After leaving school, Hartley started work with the Craven & Union Bank in Colne. When his family moved to Huddersfield, Hartley joined the Huddersfield Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1903, he left home to join the municipal orchestra in Bridlington, where he stayed for six years. He later moved to Dewsbury, West Yorkshire and in 1909, he joined the Cunard Line as a musician, serving on the ocean liners RMS Lucania, RMS Lusitania and RMS Mauretania.

In April 1912, Hartley was assigned to be the bandmaster for the White Star Line ship RMS Titanic. He was at first hesitant to again leave his fiancée, Maria Robinson, to whom he had recently proposed, but Hartley decided that working on the maiden voyage of the Titanic would give him possible contacts for future work.

He was transferred to the Arabic and returned to England. Hartley’s father Albion met the ship at Liverpool and brought his son’s body back to his home town of Colne, Lancashire. The funeral took place on 18 May 1912. One thousand people attended Hartley’s funeral, while an estimated 30,000 – 40,000 lined the route of his funeral procession.

Another Titanic memorial to the Titanic musicians as a whole was erected in Broken Hill, in north-west New South Wales. The people of Broken Hill were so moved by the bravery of the ship’s bandsmen that within a few weeks they had launched a public appeal to create a memorial to them. The memorial, in the shape of a broken pillar, was unveiled in December 1913. In 2001, Hartley’s name was still being used when naming new streets and housing in the town of Colne. In 2008, the pub chain J D Wetherspoon named a newly opened pub, (the building having been the long-standing King’s Head Hotel up until the mid-1990s), in Colne after the bandleader.

A memorial to Hartley, topped by his bust, was erected in 1915 outside what was then the town library. The memorial is inscribed: Wallace Hartley

After Maria Robinson’s death in 1939, her sister gave the violin to the Bridlington Salvation Army and told its leader, a Major Renwick, about the instrument’s association with the Titanic. The violin was later passed on to a violin teacher who gave it to the current owner’s mother. “It’s been in the same family for over 70 years,” Henry Aldridge & Sons state. Craig Sopin, the owner of one of the world’s largest collections of Titanic memorabilia, a leading Titanic expert, and a general skeptic of Titanic claims believes the violin is “Hartley’s violin and not a fraud” reports ABC News.

In March 2013, after two years of in-depth trace analysis by The Forensic Science Service on behalf of auctioneers Henry Aldridge & Son, and seven years of evidence-gathering by the Wiltshire-based auction house, it was announced that a violin found in a British man’s attic inside a leather case with the initials “W. H. H.” was the instrument used by Hartley during the ship’s last moments. The identification was helped by an engraving on the German-made violin which his fiancée (Maria Robinson) had placed on the instrument in 1910 which read: ‘For Wallace on the occasion of our engagement from Maria.’ Further tests by a silver expert from the Gemological Association of Great Britain confirmed that the plate on the base of the violin was original and that the metal engraving done on behalf of Maria Robinson was contemporary with those made in 1910. A CT scan enabled experts to view 3D images of the inside of the violin. The fine detail of the scan meant experts could examine the construction, interior and the glue holding the instrument together showing signs of possible restoration. While researching the origins of the violin, the auctioneers Henry Aldridge & Son and Christian Tennyson-Ekeberg, biographer of Wallace Hartley and author of “Nearer, Our God, to Thee: The Biography of the Titanic Bandmaster”, discovered the transcript of a telegram sent to the Provincial Secretary of Nova Scotia, Canada, dated 19 July 1912 in the diary of Hartley’s grieving fiancée, Ms. Robinson, in which she stated:

The Hartley violin was exhibited in Northern Ireland at the shipyard where the RMS Titanic was built, Titanic Belfast, and in the United States at Titanic Branson and Titanic Pigeon Forge museums. It was sold by auction house Henry Aldridge & Son in Devizes, Wiltshire, England, on 19 October 2013 for £900,000 ($1.7 million US), as reported by BBC, NBC, and The Washington Post.

After seeing the violin auctioned at Aldridges, British folk singer/songwriter Reg Meuross was inspired to write a song about the story of the violin, “The Band Played Sweet Marie”, that was released on his album ‘England Green and England Grey’ in 2014.

In popular music, a song about Wallace Hartley in his last moments, “The Last Song For My Resting Place”, was written by Joe Bonamassa, and recorded by British-American rock band Black Country Communion on their September 2017 album “BCCIV,” and an Official Music Video was filmed in-studio.