by Steve Turner
THE
BAND
THAT
PLAYED
ON
The Extraordinary Story of the 8 Musicians
Who Went Down with the Titanic
STEVE TURNER
© 2011 by Steve Turner
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.
Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].
Scripture quotations are taken from the KING JAMES VERSION.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Turner, Steve, 1949–
The band that played on : the extraordinary story of the 8 musicians who went down with the Titanic / by Steve Turner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59555-219-8
1. Titanic (Steamship) 2. Musicians—Biography. 3. Musicians—History—20th century. I. Title.
G530.T6T87 2011
910.9163‘4—dc22
2010047182
Printed in the United States of America
11 12 13 14 15 QGF 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my mother, Ivy Frances Turner,
who first gave me a love of history.
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. “That glorious band.”
2. “The world’s greatest liner.”
3. “A man with the highest sense of duty.”
4. “I will write to you on board the Titanic.”
5. “An exceptionally good performer on the piano.”
6. “A thorough and conscientious musician.”
7. “The life of every ship he ever played on.”
8. “An intellectual turn of mind.”
9. “The Titanic is now about complete.”
10. “We have a fine band.”
11. “A solemnity too deep for words.”
12. “It is with great sadness that I have to give you the painful news.”
13. “If you think you have a legal claim.”
14. “A natural fruit of the evil of the age.”
15. “The sweets of notoriety.”
16. “I should cling to my old violin.”
Sources
General Bibliography
Printed Sources
Notes
Picture Credits
About the Author
Index
First mention of sinking in Lloyd’s Weekly Shipping Index, April 18, 1912.
INTRODUCTION
In the old music-business joke, a songwriter is asked, “What comes first— the words or the music?” and the writer answers, “The phone call.” When I am asked, “What made you write a book on the Titanic?” the honest answer is, “The e-mail.” It came from Joel Miller, VP of nonfiction at Thomas Nelson Publishers, and after mentioning the launch of the Titanic in May 1911 and the maiden voyage in April 1912, he said: “I’d like to do a one hundredth anniversary popular history, and think I have a unique angle for it, one that ties into two of your areas of expertise, biography and music. Are you free to discuss?”
I’d never read a book about the Titanic and had only seen the James Cameron film after being dragged along by my wife and daughter. Biography. Music. Titanic. It didn’t take many seconds to work out that he was probably going to ask me to write about the celebrated band on the ship that went down playing. Despite having seen both Titanic and A Night to Remember, I still had a mental image of the band on the stage of a ballroom carrying on with their music as the dancers made for the exits and the water lapped against their music stands. In other words, I didn’t know very much.
But after spending a couple of days researching on the Internet, I quickly discovered that not only was this an absorbing story—one that had once transfixed the world—but it was also a story that had never been the subject of a book, despite the floods of Titanic books since the 1980s. Everything that was known about the members of the band, with the exception of Wallace Hartley, could be fitted on half a dozen sheets of A4 paper. This seemed odd, given the multiple angles that had been employed over the years to open up the Titanic story in fresh ways. I was sure there was a book to be written about them and that the key to it would be tracking down living relatives who may have inherited photographs, documents, and anecdotes. In 2009, when I accepted Joel Miller’s offer to write the book, I didn’t know what I would find, but I knew it would give me the sort of challenge that I thrived on.
The Band That Played On is the result of my research. It’s a portrait of eight men who were thrown together on a maiden voyage, never having played together as a band, and whose names will be forever linked because of an extraordinary act of courage in the face of death. It’s also a portrait of the age in which they lived, a time when everything seemed to be going right and human ingenuity was about to surmount all the old obstacles and bring about a world that was faster, wealthier, more luxurious, and more peaceful.
I’ve not attempted to write another history of the Titanic, as such, but to focus on a group of men who were on that ship and whose biographies have necessarily been defined by what would otherwise have been another few days of routine work. I’ve included essential information about the ship only inasmuch as it helps the story of the musicians along. I don’t attempt to determine whether the craft sank because the rivets were too short or the steel plates were too thin and neither do I spend pages speculating as to whether it broke up and sank or sank and then broke up. My assumption is that if readers want that type of detailed information they can be well supplied elsewhere.
I began the research knowing very little about the band and have finished the writing feeling that I know just about everything that can be known about them without the discovery of a hitherto unknown cache of letters, diaries, and journals. I met the descendants of their brothers and sisters and the son of the only known child of any of the bandsmen. I traveled up to Oxford, Liverpool, Dumfries, and Colne, across to Walthamstow and Notting Hill and down to Eastbourne and Southampton. I saw the homes they lived in, the schools they studied in, the rooms they played in, and the offices some of them worked in. There were times when information was so elusive I felt I was banging my head against a wall and other times when stories fell into my lap without really trying.
Why does the story of the Titanic continue to fascinate? There have been bigger and more costly disasters. There have been more obvious examples of human error and natural calamity. I think it’s because there are not many stories where people who are neither ill nor caught up in a conflict have a few hours to contemplate their imminent deaths. We automatically ask ourselves how we would react in the same situation because we know that our choices reveal our deepest values and beliefs. Would we do absolutely anything to get a place in a lifeboat or would we gladly put someone else first? Would we stick to husband or wife, or could we live with the possibility of being parted? Would we carry on playing music, or pack up our instrument and leap overboard?
