing over the horizon, was bought at the Christie's maritime sale in London on Wednesday.

It is believed the telephone bidder was Titanic expert and author Stanley Lehrer, who holds the world's largest private collection of Titanic memorabilia.

The 23 pictures were taken by a woman who accompanied her 11-year-old nephew on the doomed White Star liner on its maiden voyage from Southampton in 1912.

Kate Odell and nephew Jack disembarked from the vessel at Queenstown on the south coast of Ireland.

The telephone bidder paid �14,100 for the photographs

They went on a touring holiday as the Titanic headed for disaster and the loss of 1,523 lives when it struck an iceberg in the mid-Atlantic off Nova Scotia.

Christie's specialist Charles Miller said of Jack: "Despite the subsequent significance of the photographs he and his aunt took, the whole event seems to have had little lasting impression on him.

"Questioned a few years before his death in 1995, he confessed he could not remember the holiday or his unintentional brush with history and could recall no detail of the short trip from Southampton to Queenstown at all."

One picture in the album is a shot of the huge ship taken from a pilot tender offshore.

It captured the vessel, smoke billowing from its four funnels, as she picked up speed and headed out into the Atlantic.

Another photograph taken on board shows the starboard side, including portholes, boarding doors and four of its inadequate supply of lifeboats.

Another shows Miss Odell swathed in furs, two male passengers and her nephew in a school cap, standing on the Titanic's compass platform.