The Band That Played On (18 page)

His life becomes difficult to track from this point. Somehow he evaded the 1901 census and so the next official record comes from 1906 when he married at the age of thirty-four. On his wedding certificate he described himself as an accountant. The only clue to any musical prowess was the fact that he was a choir member of St. Antholin, a Peckham church where his brother Frederick was the organist. Another brother, George, apparently played in local dance bands.

By the time Taylor got married, he had left Peckham and was living in a second-floor flat at the recently completed Glenshaw Mansions on Brixton Road in Brixton. He lived at flat 13, two doors away from Sydney Chaplin and his soon-to-be-famous brother, Charlie, who were then performing in local venues such as the Canterbury Music Hall and the South London Palace of Varieties. At flat 37 was music hall entertainer Jock Lorimer, whose son Maxwell, born there in March 1908, would become the great British comedian Max Wall. Percy’s bride, Clara Alice Davis, the daughter of a gas superintendent from Dulwich, had her own stage aspirations.

Taylor could have met Clara through his brother George who married her sister, Minnie, in September 1901. Clara was still single then, but two years later married an auctioneer from Somerset named Ralph Davis. He was only twenty-one and she was thirty-one, although when it came to filling in the wedding certificate she knocked four years off her age.

Poor Ralph didn’t last long. In 1905 he died while being operated on. The cause of death was given as “cardiac failure when under the influence of chloroform for operation and suffering from fatty disease of the heart.” The verdict at the inquest was “misadventure.” He and Clara had been married for less than two years, leaving her a widow at thirty-three.

It was fourteen months later, on May 25, 1906, that Percy Taylor and the newly widowed Clara made their vows at Christ Church, North Brixton, in the presence of his brother Frederick, his sister Emily, and Clara’s parents. On August 10 he composed his will, bequeathing all his possessions including loose cash, credit in the London and County Bank, and two insurance policies to his “dear wife Clara Alice Taylor.”

Clara had made no entry in the “profession” box on either of her wedding certificates so far, suggesting that her father supported her before marriage and her husbands afterward. The story passed down the family is that it was an unhappy marriage and Taylor took the
Titanic
job in the hopes of picking up work in New York and leaving his past behind.

If this were true, it would make sense of the only facts available. Taylor doesn’t appear in the 1911 census, even at the address in Vauxhall (9 Fentiman Road) that he gave to the White Star Line. Neither was Clara at this address. She was back at home in Dulwich living with her parents. In the box for “profession” she put “actress.” An album of family photographs left behind by Taylor’s mother, Emily, when she died in 1927, has photos of Percy and even of Clara’s sister Minnie but none of Clara or Clara and Percy together. The
Daily Telegraph
, which played a leading role in raising money for the dependents of those who died on the
Titanic
, later made the cryptic comment: “It may take the public by surprise to know that there was only one actual bandsman’s widow, a lady who, no doubt, has benefited beyond her expectations.” This was possibly written in the knowledge that they were living apart at the time of his death.

John Frederick Preston Clarke, bass player on the
Titanic
, was born at 2 Churchill Terrace in the Manchester suburb of Chorlton-cum-Hardy on July 28, 1883, the son of a seventeen-year-old solicitor’s clerk named John Robert Clarke and his twenty-two-year-old wife, Ellen Preston. The story is told in the ages and dates. Their wedding date—January 21, 1883—must have been set when Ellen knew she was pregnant. During the next four years they had two daughters, Ellen and Emily, and then between Emily’s birth in 1887 and the census of 1891, John Robert apparently had deserted the family. Emily told her daughter Freda that he fled to America with his brother Edward, where they both started new lives.

John Frederick, known to everyone as Fred, was sent to live with his paternal grandparents in Croydon while Ellen Clarke and her girls settled with her spinster sister Mary in the Toxteth Park area of Liverpool. In the census of 1891, she described her marital state as “married” and her occupation as “dressmaker.” Robert Clarke, the grandfather with whom Fred went to live, was a solicitor’s clerk and his wife, Mary Ann, a schoolmistress. By 1901 Robert was on his own in Eastbourne and Clarke had returned to his mother at 174 Tunstall Street and was working as an insurance clerk. Aunt Mary, a music teacher, was still with the family.

The Liverpool street, about to be demolished, where Fred Clarke lived with his family.

