The Band That Played On (23 page)

Passengers out on the open decks initially thought the worst that could have taken place was damage to the paintwork. Ice fragments from the towering block had tumbled onto the decks and some people were picking them up in handfuls and starting snowball fights. But, in fact, the damage had been more wounding than if the ship had rammed the berg head on, crumpled the bow, and been spun around. Projections from the wall of ice had acted like tin openers, slicing into the steel plates and allowing water to seep into the much-vaunted bulkhead compartments. These had been designed on the premise that only one or two of the compartments were ever likely to be penetrated. If more than two were allowed to flood, of course, the weight of water taken on would eventually drag the ship down.

According to passenger Laura Francatelli, the potential gravity of the situation was recognised earlier on E Deck than on the upper decks where men continued to drink, read books in the library, and play cards. Shortly after the impact she was informed that the ship had hit an iceberg but was told that it was nothing to worry about. By 12:05 the situation was tangibly worse, as she described in a letter to a friend: “Then the water was on my deck, coming along the corridor and I found all the people, running up and down the stairs. Oh Marion, that was a sickening moment. I felt myself go like marble.”

There is only one account of the musicians making their way to their position. It comes from stewardess Violet Jessop, who knew Woodward and Hume from their time on the
Olympic
. She was in her bunk on either E or F Deck and heard a “low, rending, crunching, ripping sound” on impact but didn’t leave her cabin until the call to lifeboats came. On the way up the stairs she passed Captain Smith, J. Bruce Ismay, Chief Purser Herbert McElroy, and the ship’s surgeon, Dr. O’Laughlin, none of whom seemed overly concerned. She wrote that as she turned at the top of the staircase, “I ran into Jock, the bandleader and his crowd with their instruments. ‘Funny, they must be going to play,’ thought I, and at this late hour! Jock smiled in passing, looking rather pale for him, remarking, ‘Just going to give them a tune to cheer things up a bit,’ and passed on.”

By 12:15 a.m. the musicians had set up on the Promenade Deck and played for around twenty-five minutes in the entrance as the passengers awaited instructions. Jack Thayer, only seventeen at the time, recalled them playing there as crowds milled around. Then they moved upstairs to the Boat Deck level of the grand staircase, where there was a piano, before eventually moving out onto the Boat Deck itself. This fits with Lawrence Beesley’s account of seeing a cellist walking down the deck at 12:40 a.m. “Soon after the men had left the starboard side, I saw a bandsman—the ‘cellist—come round the vestibule corner from the staircase entrance and run down the now deserted starboard deck, his ‘cello trailing behind him, the spike dragging along the floor.” This was probably Woodward.

According to an unidentified third-class steward, who spoke to the
Western Daily Mercury
: “As the musicians ran after their instruments they were laughed at by several members of the crew who did not realize how serious matters were.” According to a separate account in the
Sphere
, this was because they thought the band members were anxious to save their instruments. The crew didn’t realize they were about to play.

What has never been absolutely certain is how many of the eight musicians were involved in this exercise, as they’d previously worked as two separate groups with different repertoires. If they combined, what did the two pianists, Percy Taylor and Theo Brailey, play after they were out on the Boat Deck itself? It seems unlikely that they would have hauled a piano onto the deck of a sinking ship. Others have questioned the ability of the cellists to remain in place once the ship listed beyond a certain degree because cellists need to be firmly seated. The survivors mostly referred to “the band” or “the ship’s orchestra” without enumerating them.

The two sources that did bother to describe the size of the band suggest that all the musicians were present. Within a week of the
Carpathia
arriving in New York, the
Brooklyn Eagle
ran a story that acknowledged the existence of a five-man “saloon orchestra” and a three-man “deck band.” The story specifically said that the deck band was “known to have joined Hartley when the call came for music.” As the
Brooklyn Eagle
had interviewed survivors, it’s reasonable to assume that this is where the information came from. The other source is survivor Elizabeth Nye who, when describing her experience to author Walter Lord in a 1955 letter, said that “the ship’s orchestra of ten young men were standing knees deep in water playing.” She got the number wrong, but it was clearly a guess at eight rather than five. Lord didn’t use her comment when he wrote
A Night to Remember
.

