And the Band Played On (2 page)

It was his bad luck that it was the
Titanic
.

Christopher Ward, January 2012

1

The Band Who Stayed Together

15 April 1912, 2.05 a.m.: on board the SS
Titanic

Many brave things were done that night, but none more brave than by those few men playing minute after minute as the ship settled quietly lower and lower in the sea and the sea rose higher and higher to where they stood; the music they played serving alike as their own immortal requiem and their right to be recorded on the rolls of undying fame.

Lawrence Beesley, survivor, from
The Loss of the S.S. Titanic

The moment eventually came when all eight members of the band knew that they could no longer play on. It wasn’t because of the bitter cold, even though they had been on deck for almost an hour, overcoats and scarves thrown hastily over their bandsmen’s tunics. My grandfather, Jock Hume, at twenty-one the second youngest member of the orchestra, had only been able to lay his hands on a light raincoat in the desperate rush to reconvene the band on deck. He must have been pleasantly surprised to discover that, despite the lack of feeling in his hands and the difficulty of playing a violin while wearing a cork lifejacket and a purple muffler, he had managed to complete all five verses of ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ without missing a single note. Nor did the band stop playing even when most of the audience attending this impromptu performance had left – the usual indication to a band that it is time to pack up and go home. The women and children had been the first to leave – in the lifeboats. That was an hour ago. The remaining 1,500 passengers and crew were now carrying out the last order that Captain Smith would give in his long career at sea, namely to abandon ship. A nicety, this, when one considers that the only alternatives were being washed overboard or drowning below decks. Some delayed their departure to receive the last rites on the sloping deck from Father Thomas Byles, kneeling before him in the Act of Contrition as he gave them general absolution and exhorted them to meet their God. Only a mutinous few decided to stay with the ship, retiring to the First Class lounge to await their death with a large brandy in their hand.

Nor was the band intimidated by the relentless advance of the cold sea edging ever closer. None of them had given a moment’s thought to their own safety when they came up on deck, and they did not do so now. They were not afraid. They were in this to the end.

The band stopped playing because, as the stricken ship reached its tipping point, even they could no longer hear themselves play above the deafening sound of the
Titanic
’s death throes. ‘It was a noise no one had heard before and no one wishes to hear again,’ said Colonel Archibald Gracie, a survivor who was in the water as the ship went down. ‘It was stupefying, stupendous.’

The symphony of cacophony opened with the sound of breaking glass as the finest Waterford crystal goblets slid from polished mahogany shelves and smashed into a million pieces, covering the floors of the saloons with shards like diamonds. Then, seconds later, came the crash of breaking china as ten thousand plates broke away from their anchor points in the galleys of the First and Second Class kitchens and dining rooms: Royal Crown Derby in First Class (the White Star Line had haggled for weeks over the price), plain white china in Steerage. Not that such distinctions were important any more, the deafening noise drowning even the cries for help from the poor souls already in the water.

Now tables and chairs were on the move, some flying through the windows of the saloon, showering the band from behind with broken glass. In the dining saloon on D Deck a Steinway grand piano – one of six pianos on the ship – snapped its chains, killing a steward as it gathered speed across the dance floor, ending its last waltz upside down and broken in half, its guts spilling out in a final fortissimo of wire, wood and ivory.

But more frightening still was the death rattle of the ship itself. A reverberating rumble, followed by a deep groan louder than thunder and more terrifying than an earthquake, came from somewhere deep inside the bowels as, one by one, the
Titanic
’s twenty-nine boilers burst, tearing huge steel plates free from their rivets. Stokers were boiled alive where they stood, the ear-shattering blast of the superheated steam that engulfed them sparing them the sound of their own short shrieks of death.

So huge and heavy were the
Titanic
’s three anchors that a year before it had taken two teams of eight shire horses to pull each one on low-loaders to the Harland and Wolff shipyard. Now they were on the move again, straining their great chains to breaking point, with no assistance required this time from shire horses.

Distress rockets exploded high in the starlit sky above the ship; now a blast as loud as an artillery barrage announced the collapse of the forward funnel as the guy wires, unable to stand the extra strain, snapped, the steel hawsers snaking menacingly across the bridge deck. The whole ship shuddered again as the force of gravity ripped its steam turbine engine from its hardened steel mountings, sending it shrieking on an unstoppable journey through the ship on the first leg of its 12,500ft journey to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Wallace Hartley, the band master, just nodded at the musicians, which was his usual signal that they should stop playing and put away their instruments; he followed this with his customary short respectful bow. Leaning forward, he had difficulty keeping his balance as the deck was now at a steep angle. The band huddled round their leader. ‘Gentlemen, thank you all. A most commendable performance. Good night and good luck.’ It is what he always said at the end of a performance and tonight would be no different. They shook hands with each other, according to witnesses. Hartley loosened the bow of his violin, placed it firmly in its case next to the instrument, and closed the lid. Then he wound the strap round his body until it was tight against his lifejacket, looping his belt through the strap. The extra buoyancy would increase his chances and, all being well, he would also save his favourite instrument. Jock Hume did the same with his violin, first putting a cloth over the strings to protect the polished wood, slipping the violin mute into his pocket. He kept his hand there for a few moments to warm his fingers, long enough to feel his watch and look at the time. It was 2.11 a.m. The bow of the ship was completely under water now, the icy water slapping the musicians’ thighs. They moved further back towards the stern so that they could jump clear of the side.