In 1884, the year after Clarke was born, another of his mother’s sisters, Elizabeth, married an up-and-coming violinist from Bradford named Vasco Akeroyd. By the turn of the century, Vasco was in Liverpool playing violin for the Liverpool Philharmonic and giving lessons from his home at 35 Falkner Square. Clarke became one of his pupils and during the coming years Vasco would use his influence to get him work.

In 1909 the Vasco Akeroyd Symphony Orchestra was founded and Clarke became one of its six bass players. The orchestra would play eight concerts each season at the Philharmonic Hall, almost always to rapturous reviews from the Liverpool press who admired Vasco’s choice of music, the quality of his leadership, and the high standards of the musicians. Early in the second season, the
Liverpool Post
commented that the local public had been “quick to appreciate the excellencies of the orchestral and other fare that Mr Akeroyd is seeking to provide,” and in January 1911 the
Liverpool Evening Express
said: “Excellent as these concerts invariably are, their promoters surpassed all previous efforts with the programme submitted last night. It is doubtful if a more attractive and interesting concert has been given in Liverpool for some time past, and a packed and warmly appreciative audience testified their approbation in unmistakable fashion.”

As part of this orchestra, Clarke performed everything from Bach concertos and Tchaikovsky symphonies to contemporary works by Szigeti, Saint-Saens, and Dvorak. There were guest vocalists, guest conductors, and the occasional child prodigy visiting from America. One of the most popular concerts in each series featured a program chosen entirely by the audience.

At the same time Clarke was in the orchestra at the Argyle Theatre of Varieties in Birkenhead, which was over the Mersey on the Wirral Peninsula, where the Black brothers had their home. The theater, built as a music hall in 1868 and able to seat an audience of eight hundred, was one of Britain’s best-known entertainment venues. Artists of the era who appeared there include, Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel (of Laurel and Hardy), W. C. Fields, Dan Leno, and Harry Lauder.

Clarke would have worked in the orchestra pit providing backing to vocalists and incidental music for sketches. There were two shows a night for six days of the week and a matinee at 2:30 p.m. every Thursday. During the same period he also appeared with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Port Sunlight and at the Kardomah Café. Port Sunlight was a model village built by William Lever for employees of his soap factory on the Wirral. It had almost thirty societies ranging from an Anti-Cigarette League to a Scientific and Literary Society. On June 22, 1911, Clarke played with the orchestra to celebrate the coronation of King George V.

Clarke’s connection with Charlie Black could have come through his Uncle Vasco, who for several years played violin alongside him in the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. According to family legend originating with Emily Clarke, Clarke’s reason for taking work on the
Titanic
was to make it to New York because he had heard that his father, John Robert Clarke, had lately been killed there in a house fire. He wanted to work his passage to America and, once there, sort out his father’s estate.

John Robert appears to have eluded the record books after he left his family. He doesn’t show up in British censuses after 1881 and there is no record in the UK of his death. His common name makes him hard to track in American records. The rumor about his brother leaving his family in Croydon and moving to New York, however, is confirmed by living relatives in Canada. Edward Fulcher Clarke went to America ahead of his wife and four children ostensibly to settle in before they joined him, but instead had affairs with several other women. When his wife eventually showed up, he was caught and they separated.

Georges Alexandre Krins was born in Paris on March 18, 1889, but moved with his family to the town of Spa in Belgium in 1895, where his parents opened a haberdashery store. His father, Auguste, was part Russian, part Belgian. His mother, Louise, was French. He had two sisters, Madeleine and Anne, and a brother, Marcel.

Spa was a very musical city with a number of orchestras, including la Grande Symphonie of seventy musicians. He developed an early love for the violin but there were no music schools in Spa, so at the age of thirteen he enrolled at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liege where he would study for the next six years. Early on he was recognized as a brilliant and hardworking student. In the academic year 1904–1905, he won second prize in musical theory and also in violin. The next year he won first prize for violin and in 1906–1907 he again won second prize. His professor considered him a “model pupil” who exhibited a solid grasp of technique. “Georges Krins has made enormous progress in one year.” The Spa newspaper
Saison de Spa
marked his achievement in its issue of July 24, 1907: “We note with pleasure that Mr Georges Krins, who has played in the Grande Symphonie, won the second prize for violin at the Conservatoire Royal de Liege. We give him our congratulations.”