It’s possible that Brailey and Taylor could have continued playing on other instruments once they moved away from the upright piano at the top of the staircase. We know, for example, that Hume had two violins with him and that Brailey was a multi-instrumentalist. The fact that the musicians played for the passengers as the lifeboats were lowered can’t seriously be questioned. There were a handful of survivors who claimed not to have heard them, but the evidence for the music is far too substantial to ignore.

When Frederick Barrett, a twenty-eight-year-old English crew member, was asked at the
Titanic
inquiry whether he had heard the band playing, he answered: “I had not heard the band; my friends told me they heard it; some of my mates said they heard it. I did not hear it.” Yet he was in lifeboat 13 in the company of Hilda Slater, who heard them playing “lively airs,” and Lawrence Beesley, who heard them playing the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Thomas Oxenham oddly enough recalled men singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” on deck but denied that the musicians were involved. “It was impossible for a band to play,” he said, “because all the instruments were below in the quarters and the hatches were battened down.”

Why the band came to be playing in these circumstances is a question that will never be satisfactorily answered. Pierre Maréchal, the French aviator, informed the chairman of the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union that they’d been told to do it. He was sure that instructions had come down from Captain Smith, possibly via Purser McElroy, saying that they should play in order to prevent panic. The sound of bright music would have suggested that even if all was not well, at least all was under control. He reasoned that in the captain’s mind, the eventual deaths of eight men were a reasonable sacrifice for the saving of hundreds of passengers.

If Maréchal had hard evidence, he didn’t mention it. He was certainly a figure influential enough to have spoken to J. Bruce Ismay and Captain Smith as the ship went down. A steward who spoke to the
Western Daily Mercury
also claimed that orders had come down from the bridge. Even if Smith had made this demand, however, the band was under no obligation to obey him. As had been made very clear from the outset, they were not employees of White Star, they had not signed the ship’s articles, and they had the same rights as any other passenger to expect their safety to be a prime consideration of the crew.

The other possibility is that the idea came from Hartley and was supported by the bandsmen. By all accounts he was a man of faith, character, and moral strength. At Sunday school and later at church, the importance of sacrifice and putting the needs of others first would have been stressed. We know that he had discussed what he would do in the face of death and so he was more prepared than most.

He apparently believed that music could be more powerful than physical force in bringing order to chaos. John Carr, the
Celtic
bandsman previously quoted, had played on ships with Hartley, and in April 1912 told the
New York Times
: “I don’t suppose he waited to be sent for, but after finding how dangerous the situation was he probably called his men together and began playing. I know that he often said that music was a bigger weapon for stopping disorder than anything on earth. He knew the value of the weapon he had, and I think he proved his point.”

Why he would have said such a thing is not clear, because preventing disorder would seem to be the last thing on the mind of a bandsman playing in the first-class lounges of transatlantic liners, but his point is valid and has since been supported by research into the psychological and neurological effects of music. It also displays Hartley as someone who took his faith, his position, and his craft seriously. Sarah Stap, who like Violet Jessop, had been a stewardess on the
Olympic
, didn’t believe that the band had been coerced. At forty-seven years of age, she had vast experience of ships and the ways of captains. She had served on the
Baltic
,
Adriatic
, and
Celtic
and was the daughter of master mariner Captain Henry Stap of the White Star Line. “We could hear the music of the band all the time,” she told the
Birkenhead News
. “They were heroes if you like. I must say that everything that has been said about them is perfectly true. They were not asked to play but did it absolutely on their own initiative.”

