London :The violin played by the bandmaster of the Titanic to calm passengers as it sank sold at auction for £900,000 ($1.45 million, 1.06 million euros) on Saturday, a world record fee for memorabilia from the doomed liner.
The instrument, found strapped to the body of Wallace Hartley after he drowned along with 1,500 others in the disaster in 1912, was sold at Titanic specialist auctioneers Henry Aldridge and Son in Devizes, southwest England.
“It was sold to a UK collector who was bidding by telephone. The whole sale only took about 10 minutes.”
The instrument carries an inscription from the 33-year-olds fiancee Maria Robinson to mark their engagement and was on sale with its leather luggage case, initialled W.H.H, in which it was found.
For decades the violin was believed lost but it was found in the attic of a house in northwest England in 2006, prompting a debate about its authenticity, which experts only recently resolved.
Hartleys band played the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee” to try to calm passengers while they climbed into lifeboats as the Titanic sank beneath the icy waves in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912, after hitting an iceberg.
Hartley and his seven fellow band members all died after choosing to play on.