It would have been Jock’s style to volunteer to jump first, joking that it would be like a dip in the Mediterranean compared to swimming in a Scottish burn in summer. But Hartley, would have led the way, a leader to the last, hugging his violin case tightly against him to prevent it slipping off him as he leaped over the side. ‘Good luck, boys,’ he would have shouted. ‘Keep close together, we’ll have more chance that way.’

They had no chance at all, of course. But they did stay together.

As our brave bandsmen join the other 1,500 men, women and children in the water, we must pause for a moment to understand what will now happen to them, in the last minutes of their lives. Contrary to the findings of two official inquiries, and the statements issued later in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by Dr W. D. Finn, the provincial coroner, very few people drowned that night. Most died from hypothermia. A few lucky ones died almost immediately from what is now known as CSR – ‘cold shock response’. Charles Lightoller, the most senior officer to survive the sinking, described the experience of entering the water as ‘like being stabbed by 1,000 knives’. He was in the sea for only a short time but it is clear he came close to dying from CSR.

Two world wars have increased our understanding of the effects of cold water on the human body as scientists searched for ways to save the lives of sailors and airmen who found themselves ‘in the drink’. The Nazis set about their research with their usual precision and ruthlessness, building experimental cold water tanks in concentration camps to record the precise time it took someone to die depending on the temperature of the water and the body weight of the victim. There were no survivors among those selected for these experiments, just a slow, agonising death recorded by the click of a stopwatch and a small ink mark on a sheet of graph paper.

More research has been carried out in the years since the war. Life expectancy in cold water is now measured across a band of six temperature ranges, from the warmest water, 27 degrees Centigrade, to the coldest, zero degrees Centigrade and below. The temperature of the North Atlantic that night was at the very bottom of the survival scale: 28° Fahrenheit or -2.2°C. A grid entitled ‘Expected Survival Time in Cold Water’ provides a simple guide to the life expectancy of the
Titanic
’s passengers and crew once they entered the freezing water of the North Atlantic. Within fifteen minutes they would have lost consciousness. Ten minutes later they would be dead.

Survivors of cold water accidents have reported how their breath was driven from them on the first impact with the water. If your first gasp for air is under water, you are on a fast track to drowning. If you succeed in holding your breath for long enough, the deadly combination of lack of oxygen and sudden drop in temperature places a severe strain on the body: surface blood vessels constrict, heart rate increases, blood pressure rises and hyperventilation takes over. This can trigger an immediate ‘cold shock response’ – effectively a fatal heart attack. This is the best you can hope for. It’s your lucky day.

If you are still alive two minutes after falling into the water you enter the first of three stages of death by hypothermia. You lose all feeling in your arms and legs, your body temperature plummets and you start shivering so violently that your teeth chatter. Your pupils dilate. The worst thing you can do now is start swimming – you will shorten your survival time by up to 50 per cent as your body loses heat at a much faster rate when you move. All the
Titanic
victims were desperately trying to get as far away from the sinking ship as possible for fear of being sucked down with it, but they were unknowingly hastening their deaths. You may suddenly start to feel warmer. This is a cruel deception. Your body temperature is still dropping like a stone. When you are unable to touch your thumb with your little finger, you are about to enter stage two.

In stage two, movement becomes slower and confusion sets in. Surface blood vessels contract further as the body focuses its remaining resources on keeping the vital organs warm. Lips, ears, fingers and toes turn blue. Pulse rate drops further but heart rate increases. Breathing becomes erratic and shallow.

Stage three kicks in when the body temperature drops below 32°C (89.6°F). Shivering usually stops. At 30°C (86°F) you lose consciousness as cellular metabolic processes, essential for maintaining life, shut down. Major organs fail. Clinical death occurs at 26°C (79°F) but brain death follows later because of the decreased cellular activity. No one in the water would have been alive after 2.45 a.m.

It is hard to imagine two more different lives than those of the American millionaire Colonel J. J. Astor and my grandfather Jock Hume, a music teacher’s son from Dumfries. But fate would bind them together that night, not only by throwing them together in the final minutes of their lives, but with what the two men left behind. For both Astor’s young wife Madeleine and Jock’s fiancée Mary Costin were pregnant and, later that year, would give birth to children who would grow up never having known their fathers. The
Titanic
would cast a dark shadow over both families for a hundred years.