There were sixteen lifeboats on the
Titanic
, divided between both sides, and they were lowered into the sea over a sixty-five-minute period. Additionally there were four Englehardt collapsible boats kept in reserve. The passengers were mostly calm as the boats were winched down, although husbands were parted from wives and fathers from children because of the established “women and children first” policy and this led to poignant scenes of farewell. At first many of the passengers were reluctant to leave, feeling safer on the listing liner than in a dark and flimsy lifeboat on the freezing Atlantic with no provisions, no heating, and the vague promise that the
Olympic
was somewhere in the vicinity. Many passengers spoke of the unreality of the situation, as though they were observing something being acted out rather than being participants.

Despite the awfulness of what was happening, the backdrop was a scene of beauty: a clear sky, a bright moon, clearly visible stars, flat undisturbed water, and an immense liner blazing with pinholes of light. The music would have carried farther than usual because for most of the time there were no competing sounds from engines or waves. Passengers who left from both port and starboard told similar stories of being able to hear the band as they were quickly rowed away to avoid the inevitable drag of the suction. Emily Rugg claimed she could hear the band from a mile away.

What the band played has always been more a matter of controversy than whether it played at all. This is sometimes presented as an issue raised by modern historians, but it was there from the very beginning in the divergence of the accounts given by Harold Bride to the
New York Times
and by the survivors on the
Carpathia
to Carlos Hurd for the Pultizer newspapers. Had the musicians gone down playing a tune known as “Autumn” or the music of “Nearer, My God, to Thee”? The public inquiries in America and England raised the additional issue of whether they had played any religious music at all. Some witnesses claimed that they’d stuck to popular tunes and that hymns would have been inappropriate at such a time of despair.

The biggest opponent of the story that they’d played hymns was the wealthy merchant Archibald Gracie. In his account written soon after arriving back in America, he said:

If, as has been reported, ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’ was one of the selections, I assuredly should have noticed it and regarded it as a tactless warning of immediate death to us and one likely to create a panic that our special efforts were directed towards avoiding, and which we accomplished to the fullest extent. I know of only two survivors whose names are cited by the newspapers as authority for the statement that this hymn was one of those played. On the other hand, all whom I have questioned or corresponded with, including the best qualified, testified emphatically to the contrary.

In November 1912, shortly before his death, Gracie gave a talk at the University Club in Washington DC in which he went further, saying that if they had dared play that hymn they would have been forcibly restrained by the men on board who were trying to calm the women. “If the band had played that familiar hymn, panic would have resulted. Fixing the minds of the passengers on the possibility of their being nearer to God, and I say it seriously, would have been the last thing they wanted.”

Most passengers who mentioned the band didn’t describe the music in any detail, but of those who did, the bias was toward the “lively airs” that Hilda Slater reported hearing. Jack Thayer said he heard “Star Spangled Banner” and someone else the hit tune “In the Shadows.” Algernon Barkworth heard a waltz. Lily May Futrelle, wife of the novelist Jacques Futrelle, heard Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Gracie, who watched from A Deck as the lifeboats were being lowered on the port side, wrote: “It was now the band began to play, and continued while the boats were being lowered. We considered this a wise provision tending to allay excitement. I did not recognize any of the tunes, but I know they were cheerful and were not hymns.” Second Officer Charles Lightoller, who helped lower lifeboat 6 on the port side at 12:55, said that as he did so, “I could hear the band playing a cheery sort of music. I don’t like jazz music as a rule, but I was glad to hear it that night. I think it helped us all.”
¹

The most likely explanation for this confusion is that they played both Popular music and hymns. After all, by the time the ship started its final heave, they would have been playing for more than two hours. If each piece took four minutes to play, that would have allowed for thirty tunes. It’s also worth considering that not all popular tunes were “lively” and not all hymns were “reminders of death.” Dr. Washington Dodge told the
San Francisco Bulletin
that before the lifeboats began to be lowered, the orchestra was “playing a lively tune,” but added that when he was out on the water he heard the music of the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light.”