Titanic Violin that Wallace Hartley used as 'the band played on....' going up for sale at auction.
And I see this stunning, amazing, heart-clinching, may I borrow 400 thousands pounds, story.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24560046
Chills all over. One of the most Iconic pieces of tangible history going up for Auction. We all know the story of how the 'Band Played On', but it was because the other few chaps were just following their band-LEADer's lead and started off playing jaunty tunes to calm everybody, especially the woman and children while "waiting for rescue", then staying and playing hymns until plummeting into the sea themselves. Most died of hypothermia, not drowning. Had the water been warmer, there wouldn't have been many deaths. They had on life-preservers. It was the cold that got almost everybody....except the band. Wallace Hartley didn't wear one, I suppose knowing it was futile and should go to a child or young lass.
I believe the story lives on because that was the last major public display of chivalry. I've attended Titanic exhibits before. I was a buff long before the film, which was a blessing and a curse. A Curse because suddenly there were all these new so called 'Titanic experts', parroting "facts" that were plain rubbish used for dramatic purposes in the film. People claiming they knew someone who knew someone that one met 'Rose Dawson' (nee DeWitt-Bukater), a FICTIONAL character. The Blessing side was more exhibits, more books, documentaries, etc. But I hated people treating me (I guess I was 18 or so at the release of the movie) like I was just at a Titanic Exhibit because I fancied Leo DiCaprio. I didn't and had been knee deep in Titanic knowledge and books since I first learned of the tragedy when I was 9 or so and watched "A Night to Remember", with Barbara Stanwick, found it interesting and started to study.
The reason *that* Violin will probably get more at Auction that any other single piece of Titanic "memorabilia" is it is all-encompassing. He played it at dinner to Molly Brown and the Strauses (if you recall, Ida Straus was offered a seat and would have been America's wealthiest widow, along with J.J. Astor's new, young, pregnant bride, Madeline. Yet Mrs. Straus refused it because what good was all that money without her husband Isidor. She said 'they had a good life, lived it together and would thus die together as well.)
Wallace Hartley (though almost every film or show pictures him as a man of 40 or so) was only a man of 25, younger than most of us yet with more bravery and consideration than men twice his age have 101 years later. His violin is the symbol of this calm in the eye of a storm. It played for Countesses, Barons, the richest and most elite people on both sides of the Atlantic, plus the poorest of the poor and his violin was the last music more than half of those people on the Titanic ever heard. I wouldn't be surprised if it went for a Million Pounds. It's not just an Icon of an age long gone, a moment in time frozen forever on a moonless night in mid April, 1912. It's symbolic of who we USED to be and how we all can still be again. Yet nearly 100 years later, when the Costa Concordia starts to sink, there are stories of grown men trampling over little kids and women with babes in the arms just to save themselves, and a COWARD Captain who saved his own ass and got far away, refusing to go back and help his people, dying on a ship that his arrogance CRASHED. Wallace Hartley plays somewhere in the distance, weeping.