And the Band Played On (4 page)

This story could not possibly have appeared without the collusion of the White Star Line. I worked in Liverpool for the
Daily Mirror
in the Sixties and enjoyed, along with all the other pressmen in the city, the closest relationship with the shipping companies. In 1912, when Liverpool was the Empire’s leading sea port, the press and the shipping lines would have been completely in each other’s pockets.

Other British newspapers sensibly put their trust in news coming from the wire services in the USA and Canada, based on Marconi intercepts from Cape Race. The
Daily Sketch
accurately reported that the liner had sunk with a ‘Feared Loss of 1,700 Lives in Mid-Atlantic’.

My grandmother, Mary Costin, who had risen early and waited outside McMillan’s, the newsagent’s shop in Friar’s Vennel, until it opened shortly before 6 a.m., knew at once which of the two conflicting accounts she believed. For as long as Mary could remember, the people she loved had died: her two young sisters Margaret and Elizabeth when she was five, both from cerebral meningitis; her father from a haemorrhage a year later; and then last year her beloved brother William, from appendicitis, aged twenty-four, leaving three more young Costin children fatherless. Now Jock had been taken from her.

It might have been some comfort to both families if they could have shared their grief, exchanged information and comforted each other. But to say that the Humes and the Costins did not speak would be an understatement. Ever since my grandparents Jock and Mary had fallen in love two years earlier, a state of war worthy of the Montagues and Capulets had existed between the families. Jock’s father Andrew Hume had instigated the hostilities, forbidding his son to see Mary on the grounds that Jock could ‘do better’ for himself. From that moment on Mary’s mother Susan, a proud and determined woman who liked Jock and cared about her daughter’s happiness, did everything possible to encourage the relationship, including inviting Jock to live under her own roof with Mary, which he did, between voyages, during the last year of his life.

For several days the Costins believed the Humes had information about Jock that they were witholding from them. After all, as Jock’s parents, the Humes were the next of kin with whom the White Star Line would communicate. But with the survivors still at sea on board the SS
Carpathia
and the company maintaining its blackout on news, both families were equally in the dark.

Although Mary had not slept, there was no question of not working as normal at the glove factory. But she decided to leave home early so that she could call on the Humes on her way to the mill and see if they had received any news of Jock. Susan counselled her against doing this but Mary ignored her mother’s advice and strode the 400 yards to 42 George Street, mounted the six York stone steps to the Humes’ front door, grasped the heavy lion’s claw doorknob and knocked twice. She saw an upstairs curtain flicker briefly. Two minutes passed, then she heard the sound of a woman’s footsteps followed by the grating noise of a large key being turned in the lock.

Jock’s stepmother, Alice, opened the door. She looked Mary up and down and before Mary had time to speak said, ‘Please do not call here again, Miss Costin,’ and shut the door in her face. Mary walked back down the steps and wondered what kind of reception she might receive when she called to tell the Humes she was expecting Jock’s baby.

3

The
Mackay-Bennett
Sets Sail

17 April, Halifax, Nova Scotia

At exactly 12.45 p.m. on Wednesday 17 April 1912 the cable-laying ship
Mackay-Bennett
cast off from the wharf at Upper Water Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia. On the bridge deck of the 1,731-ton ship Captain Frederick Larnder, a tall handsome Englishman with a full brown beard and ‘eyes of unnatural keenness’, started a new page in the ship’s leather-bound deck log. In capital letters he wrote in pencil: ‘PROCEEDED TO SEA TOWARDS WRECK OF SS TITANIC’ noting the conditions – ‘foggy, gentle breeze’ – before charting a south-easterly course which would take him the 680 miles to the last known position of the
Titanic
.

Larnder’s orders were to recover the dead and bring the bodies back to Halifax, the nearest port to where the
Titanic
foundered. There had been no talk of survivors and no one, least of all Larnder, was under any illusion about finding anyone alive. He had seen men die of hypothermia within minutes of falling into these sub-zero waters. Even in a lifeboat you would be lucky to live for more than a few hours and the
Mackay-Bennett
would not reach the scene for four days, nearly a week after the great liner had sunk. Nor had anyone told him how many dead he was to expect. He had 103 coffins on board but he still had no idea of the horror that was waiting for them out there although he was warned to expect the worst. Robert Hunston, the keen young wireless operator manning the new Marconi communication station at Cape Race, had kept a message log of all the signal traffic on Sunday night as the
Titanic
’s wireless operator called for assistance from ships in the area. Hunston decoded the word S-I-N-K-I-N-G three times just to make sure he had understood the message properly. Then the
Titanic
went off the air.

One person, however, knew exactly how many had died: Bruce Ismay, Chairman of the White Star Line. But he was remaining silent. For two days Ismay, calmed by opiates, had been resting in a state room aboard the Cunard liner SS
Carpathia
sailing to New York with the 712 survivors. The arithmetic to calculate the death toll was so simple a child of five could do it: take 2,209 passengers and crew, subtract 712 survivors and you have . . . yes, 1,497 is the correct answer.

There were 1,497 passengers and crew dead in the sea somewhere out there in the North Atlantic. It would have been 1,498 if Ismay himself had not joined the women and children in one of the
Titanic
’s lifeboats, from where he heard the screams and watched the desperate death throes of hundreds of men, women and children who had been entrusted to his corporate care. No wonder he could not bring himself to tell the world what had happened. Transmission problems thwarted an attempt by the SS
Carpathia
’s wireless officer to transmit by Morse code a full list of those who had been saved, but it is no surprise that names such as Bruce Ismay and Mrs Astor were among the few to get through.

