The band played on, engineers fought to maintain power and the captain remained at his post as the Titanic went down on the night of April 14, 1912.

To these stubborn acts of courage can be be added those of the ship’s five postmen.

This month the keys and chain of the postmaster of the Titanic mail room, prised from his frozen body, emerged for auction, and with them a bewildering story of postal heroism.

In an age when the Royal Mail was staggeringly efficient, postmaster Oscar Woody and his team were regarded as the best of the best, entrusted with sorting 400,000 letters during the six-day voyage from Southampton to New York.

He had no intention of letting the holing of the vessel by a giant iceberg stand in the way of their safe delivery.

Mr Woody, from Clifton, Virginia, had been a railroad mail clerk for 15 years before boarding the Titanic, a Royal Mail steamer, on April 9, 1912. With him in the post room were Wil-liam Gwinn, from New York, John Marsh, from New Jersey, John “Jago” Smith, 35, from St Keverne, Cornwall, and James Williamson, 35, from Dublin.

The evening of April 14 was Mr Woody’s 44th birthday and the men were celebrating when, at 11.40pm, the ship hit ice off Newfoundland.

They rushed down to the mail storage room in the forward hold of G deck, where the bitterly cold seawater was already two feet deep. For several hours the five struggled up four flights of steps, carrying 100lb (45kg) sacks of sopping mail.

The keys and chain are expected to fetch about £50,000 when they are auctioned by Henry Aldridge and Sons in Wiltshire on April 21. Andrew Aldridge said: “They didn’t think or care about saving their own lives, just saving the mail. It was a completely futile exercise, but that was the sort of men they were.”

As it became obvious that the ship was sinking, the men redoubled their efforts, enlisting the help of stewards to carry up the bags.

Alfred Thessinger, a bedroom steward who survived the ordeal, was one of the last to see the men alive. “I urged them to leave their work,” he said. “They shook their heads and continued. I saw them no more.” Mr Aldridge said: “Os-car Woody was last seen carrying sacks of mail from G deck to C deck to save it. It must have been an odd sight for the passengers to see these men carrying bags up flights of stairs while Armageddon was going on around them.”

However, as Mr Aldridge points out, “the postmaster and his staff were the crãme de la crãme. To serve on a transatlantic steamer you had to be in the top 1 per cent of your profession because you had to sort through hundreds of letters per hour.”

The rusty set of keys and chain were recovered from the body of Mr Woody and handed to his widow, Leila, who in turn passed them on to his masonic lodge. They will be sold together with a compensation letter written to the wife of his colleague, Mr Gwinn.

Key, lock and compensation letter will be sold at an auction of Titanic and White Star Line memorabilia in Devizes on April 21.

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