And the Band Played On (15 page)

As the thirty horse-drawn hearses lined up to carry the rest of the bodies to the curling rink, panic broke out among the Astor contingent.

The White Star Line had earlier assured the family of millionaire businessman George D. Widener that Mr Widener had been positively identified in spite of suffering terrible facial injuries and that his body was being brought back to Halifax. But it had subsequently become clear, while the
Mackay-Bennett
was still at sea, that the body was actually that of Widener’s manservant Edward Keating, who had in his pocket a letter addressed to his employer, leading to the mistaken identity. Suspicions as to the identity had been aroused by the man’s underclothing, which was ‘of a poorer texture than Mr Widener would be expected to wear’. A further examination of his clothing revealed the initials EK in his coat, which was also ‘of inferior quality’. Now identified for who he really was, a mere humble servant, Keating was promptly sewn up in canvas, weighted with iron bars and tipped overboard. The body of his employer, Widener, was never recovered.

Vincent Astor feared that something similar might have occurred with his own father, whose manservant was missing. With Astor’s body still on board the
Mackay-Bennett
, Captain Roberts was immediately dispatched to the ship to make a positive identification. The lid of Astor’s coffin was removed and Roberts peered in. The body was most definitely that of his former employer, he said. ‘The features were perfect, the face being only slightly discoloured which would be the result of the action of the icy waters of the Atlantic upon a human body.’ Roberts was further reassured after being shown what had been found on the body: the gold-buckled belt that Astor always wore, the diamond cufflinks, ‘the $3,000 found in his pockets settling the uncertainty’, according to a reporter from the
New York Times
. Roberts was seen ‘hurrying through the crowd to the nearest telephone’ to inform Astor’s son, Vincent. Roberts’s description of the body of his late employer was a tribute to the embalmer’s art of John R. Snow Jnr.

Soon after 11 a.m. the last of the dead had been carried off the
Mackay-Bennett
to the Mayflower Curling Rink, although some reports said that Astor and Strauss were taken directly to Snow’s. Relatives who had gathered outside the Mayflower in the hope of discovering whether their loved one was among the dead were told there would be no admission until the following day, as bodies were still being embalmed and prepared for identification.

An interview with John R. Snow Jnr, published in the
Halifax Evening Mail
the next day, caused further distress to relatives. He spoke with gruesome detail of finding the two-year-old boy, of mutilated bodies . . . ‘arms and legs shattered, faces and bodies mangled, many still in evening dress, their watches stopped at ten past two’. Twelve women, he said, had been found forty miles from the scene of the wreck. A red skirt had been found tied to an oar in an overturned lifeboat. The manner of the deaths was what upset relatives more than anything else. Snow said: ‘There was awful evidence of the fierce struggle for life, hands clutching wildly at clothing, faces distorted with terror . . . ours was a sickening task.’

This image may have been encouraged by the dreadful sight of the bodies consigned to the ice in the hold and the nightmare scenario that greeted those who had to extricate the bodies when the
Mackay-Bennett
returned to Halifax. Snow later denied saying this and the
Mackay-Bennett
’s doctor, Thomas Armstrong, gave a wholly different account in the
Morning Chronicle
on Thursday 2 May. ‘With the exception of about ten bodies that had received serious injuries their looks were calm and peaceful,’ he said. ‘In fact so peaceful it was difficult to realise that they were dead.’ Subsequent interviews with crew members confirmed Dr Armstrong’s account: it may have been a belated attempt to comfort grieving relatives but all the research into death by hypothermia suggests that it is a better way to die than drowning.

By the time the
Mackay-Bennett
had docked, anger was competing with grief as the dominant emotion among ‘mourners’, as the press had dubbed them, despite the fact the bereaved still had no one to mourn. The White Star Line was being held accountable for the causes of the disaster: navigational errors, a flawed watertight doors system and insufficient lifeboats. The order ‘women and children first’ was also being questioned. We accept today that this is the ‘decent’ way to behave in such a situation, but we do so partly because of the
Titanic
, where the order determined who lived and who died. But in 1912 the ‘women and children first’ rule had only one precedent in maritime disasters, many years earlier. Yet no one on board the
Titanic
– crew members or passengers – challenged the command, even though for many it meant laying down their own life.

Neither the American nor the British public inquiries into the disaster satisfactorily answered the question, ‘Who gave the order?’ Captain Smith had been heard to shout through his megaphone, ‘Be British!’ but not much else. Charles Lightoller, the second officer, maintained that Captain Smith had given the order but, if he did, it was by way of an answer to a question that Lightoller himself had posed when ordered by Smith to load the lifeboats, ‘Shall we load the women and children first?’ to which Smith had replied ‘Yes.’ On the port side of the
Titanic
, where Lightoller was in charge of lowering the lifeboats, the order was rigorously enforced, but on the starboard side many more men found their way into a lifeboat. It seems to have been Lightoller’s decision to give priority to women and children.

In spite of Lightoller’s efforts, the statistics of those who lived and died make shocking reading. Every child travelling First and Second Class was saved, yet two thirds of children travelling in steerage (52 out of 79) died. In percentage terms, more First Class adult males survived than Third Class children – 57 men, including Bruce Ismay, making it into the lifeboats. Only four women travelling First Class died – three of them by choice, preferring to remain with their husbands. Yet more than half the 165 women travelling steerage lost their lives.

