Who'd pay £1 million for an unplayable violin?

Why is it that artifacts of enormous historic significance and great works of art that were once thought lost to the nation, always show up in suburban attics? 

This was the case when a rather sad piece of history was auctioned last week for the grand sum of £1.1 million (once the buyer's premium had been added). The item in question being a very tatty looking violin that had certainly seen better days, and was almost certainly unplayable.

Its poor owner, one Wallace Hartley had unfortunately been employed by the British shipping company, White Star Line  to play aboard the maiden voyage of its spanking new passenger liner from Southampton to New York. The year was 1912 and the boat was, of course, the ill-fated Titanic. 

The story of Wallace Hartley's band playing the hymn 'Nearer, My God, To Thee' while the great ship went down has passed into Great British folklore and has come to represent that Great British, unflappable spirit in the face of adversity.

Poor Wallace and the other brave members of his ensemble all drowned along with 1,500 other crew members and passengers.

Quite how the violin survived is something of a mystery. It was believed to have been strapped to his chest in a leather bag, but was not officially accounted for in the inventory of items later recovered. It is more than possible that it was initially stolen or went missing and came to light later that year when Wallace Hartley's fiance, a Miss Maria Robinson sent the following telegram to the Provincial Secretary of Nova Scotia: "I would be most grateful if you could convey my heartfelt thanks to all who have made possible the return of my late fiance's violin."

Touchingly, the violin had in fact been bought by Miss Robinson for her fiance to mark their engagement, and she had gone to the trouble of having it engraved to this effect. What makes this story all the more poignant is the fact that Miss Robinson never did marry, and kept her late fiance's violin in its case until she died in 1939.

It then passed to her sister, Margaret who passed it on to Major Renwick of the Bridlington Salvation Army. Renwick who was fully aware of the instrument's provenance, gave it to one of his members, a violin teacher.

The instrument remained in the Bridlington area until it was finally discovered in the suburban attic seven years ago. A letter with the instrument states: "Major Renwick thought I would be best placed to make use of the violin but I found it virtually unplayable, doubtless due to its eventful life."

It was taken to the government's Forensic Science Service in Chepstow which considered the corrosion deposits "compatible with immersion in sea water." And for the past seven years historians, scientists, forensic experts and Hartley's biographer have all examined it and come to the conclusion that the instrument is authentic "beyond any reasonable doubt." 

The violin was brought to Wallace Hartley's home town of Dewsbury, Yorkshire and auctioned by Andrew Aldridge. Bidding which started at just £50.00 soon became heated and frenetic, and it wasn't long before the price of £350,000 was reached. Thereafter, one could hear a pin drop as the price continued to soar. At £750,000, the battle was between two telephone bidders; the eventual winner being a British collector of Titanic memorabilia.

While it isn't the most expensive violin to be sold at auction (a Stradivarius fetched £8.9 million in 2011), it is undoubtedly the most expensive unplayable violin ever sold, and has set a record price for Titanic memorabilia - the previous record being £220,000 for a 32-foot plan of the Titanic.

Alex Pearl is author of Sleeping with the Blackbirds 

Hurrah for the Clangers

Those pink knitted, moon dwelling creatures with long snouts - the kind of woollen creations your granny might have knitted when you were a kid - are to grace our television screens after an absence of more than forty years. The BBC has announced that they plan to relaunch 'The Clangers' at a cost of £5 million. But interestingly, in the age of digital technology, the Beeb has stated categorically that the series will be true to the original, which first appeared in 1969. And to this effect, one of its original creators, Peter Firmin, now 84 is to be executive producer, while Daniel Postgate, the son of its original writer, Oliver Postgate, will oversee the scripts. To retain the charm of the original series, stop-frame animation will be employed rather than CGI, and much like their predecessors, these new Clangers will communicate through primitive swanee whistle sound effects. 

It wasn't so long ago that the BBC were investing £15 million in Anne Woods' and speech therapist, Andy Devenport's very peculiar and highly researched 'Teletubbies'. The series was hailed as a huge success (particularly for its creators and the production company 'Ragdoll Productions') having been exported here, there and everywhere. Much was written about Teletubbies at the time; there was a national debate as to whether Tinky Winky was gay; and strangely, the show written originally for two to four-year-olds found a significant audience among university students (who presumably viewed it while smoking marijuana).  

I, for one, am pleased that those adorable whistling pink socks with eyes will be coming back to our television screens. And I don't suppose for one moment that the BBC has any intention of researching the show. 

