Titanic's 'hero' bandleader Wallace Hartley's links to Dewsbury, Huddersfield, Leeds and Bridlington

He and the other seven members of his orchestra were among the many dead after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in April 1912.

Today, though, is the 145th anniversary of Hartley’s birth.

Nicola Colloby, 62, lives at the house in West Park Street, Dewsbury, which Hartley called home before leaving for the Titanic.

“Everything in the house is original. All the doors are original. We haven't changed anything. Even the windows are original. So everything that he will have touched, we touch,” says the retired Westborough High School teacher.

"To know that he lived there and would have walked down the same steps that we walk down, yeah, it's pretty awesome.”

Nicola lives at the house with husband Andy, daughter Catherine, her partner Jack and their three-month-old daughter, Daisie. The family moved in a year or two after the film came out, which led to a few jokes with colleagues.

“They were stood at my classroom door saying: ‘Come back! Come back!” – lines Kate Winslet’s character Rose says to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack.

"It was weird to watch the film in the house,” she says. “To sit in the house where he (Hartley) will have sat and watch that film and see him – I know it’s an actor, but it was a bit bizarre.”

Hartley was born in Colne, Lancashire, on June 2, 1878.

His family are reported to have later moved to Huddersfield and records suggest he played with the town’s Philharmonic Orchestra in the late 1890s. A blue plaque on Nicola’s house, organised by the Dewsbury Arts Group, states that he lived there from 1896. He is also believed to have spent time playing music in Bridlington and Leeds, a city where fellow Titanic musician, French cellist Roger Bricoux, reportedly performed too.

Hartley had worked on Cunard liners including the Mauretania and the (also ill-fated) Lusitania before being bandleader on the Titanic.

“Everybody's heard of it, and everybody knows what happened to it, and therefore, anyone linked to it is automatically just that little bit more interesting as a historical character,” says Nick Cunliffe, a member of Dewsbury Arts Group who has researched the Titanic and Hartley’s life.

The bandleader has become “classified as a hero of the Titanic,” says the health lecturer, 54, because of the story about the orchestra remaining at their post.

"You just get the feeling that the orchestra did their duty. And I would have thought they had inklings about how bad things were because they would have been on good talking terms with the crew.”

Belfast-built RMS Titanic, operated by White Star Line, was one of the largest liners in the world at the time it set off from Southampton on April 10, 1912, on her maiden voyage to New York City via Cherbourg, France and Queenstown, Ireland.

Late on April 14, despite a number of warnings, it hit an iceberg and in the early hours of April 15, foundered about 400 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

Of around 2,200 people on the ship, more than 1,500 passengers and crew perished.

Third class passengers suffered greatly, with just 174 of around 710 surviving, Encyclopaedia Britannica reports.

The wreck, which was split in two, was discovered at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean on September 1, 1985.

"I think the other thing about the Titanic is the supreme irony,” says Nick.

"‘We've engineered stuff to a point where nothing can go wrong. How wrong we were’. We still don't learn the lessons. I think that a lot of the Titanic fable fits with that hubris of mankind - it’s Icarus.”

Much mythologised is how long the band played for, and what they performed last – but the hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee has become closely associated with the tragedy.

The streets of Colne were lined with 40,000 people viewing his funeral cortege, according to a BBC article citing the Colne and Nelson Times.

Hartley’s violin, which was in a case strapped to the 33-year-old’s body when he was found, was an engagement gift from his fiancee Maria Robinson, who he was meant to marry in summer 1912. It went on show in Dewsbury in 2013 before it was auctioned, but was first brought back to Hartley’s old house, where according to Nicola he lived with his parents and siblings. The auctioneer walked in and “said to the violin: ‘Well, my dear, you're finally home’,” says Nicola.

“My God, to hold it was incredible.”

The town also honoured him that year by opening a bandstand in his name in Longcauseway Memorial Gardens – one which had been promised to his family in the 1920s.

"I find it fascinating to think that Wallace Hartley once lived right here in Kirklees and was a former member of Huddersfield Philharmonic Society before he took that fateful job of bandleader on the Titanic, playing on that famous deck that's since been depicted on the big screen,” says Coun Naheed Mather, Kirklees Council’s Cabinet Member for Culture.

"It's easy to feel far removed from such monumental events from history, but local connections like this help to give us a personal sense of the shock and tragedy people felt back then."