Believed to have once been part of the decorative brass strip that ran across the front lip of each step on Titanic’s aft first class Grand Staircase (see below), this section of brass was cut and later used as one of four corner brackets that held together a wreck wood picture frame composed entirely of pieces of Titanic’s aft Grand Staircase.
The Titanic wreckage frame was hand-crafted by the Minia’s carpenter William Parker and once completed it was given to James Adams, Chief Officer of the cable ship Minia. In a letter written on board Minia during the Titanic victim body recovery mission Minia crew member Will Mosher wrote to his sister Agnes: “Picked up any amount of wreckage. Deck chairs, chests of drawers, cushions, two steps of the grand stairway…etc.”
William Parker used all found elements which were once a part of the staircase when crafting his Titanic wreck wood frame. For the front of the frame he used carved balustrade from beneath the handrail, for the back section of the frame he used sections cut from steps or the back boards to the steps, and for the assembly brackets he cut the long decorative brass strips from the lips of the staircase steps into small rectangles which he then drilled with four holes each to accommodate fixing screws. In August 1998 the picture frame was dismantled in Brandon, Manitoba.