The highest casualty rate of all – exceeding (in percentage terms) deaths of crew and Third Class male passengers – was among men travelling Second Class. Only 14 out of 168 of them survived, suggesting that they did indeed step back from the lifeboats, the middle classes demonstrating a greater sense of honour and decency than their First Class peers.

Two days after the
Titanic
sank, on 17 April 1912, the
Halifax Daily Echo
published a leader apparently questioning the command, under the heading, ‘Famous Men Chose Death That Penniless Women Might Be Saved’. Colonel Astor, it said, and Charles M. Hays, the President of Grand Trunk Railway, had ‘stood aside for the sabot shod illiterate peasant women of Europe’, suggesting perhaps that it should have been the other way around. But, if so, by 30 April the
Echo
had changed its tune. Under the heading ‘An Honourable Death’ the paper said:

The passengers and employees who were left behind must have gone down in the end with the supremely satisfactory feeling that they had done their whole duty and done it nobly. Never have men and women acted better in the world’s history under supreme trial than did those of the Titanic. Each was for all, and all for each. And they have their reward, not only in what they accomplished for one another, not only in the world’s outspoken admiration but above all in the individual comfort which their splendid self restraint, their dignified facing of death, their unwavering thought for others must now bring to surviving relatives and friends.

The
Halifax Evening Mail
warmed to the theme the same day (not realising that the
Titanic
now lay 12,500 feet deep):

The Captains of Industry, the Lords of Money, the Men of Letters, the hard-mouthed seamen, went quietly down to their doom in 1200ft of blue water in order that the women whose lives were in their care might come perchance to a haven of safety. This is our civilisation vindicated.

The theme of ‘heroic death’ was one taken up by newspapers all over the world. The
Daily Sketch
in London wrote about ‘the wonderful scene on the
Titanic
when the band went down at their posts’. At a memorial service in Halifax to honour the dead, Principal Clarence McKinnon said in his appreciation, ‘All we know is that they heard the order “All men step back from the boats”, they stepped back and they shall sleep in a hero’s grave.’ In Dumfries, Jock Hume and Thomas Mullin didn’t die, ‘they went home, though not to the old burgh by the banks of the Nith but to a happier and better country’.

As for Captain Smith, far from being blamed for steering 1,500 people to their death, he, too, had died ‘a simple hero, as a British sea captain should’. The same sentiments would soon sustain the nation through the catastrophe of the First World War, during which a generation of young men laid down their lives for their country.

Jock Hume’s body arrived at the Mayflower Curling Rink soon after 11 a.m. He was one of 125 unidentified victims brought back to Halifax and, as such, was not an immediate priority for the embalmers, who set to work on the sixty-five whose names were known. These included Jock’s fellow bandsmen Wallace Hartley and Nobby Clarke, both of whom carried identification that could be quickly verified. The embalmers worked right through the night preparing the bodies so that relatives could make formal identifications next morning and claim the bodies or make arrangements for their transportation. Hartley’s family asked that Wallace’s body be returned home for burial there. Clarke’s family requested that he be buried in Halifax in Mount Olivet Roman Catholic cemetery. Of the 190 bodies brought back to Halifax by the
Mackay-Bennett
, fifty-nine were shipped out of Halifax for burial at home, Colonel Astor being the first, departing at 8 a.m. on 1 May on his private train the
Oceanic
, the morning after the
Mackay-Bennett
docked. Vincent Astor and the Astor lawyer, Mr Biddle, accompanied the coffin, leaving Captain Roberts behind to see if J. J.’s valet Victor Robbins was among the unidentified bodies in the mortuary.

By the morning of Thursday 2 May, sixty of the dead were still ‘keeping the secret of their identity locked up within their rigid forms’, the
Daily Echo
reported. Sparing the feelings of its readers, the
Echo
did not add that some of the bodies that had been consigned to the ice were beginning to thaw out and decompose. Many were now considered to be beyond embalming and were placed in coffins in their decomposing state.

George Gauvin and his assistant spent the day photographing the bodies so that the process of identification could continue after burial. The glass negatives were later destroyed by Gauvin & Gentzell, although two or three are reported to have survived and have found their way into private collections. Those who have seen them say they are not pleasant viewing. In any event, although there was a need to bury the bodies as soon as possible, there was no hurry to formalise identities as no arrangements had yet been made for headstones and all the dead had numbers to which names could later be added. Simple wooden crosses were cut with the numbers painted onto them. Long trenches had been dug at Fairview, Mount Olivet and Baron De Hirsch cemeteries and burials commenced on Friday 3 May. The only burial on the Saturday was that of the unknown child. Six crew members from the
Mackay-Bennett
carried the tiny casket into St George’s Church for a special service conducted by Canon Kenneth Hind. The congregation, who included all seventy-five crew and officers of the
Mackay-Bennett
, quickly filled the aisles and balconies of the church, spilling into the street outside. After the service, they were joined by hundreds of others, many in tears, who lined the street to see the horse-drawn hearse take the coffin to Fairview Lawn Cemetery.