And the Band Played On (6 page)

When the crew in the cutters had recovered five or six corpses they would row back to the
Mackay-Bennett
where the cutter would be raised to the rail of the ship and the bodies passed by the seamen to their mates on the deck. The cutter would then be lowered to the sea again so that searching could continue. The fourth body hauled out of the sea was to be the youngest of all those recovered: a two-year-old boy who was found floating without a lifejacket, suggesting that he had been carried by his mother and slipped from her arms. The sight of the dead child was said to have so moved the seamen that they later paid for the boy’s burial and a special gravestone, a lasting monument to the ‘Unknown Child’ of the
Titanic
, whose identity has been the source of controversy ever since. Thousands lay flowers at his grave in Fairview Lawn Cemetery, Halifax, every year.

The crew of the
Mackay-Bennett
had braced themselves for their unpleasant task but they were caught off balance by their distress at finding women and children. Men were easier to cope with. Sailors lived and died by the sea and the sight of a floating male corpse was not an unfamiliar one. Many of Larnder’s men had worked on whalers or participated in mass seal culls. As one of them said, ‘The first ten are difficult, after that it’s just work.’ They stopped seeing bodies as people – they were loads that had to be moved from one place to another.

Once on deck, bodies were undressed by the undertaker so that distinguishing body marks such as scars could be noted by the purser Frank Higgison, assisted by the ship’s surgeon, Dr Armstrong, along with a general description of the person, to assist identification. The White Star Line would never concede that bodies recovered by the
Mackay-Bennett
were processed according to class and the issue has always been a sensitive one. But the fact remains that they were, whether intentionally or otherwise. In death as in life the passengers and crew would be treated in a way appropriate to their perceived ‘position’ in the world.

No one knew how many bodies the
Mackay-Bennett
would find when it arrived at the scene of the wreck. It could have been fifty. Or a thousand. As it turned out, they recovered 306, three times more bodies than they had coffins for, and also ran out of embalming fluid and canvas in which to wrap bodies for which there were no coffins. Decisions had to be taken, choices made. Society dictated that men of property or position would always take precedence. Captain Larnder would admit this later when defending himself from accusations that too many bodies were buried at sea.

All the evidence suggests that the bodies of those deemed to be First Class passengers were embalmed by Mr Snow and placed in coffins. Second Class passengers and officers were also embalmed before being sewn in canvas and stacked in rows on the deck. When supplies of embalming fluid and canvas ran out, steerage passengers and crew were consigned without embalming to the ice in the hold – the three tanks that had held the
Mackay-Bennett
’s huge cable drums. Where no identification could be found, decisions on a body’s ‘class’ seemed to have been a judgement based on a combination of what a person was wearing and their general appearance, tattoos quickly resolving any uncertainties.

There was no mistaking body number 124, quickly identified as John Jacob Astor from the silk initials inside his collar. Astor was wearing a gold watch, gold cufflinks with diamonds, a diamond ring with three stones – and carrying $3,000 in cash. Had coffins been allocated to victims on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, John Snow would have run out of coffins twenty-one bodies ago. But he had kept a coffin to one side for this moment and saved more than enough embalming fluid.

The Astor family had promised a $10,000 reward for the recovery of his body and would later keep their word. Although Captain Larnder received the lion’s share of the reward it was a tremendous morale booster for the crew of the
Mackay-Bennett
, who generously used some of their share of this money to pay for the grave of the unknown child.

Within a day of arriving at the scene of the drifting wreckage it became clear that the number of bodies recovered would exceed the number that the
Mackay-Bennett
could accommodate on its decks. Disposing of bodies at sea thus became an expedient solution. ‘Hands sewed up 24 unidentified bodies and attached a 50lb weight to each,’ Capt Larnder noted in his log on Monday 22 April. This was to become a source of much grief later among relatives of the dead. Out of 306 bodies recovered by the
Mackay-Bennett
116 were buried at sea, more than a third. All bodies brought on board were seen at once by Canon Hind and Mr Snow. Those that were to be buried at sea would be sewn up in canvas and stored separately on deck to await burial that night. Frederick Hamilton’s diary records the ritual:

The tolling of the bell summoned all hands to the forecastle where thirty bodies are ready to be committed to the deep, each carefully weighted and sewn up in canvas. It is a weird scene, this gathering. The crescent moon is shedding a faint light on us, as the ship lays wallowing in the great rollers. The funeral service is conducted by the Reverend Canon Hind, for nearly an hour the words ‘For as much as it hath pleased . . . we therefore commit his body to the deep’ are repeated and at each interval comes, splash! as the weighted body plunges into the sea, there to sink to a depth of about two miles. Splash, splash, splash.

It had been agreed in advance in Halifax that bodies judged to be injured beyond recognition would be disposed of in this way. This was why the grate iron had been brought on board. Several bodies were indeed so crushed and blackened by soot that it is thought they must have been in the water directly below one of the
Titanic
’s mighty funnels as it toppled. Others were hideously disfigured by preying seagulls as they drifted dead in the sea, face up in their cork lifejackets. But Larnder needed to dispose of more bodies than those that had been disfigured beyond recognition.

Once again, the class system provided the solution to making what might have been difficult choices. Examining the ‘Disposition of Bodies’ list available at the Nova Scotia Archives in Halifax it is clear that one’s chances of being buried at sea increased substantially if you had tattoos, were wearing a steward’s jacket, looked foreign or, worse,
were
foreign. A combination of any two of these factors made it a virtual certainty. The double misfortune of body number 58, identified as Catavelas Vassillios, was to be foreign and a Third Class passenger. Body number 36 – a steward with tattoos – was also consigned to the deep that night, in spite of being one of the first to be recovered. Someone called Madge would surely have known who he was from the purser’s notes: ‘Unidentified male. Steward’s uniform. Left arm tattooed all over; right arm, clasped hands and heart, breast, Japanese fans. Gold ring engraved “Madge”.’

