There are a few contenders for the most famous element in the story of the sinking of the Titanic. That there weren’t enough lifeboats, that the ship was thought to be “unsinkable”, that third class passengers died disproportionately to their richer counterparts in second and first class. And then there’s the thing about the band. That the musicians kept playing right up until the moment the ship sank beneath the waves, taking every one of them with it, is a fact that everyone who knows about what happened to the Titanic, also knows. It sticks in the mind. The fortitude it must have taken to lift up their bows in the face of certain death, the dignified acceptance that all they could do for their fellow passengers at the last was give them what little solace music might offer. The poignancy of playing their own elegy.
Imagine that someone had been able to tap band leader Wallace Hartley on the elbow, pull him aside between taking requests from passengers for their favourite Strauss numbers, and tell him that he was mere hours away from dying with heroism that would be remembered by millions in an era-defining tragedy. But not only that — that more than a hundred years later, families looking for something to do on a slow weekend afternoon would be sitting in a warehouse in Rotherhithe, spinning around on swivel chairs like doner meat while wearing a special headset that allowed them to pretend to be floating above the Atlantic Ocean watching a ghostly facsimile of him playing his violin.
This is what I was thinking about at The Legend of the Titanic, an “immersive” exhibition I attended in London in July. There is already a hugely popular official Titanic museum in Belfast, which opened in 2012, and the touring Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, containing objects like corroded portholes and weathered crockery from the wreck, which has been seen by over 35mn people worldwide. It has a permanent location in that mecca of unreality, Las Vegas. But as of the past few years, we have a new entry in the curiously massive world of Titanic edutainment: virtual-reality experiences that invite participants to feel what it was like to actually be on the ship.