Wallace Hartley sheet music on display at Manchester Titanic exhibition. Source: BBC
Rare artefacts from the Titanic shipwreck including the sheet music from the ship’s band leader Wallace Hartley who died in the sinking are to go on display in Manchester. The RMS Titanic sank in April 1912 after it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York killing more than 1,500 people. The Titanic Exhibition Manchester will open from 31 July to 24 August at Manchester Central. It will feature items such as the largest surviving fragment of the Aft Grand Staircase and the personal belongings of passengers and crew, including those from Mr Hartley, from Colne, Lancashire, who is said to have played on as the ship went down.
RMS Titanic pictured in Queenstown, Ireland 11 April 1912 Source:Cobh Heritage Centre, Cobh Ireland/Wikimedia Commons
Come August, visitors here will experience a visceral re-creation of what cruise passengers on board the fateful Titanic faced, through virtual-reality (VR) technology at Titanic: An Immersive Voyage – Through The Eyes Of The Passengers. It will be the first time the exhibition is coming to Asia, having been staged in places such as Cincinnati, New Orleans and Copenhagen. Its creator, Exhibition Hub, is leveraging technology such as 3D projections, video animations and VR to capture the sundry of emotions faced by the ship’s passengers.
“Nothing prepares you for seeing ‘Titanic,'” he said. After a 2.5-hour descent in a Russian submersible, with pressure so intense that “a regular styrofoam coffee cup gets squeezed down” when strapped to the outside, Delgado said the anticipation suddenly disappeared when the ship appeared. “There it was looming out of the darkness,” he recalled. “This massive hull rising twice as high as the ceiling here. Still painted but streaked with rust and rusticles that are orange and yellow and red. And then a porthole that’s open and another closed.” Delgado described one particularly eerie moment: “One of the spookiest moments — because ‘Titanic’ is a ship of the dead — is when I first looked through the porthole, 2.5 miles down, the lights — I could see a face looking back at me in the porthole. It was my own reflection.”
RMS Empress of Ireland 1908 Photo:Public Domain (Library and Archives Canada / PA-116389)
Davidson stripped off his nightshirt and swam away from the ship. The suction took him down, and when he came up, he swam into a frenzied crowd. “They tramped me under three times before I got through them. I swam on a little farther, but the water was fearfully cold, and I was out of practice swimming,” he said. Davidson was picked up by a lifeboat and taken to the Storstad, which survived the collision. None of what appeared in the Vancouver Province actually happened. It was all one reporter’s wild speculation. And even though Davidson tried to correct the information himself, that one reporter’s version from two days after the shipwreck is what was repeated and embellished in newspaper articles, in books, and even in his own obituary eight years later.
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Suggested Reading
Lord, Walter, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York, New York, 1955. Multiple revisions and reprints, notably Illustrated editions (1976,1977,1978 etc.)
Lord, Walter, THE NIGHT LIVES ON, Willian Morrow and Company, New York, New York, 1986 (First Edition)
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Screenshot of photo at Teeside Live “Charming North East hotel with dining room full of Titanic fixtures” 28 June 2025
The White Swan Hotel in Alnwick, Northumberland, has a stunning dining room that’s home to furniture from the first class lounge of the ill-fated Titanic’s sister ship, the RMS Olympic. The White Swan has recently been spotlighted by the explorative website Atlas Obscura, known for uncovering hidden gems perfect for dining experiences. In its review of the Olympic Suite, the site stated: “This dining room is widely believed to be so similar to the Titanic’s that it has been used in films to represent the famous ship. In fact, when now-retired U.S. Navy officer Robert Ballard found fittings around the Titanic wreck, he used the lounge at the White Swan as a reference.
Including the Snyders, there were 35 passengers aboard the Titanic “known to be journeying — or in some way connected — to Minnesota,” historian Christopher Welter wrote in a 2007 Minnesota History article. They came from a wide range of backgrounds, and included immigrants from Sweden, Finland and Norway who were traveling in steerage to join family or find work in Minnesota. Of all the first-, second- and third-class passengers with Minnesota ties, 16 survived, Welter wrote.
Coe Hall seen from the side. GK tramrunner229 via Wikimedia Commons
In the village of Upper Brookville on Long Island, New York, you can step back 100 years — all you need to do is enter the Planting Fields Arboretum, a 409-acre state park that houses an expansive mansion, multiple greenhouses, gardens, and a tea house straight out of a fairy tale. The mansion, Coe Hall, was built by William Robertson Coe, an executive who succeeded in the insurance and railroad businesses, and his wife, Mai Rogers, an heiress to a fortune built on Standard Oil money. In fact, Coe was the president of the company that brokered the insurance for the hull of what was known as an unsinkable ship: the Titanic. He was even booked on the return voyage of the Titanic from New York City to England, per the Long Island Press.