Yesterday. It seemed like a year ago to Larnder now. Only yesterday he had been preparing the 270-ft
Mackay-Bennett
for the task for which it was purpose built: to repair a cable break near Cape Cod in a transatlantic cable linking Europe and the United States. All day the crew had been flat out, filling the bunkers with coal, feeding miles of telegraph cable on to drums in the
Mackay-Bennett
’s three tanks, painting girders, taking in water and stores and scrubbing the decks while the ship’s carpenter raced around making last-minute repairs.

Then, shortly before noon, Larnder was summoned to the office of his employers, the Commercial Cable Company, where he was introduced to Mr A.E. Jones, the White Star Line’s agent in Halifax. Jones informed him that the White Star Line had chartered the
Mackay-Bennett
to recover bodies from the
Titanic
. Larnder’s orders were to make ready for sea and sail tomorrow. Jones handed him a piece of paper with the last known position of the wreck, which Jack Phillips,
Titanic
’s wireless operator, had radioed shortly before the ship went down. The position was 41.46 N, 50.14 W but Larnder would have to make careful calculations based on wind and sea currents to determine where the bodies were likely to be by Sunday, the soonest the
Mackay-Bennett
was likely to reach the scene.

The White Star Line were paying the Commercial Cable Company $550 a day to charter their ship and would pay the crew, including Larnder, double wages after they completed their unpleasant mission. Everything that the
Mackay-Bennett
required would be on the quayside ready for loading tomorrow morning. Larnder would need to take on extra crew – probably ten men. In addition, they would be joined on board by Canon Kenneth Cameron Hind of All Saints Cathedral, Halifax and John R. Snow Jnr, chief embalmer with his father’s firm of John Snow & Co, Nova Scotia’s largest undertakers. Larnder knew the men well; both were at the top of their professions in the efficient processing of death: Mr Snow attending to the bodies with all the skills of the mortician, Hind commending souls to the Almighty. Neither man could have guessed what distressing scenes lay ahead for them: Mr Snow running out of coffins and embalming fluid, Hind standing in his vestment on the freezing deck chanting ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God’ time after time as he commended the soul of yet another dearly departed to the Good Lord.

Larnder returned to the
Mackay-Bennett
, where work began at once to prepare the two-masted ship for its gruesome task. The removal of non-essential equipment for their planned voyage was done efficiently and with urgency yet it could have given Larnder no pleasure to preside over the unwinding of the submarine cable from the drums in the tanks. For five years he had been master of the
Mackay-Bennett
, laying telegraph cables hundreds of miles along the ocean bed, often – mostly – in the most inhospitable weather that the North Atlantic could serve up. He had come to believe it was his calling to help move the world from the industrial revolution to the new age of technology and communication, connecting Europe to North America. Now he found himself in command of an ocean-going mortuary, ‘The Ship of Death’ as it would soon be called. But today the White Star Line were paying the bills and by 5 p.m. the last of the cable had been removed and Larnder retired to his cabin after writing the final entry for that day in the log: ‘5 p.m., Hands piped down.’

Larnder didn’t get much sleep between the clatter of horses’ hooves and shouted instructions signalling every new delivery throughout the night. Coffins, 103 in all, of varying quality, the most that Halifax’s funeral directors and carpenters could knock together at such short notice, were stacked so high on the dockside that they looked as if they might topple. Sheets of sailing canvas in which to wrap bodies were piled next to them. And grate iron, ten tons of it, to weight bodies that would be buried at sea. At midnight the purser woke Larnder to ask where they could safely stow the wooden cases containing fragile flasks of Mr Snow’s embalming fluid. Meanwhile, the boatswain was trawling Halifax’s inns in a frantic search to recruit men who would be sober enough to sail in the morning and who had the strength and stomach for the work ahead.

Loading started early next morning. Larnder noted in his log: ‘Hands getting ice, old iron and coffins on board.’ The ice had been Larnder’s idea. As a boy, Larnder had served his time on trawlers and knew that this was the only way to keep the catch fresh until you returned to port. The
Mackay-Bennett
had three empty tanks below the deck where, until yesterday, three huge drums of submarine cable had been stored. Now the tanks became the containers for 20,000 tons of crushed ice, only it wouldn’t be Newfoundland cod that was being tipped into the hold: it would be bodies. Many of the passengers and crew of the
Titanic
would end up there, lying frozen side by side like so many dead fish, First Class passengers and White Star Line officers excepted of course. It would become the storage area for the underdog when the
Mackay-Bennett
ran out of coffins and canvas.

Ten new crew members had to be accommodated – and cabins found for Larnder’s VIP guests. Fortunately the Commercial Cable Company’s owners, John William Mackay and James Gordon Bennett Jnr, had insisted on the
Mackay-Bennett
being built to the highest specifications by John Elder & Co. of Glasgow in 1884. It was exceptionally comfortable as well as leading edge in its engineering and equipment. The fact that it withstood its maiden voyage spoke volumes for it. On 17 February 1885, after being fitted out in London, the
Mackay-Bennett
set sail for Halifax where it would be delivered to its owners. The following day it encountered a series of gales and hurricanes ‘never before experienced’. Four days out to sea it passed through ‘a terrible hurricane’ that lasted six hours, according to a
New York Time
s report. On arrival in Halifax two weeks later, the four storm-battered officers, relieved to have survived the ordeal, declared the
Mackay-Bennett
‘a handsome craft . . . a magnificent sea boat and one of the finest specimens of modern marine architecture’.