Women were not exempt from arbitrary disposal overboard either. Mary Mangan, thirty-two, from Carrowkehine, County Mayo, was buried at sea on the second night. The official record describes her simply as ‘Third Class, Embarked Queenstown’, suggesting that she was dismissed as another Irish immigrant. Yet she carried a gold watch with her name engraved on the back and could easily have been identified from the White Star Line passenger list. Mary had lived in America for some years and was on her way home to Chicago to marry her fiancé after visiting her parents. In 2002, ninety years after Mary died, her watch found its way to her nephew, Anthony Mangan, in County Mayo, but her body could never come home.

At some point, a halt must have been called on the practice of indiscriminate disposal because no bodies were buried at sea after the recovery of body number 201. Whether this was a decision made on board the
Mackay-Bennett
by Larnder, by Canon Hind or by John Snow because he was coping better with the workload, we will never know. It was most likely an instruction that came from New York late on 24 April as Larnder seems to have been in regular contact with the White Star Line via Cape Race. But the decision must have been taken quite suddenly because iron weights were still attached to the legs of several of the bodies sewn in canvas when the
Mackay-Bennett
docked in Halifax a week later and were hurriedly removed before the bodies were taken ashore. The controversy over sea burials continued for many months after the
Mackay-Bennett
’s return.

When the scale of the task facing the
Mackay-Bennett
became clear, Larnder radioed for supplies and assistance. The White Star Line commissioned a second cable ship, the
Minia
, to sail at speed to assist the
Mackay-Bennett
. On Tuesday 23 April, after another 128 dead had been brought on board, bodies were piled high everywhere with no more canvas to wrap them in. A rendezvous was arranged with the Allan liner
Sardinian
that evening, during which the
Mackay-Bennett
winched on board all the supplies that the
Sardinian
could give them.

With so many bodies to process, no particular attention was paid that day to body number 193, a young man wearing a light raincoat over a green bandsman’s tunic, a purple muffler tied under his chin. Like all the dead, when it came to his turn to be processed, number 193 was stripped of his clothes so that Mr Snow could examine him for any unusual body marks which might later assist in his identification. As the young man lay grey and lifeless in his sodden underclothes on the mortician’s trestle table, the purser entered this brief description into his register: ‘193: Male, height 5ft 9ins, weight 145lbs, age about 28; Hair, light curly, clean shaven’. Emptying the contents of the young man’s pockets into the stencilled duck bag, he recorded each item carefully: ‘Cigarette case, English lever watch, empty purse, knife with carved pearl handle, mute’. The purser dropped the young man’s effects into the numbered mortuary bag, which was securely tied. The bandsman’s tunic and purple muffler were bagged up and taken away. Two seamen carried him to the ice in the hold.

It was not long before Jock Hume, still in his underclothes, found himself among friends again. Less than an hour later, his pal, John ‘Nobby’ Clarke, body number 202, the bass player in the band, joined Jock in the ice. Their bandleader, Wallace Hartley, had been with them in the sea for eight days and was not far away, but for the moment the
Mackay-Bennett
had more bodies than it could cope with. Capt Larnder gave the order to let the ship drift with the wreckage and leave the bodies in the sea but keep sight of them while the crew dealt with the dead they had already recovered. On Thursday morning the cutters went out again and Wallace Hartley was brought on board, body number 224. He joined Jock and Nobby on the ice, the first and last reunion of the
Titanic
band.

It was an extraordinary coincidence, was it not? After ten days in the North Atlantic, despite wind and currents, the three men had drifted, staying together; and three out of the eight members of the band had been found while barely one in five of the bodies of other passengers and crew were recovered. Or perhaps it is not a coincidence at all. It can only mean that the band stayed together in the water, just as they played together – until the end and beyond.

By Saturday 27 April the
Mackay-Bennett
had recovered 306 bodies, leaving nearly 1,200 passengers and crew from the
Titanic
still unaccounted for. The
Minia
had now taken up the search, having brought more canvas and embalming fluid for the
Mackay-Bennett
, but already the Gulf Stream was carrying bodies and wreckage east and north-east away from the original search area. The search would continue for another three weeks but the
Minia
would find only seventeen more bodies before it was recalled on 3 May. Two other vessels sent out to join the search, the
Montmagny
and the
Algerine
, would find only five, one of them Jock’s old school friend Thomas Mullin, who had joined the ship as a steward.

With 190 bodies stacked on the forward deck or stored on ice in the hold, the
Mackay-Bennett
could accommodate no more and the following morning Larnder headed for port. Starting a new page in his log he wrote in capital letters, ‘TOWARDS HALIFAX’. Underneath he noted: ‘Moderate breeze. Hands stowing corpses on bridge deck and securing coffins on poop.’

4

The Besieged Offices of the White Star Line

17 April, Liverpool

Andrew Hume was a man who liked to contain his emotions. He had shed no tears at the funeral of his wife Grace six years earlier. The death of his mother the following year had left him similarly unaffected and, though he admitted this to no one, slightly relieved. Indeed, Andrew Hume could not remember the last time he felt emotional about anything, except possibly a performance in Edinburgh of Elgar’s
Enigma Variations
, conducted by the composer himself.