I wonder if, in forty years from now, someone in the BBC will have the bright idea of reviving Teletubbies? I somehow doubt it, and for the benefit of future generations of kids, I sincerely hope not. 

Alex Pearl is author of Sleeping with the Blackbirds 

'Why I hope Hitler was right'

The internet is an amazing thing. It allows you to track down pretty much anyone who writes, entertains or blogs, and peruse their latest offerings, innermost thoughts and real life observations to the world at large. This was the case when I recently trawled the net in search of my old English teacher.

Clive Lawton was (and is) no ordinary teacher. For me, he came to represent the John Keating character played by Robin Williams in 'Dead Poets Society' long before the film hit the big screen. To say he was inspirational is something of an understatement. He had this wonderful gift to get his pupils to challenge and question everything, including our fairly dreary GCSE curriculum, and would turn everything on its head in order to make his point. As a result, we would be asked to mark his essays and take part in impromptu class theatre. The point of all this was to instil into his pupils a love of words and an understanding of the power of language.

Since teaching at my old school, he has unsurprisingly achieved much in his professional life. He was headmaster at King David's School, Liverpool, and then went on to jointly found Limmud, the British charity that promotes Jewish learning to anyone in the world who's interested. He is also Governor of the Metropolitan Police Authority and finds time to write and talk all over the world. The other day I inadvertently heard his dulcet tones on the BBC's World Service while in the car.

So it was with some relish that I discovered some of his talks on youtube. One such talk given to a Limmud gathering in Montreal was provocatively titled: 'Why I hope Hitler was right.' And I suspect that only someone of the Jewish faith would be able to get away with such bare-faced audacity, such chutzpah.

Though he now sports white hair, the strident voice, wit and delivery haven't changed one bit. The talk is riveting and in a relatively short space manages to convey the beliefs of the Nazis and the real feelings of Adolf Hitler as expressed in 'Mein Kampf'.

"Many people," says Lawton, "believe that Nazism and Hitler thought the Jews to be the worst kind of people, but they didn't. The Nazi world view was that the world was stratified into top and bottom human beings. This mock science based on something vaguely Darwinian revolved around the survival of the fittest and the natural order of things."

He goes on to describe the concept of the Master Race and how other lower creeds within the system had their uses. Black people who sat at the bottom of the pile, for instance, were very useful. But Jews were different. They didn't fit into the system, because according to Hitler, they weren't even human. They were some kind of virus or cancer that works on the system in order to stop it working. And by disrupting the system and destabilising it, they would ultimately take it over.

At this point Lawton makes the point that ironically, anyone who's close to the Jewish community anywhere in the world will know that Jews are incapable of organising a piss-up in a brewery. He also tells a rather good Jewish Joke along the following lines: Two Jews in Nazi Germany are sitting next to each other reading. One is engrossed in the Yiddish local paper and the other is reading a Nazi propoganda magazine. "Why are you reading that rubbish?" asks the Yiddish newspaper reader. In response his neighbour shrugs: "I'm fed up reading about how miserable, pathetic and hopeless we have all become. I read this and I hear how we're running the factories, the theatres and the newspapers, and I feel a lot better."

"In the Third Reich," continues Lawton, "might is right. The top dogs can do what they like. There is no morality or ethic other than power." Then he says something I hadn't heard before, probably because I haven't read 'Mein Kampf'. He makes the interesting point that Hitler believed conscience to be a Jewish invention. And of course, there could be no room in the Third Reich for such dangerous sentimentality. Jews, gays, gypsies and those of unsound mind or mental capacity had to be disposed of as a matter of course because they didn't fit into the system. But only the Jews were deemed a threat so huge to deserve a 'final solution' of their own. So although others were killed or allowed to die in concentration camps, by and large it was only the Jews who were sent to the death camps and herded into the gas chambers.

As for conscience being a Jewish invention, Lawton looks incredulous. "Wouldn't that be something to be really proud of if that were true? Just imagine a Jewish lad in his bedroom with a poster carrying the headline: 'Conscience is a Jewish invention - Adolf Hitler'".

The silence in the room is almost palpable.

"The only reason I can only say that I hope Hitler was right, is that I'm not convinced that he was. I've seen far too many Jews say racist things about non-Jews; I've heard too much crap said about muslims; experienced too much misogyny; and too much exclusion of the gay community. So it might not be true that Hitler was right. It may be that Hitler believed in the Jews more than the Jews believe in themselves. And that would be a massive tragedy. One only we Jews can resolve ourselves."

Alex Pearl is author of Sleeping with the Blackbirds