A game called Titanic Escape Simulator has been making waves from the moment screenshots of it began to spread online. However, the dev has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes on this one: None of the screenshots on the store page for this game are real. They’re all AI. It has an official store page and a pending release window of 2026, but every single screenshot for the game is AI generated and almost no one has noticed. There are posts with hundreds of thousands of likes about this game that have people believing the screenshots they’re looking at are in-game footage and not AI.
Herbert Haddock (first captain of RMS Titanic), circa 1930-1940 Source Genemeet via Wikimedia Commons Original photo owned by family and used here for informational purposes.
Emma Stevens and Vicky Smith, who call themselves the Graveside Sisters, started cleaning graves in Hampshire cemeteries during lockdown. The pair, who came up with the idea during a walk through a cemetery, now run a fully-fledged grave restoration business. At the request of the British Titanic Society, they recently cleaned the grave of Captain Herbert Haddock, who died in Southampton on 4 October 1946. The society said it tried to contact his family ahead of commissioning the sisters but believes there are no surviving relatives. Captain Herbert sailed the Titanic from Belfast to Southampton from March 25 to 31 in 1912.
Orlando unveiled one of the rarest artifacts recovered from the ship’s wrecksite, the Black Glass Necklace, marking its first-ever public debut since 1912. In addition to revealing the Black Glass Necklace, Tomasina Ray, President and Director of Collections of RMS Titanic, Inc. (RMST), and conservators at EverGreene led a live conservation demonstration of the two-ton section of the ship’s hull, Little Piece.
The newly conserved necklace was found and recovered in individual pieces and small fragments during RMST’s 2000 expedition. Upon inspection, this artifact revealed itself slowly through careful excavation from a recovered concretion: a hard, solid mass formed from several objects being physically and chemically fused due to the environmental conditions and immense pressure found at the wrecksite. Featuring black glass heart-shaped and octagonal beads woven in an intricate pattern, this necklace provides insight into the wrecksite’s environment and the ocean’s effects on material
Taking place from July 31 to August 24 at the Exchange Hall in Manchester Central, the Titanic Exhibition traces the liner’s short history from its construction at Harland & Wolff in Belfast to its unexpected sinking on its maiden voyage and eventual discovery at the bottom of the Atlantic. Both captains of the ships closest to the tragedy in April 1912 were Boltonians, with the skipper of the RMS Carpathia, Arthur Rostron, ordering his vessel to steam through the North Atlantic ice field towards the stricken boat.
Nearly two years after the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible claimed five lives during a descent to the Titanic wreck, the incident continues to shake the deep-sea exploration industry. The June 18, 2023, tragedy has sparked an international push for stricter regulation and oversight of commercial underwater expeditions. Investigators confirmed that Titan’s pressure vessel was made of carbon fibre, a material that experts say is vulnerable to stress degradation at extreme ocean depths. Industry-standard submersibles typically use titanium or steel to withstand intense pressure. Its observation window, certified only for 1,300 metres, fell far short of the Titanic site’s depth. Titan also lacked approval from any recognized maritime safety organization.
Their final act of unity was captured in James Cameron’s cinematic masterpiece, Titanic, showing an elderly couple embracing as the ship went down. In a remarkable twist of fate, Wendy Rush, the wife of the late Titan inventor Stockton Rush, is revealed to be the great-great-granddaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus
A gold pocket watch connects a Lake Michigan beach town to an English port town. It’s a homecoming 165 years in the making, weaving invisible strings between a British parliament member, a deadly shipwreck, treasure hunters and Michigan’s foremost expert on the ‘Titanic of the Great Lakes.’ The pocket watch was preserved underwater in the wreckage of the Great Lakes deadliest shipwreck for decades. This spring, it made its way home to England, hand delivered by a Michigan historian who has been studying the shipwreck for more than 30 years.
On June 16, 2023, OceanGate Expeditions CEO Stockton Rush and four other passengers left the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, for the thrill of a lifetime—a submersible dive to the sunken Titanic. Tragically, none of them returned to shore. “They knew what they were getting into,” OceanGate cofounder Guillermo Söhnlein said. “And yeah, and it’s just, it’s a sad thing that they died doing something that they were passionate about.”
On display for now at the Pigeon Forge museum are a pocket watch recovered with Isidor Straus’ body and a letter written by his wife, Ida Straus, while aboard the RMS Titanic. Isidor was a co-owner of Macy’s department store. Ida sacrificed a seat on a lifeboat to remain on the ship with her husband until it sank. Only Isidor’s body was recovered. “It’s better than the Jack and Rose (story from the 1997 movie ‘Titanic’),” museum curator Paul Burns told Knox News.
Lord, Walter, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER, Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York, New York, 1955. Multiple revisions and reprints, notably Illustrated editions (1976,1977,1978 etc.)
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