The musicians faced this ultimate challenge. I hope that I have done their actions justice. I hope that some deserving stories will have been drawn back into the light. I’d like to think that if Wallace, Georges, Roger, Theo, Percy, Fred, Jock, and Wes were to read this book they’d think I was spot on.
&
nbsp; STEVE TURNER
London, September 2010
1
“THAT GLORIOUS BAND.”
On the night of April 18, 1912, a dimly lit low-slung steamer with a single black funnel graciously eased its way up the lower reaches of the Hudson River headed toward Cunard’s Pier 54. Never before had the arrival of one ship been the focus of so much anticipation and speculation. New York’s traffic was gridlocked, police barriers had been erected around the west end of 12th Street, and the eyes of the world were focused on a gangway that would soon connect lower Manhattan with the British steamer Carpathia.
More than fifty tugboats manned by journalists had been nipping at the vessel as she made her approach, hoping to be rewarded with shouted-out answers to questions or handwritten scraps of information that would put them one step ahead of their competitors in the scramble for headlines. Reporters with megaphones made offers of $50 or $100 for firsthand reports, while photographers lit up the side of the ship with their flashes of magnesium powder. Some of them even tried to invade it when a rope ladder was let down for the river pilot to climb on, and they had to be forced back by Second Officer James Bisset.
The object of all the attention was not the ship’s prebooked passengers who’d set out for the Mediterranean exactly a week before, but the more than 706 survivors of the world’s worst shipwreck who’d been hauled on board from the freezing Atlantic.1 The Titanic had gone down almost four days previously, and the story of its loss had dominated the front pages of newspapers around the world. But beyond knowing that it had collided with an iceberg, and that the majority of the crew and passengers had died, very few hard facts had reached the shore. An early report had suggested that all were safe, and a wrongly attributed wireless message gave the impression that the damaged Titanic was being towed slowly back to port.
Speculation had developed that a cover-up was being mounted, that the meager output from the Carpathia’s wireless room—a provisional list of survivors—and the refusal to answer press inquiries was a stalling tactic to give the chairman of the White Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay, himself a Titanic survivor, time to concoct an official explanation that would absolve him and his company of negligence charges. An intercepted wireless message from the Carpathia indicated that Ismay wanted the Carpathia to let its passengers off farther downriver to avoid the press.
The public naturally wanted to know how this apparently invincible liner had come to grief on what should have been a routine Atlantic crossing, but for most of the curious the explanation would have little or no immediate impact on their lives. For the friends and families of Titanic passengers, the need to know was vital to their peace of mind. Many of them gathered in the shed at the entrance to Pier 54 uncertain as to whether they would see their loved ones emerge. For newspapers, getting an accurate record of this event was a professional duty and an unparalleled editorial challenge.
The Carpathia’s arrival hadn’t been expected until the early hours of April 19, so when it was spotted at 6:10 p.m. on the eighteenth, off the coast of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, the news spread quickly through the city and the streets began to fill with traffic. Limousines and touring cars sped so quickly down the newly asphalted Seventh Avenue that many of them slipped on its rainy surface and found themselves running into the curbs. Police were brought in to ensure that no one was allowed on the pier itself but the two thousand already issued passes.
Although the city was frenzied as it readied itself to receive the survivors, the atmosphere in Cunard’s shed was muted. There was only a hush occasionally punctuated by sobbing. Pass holders were organized in groups behind placards bearing the initial of their loved one’s surname. This was to make it easy for survivors to connect with their waiting parties. In addition to friends and relatives, there were professional caregivers: officers from the Salvation Army offering hospitality to those with no local contacts, doctors in white jackets and nurses in uniform to attend the sick and injured, representatives from the White Star Line to answer questions and handle problems. Against the walls of the shed was a row of stretchers for those too emotionally traumatized or physically damaged to make the walk.
Half a mile above Battery Park, the Carpathia released thirteen now empty Titanic lifeboats in order to deny newspapers the opportunity to photograph them. Three of the original sixteen they had picked up were too damaged to haul back, and they were left at the wreck site. The thirteen were all that remained of the proud steamer that had left Southampton on April 10 for its maiden voyage. Everything else was spread out over the ocean bed 550 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.
The Carpathia turned toward the Cunard Pier, where at 9:30 it tied up. The first person to emerge was a sailor dressed in a yellow oilskin. Then out came the first survivor, a fragile and unsteady woman who needed the support of a ship’s officer. She was collected by her husband, who wept tears of joy and relief on her shoulder. This scene, and ones very like it, was played over and over again through the night. In many cases the longed-for face didn’t appear, and there were tears of bitterness and loss.
For waiting journalists the challenge was to work out how best to use their limited time in researching and writing the most dynamic and informative copy for the next morning’s papers. This was clearly a story that would win or lose the reputations of newspapers, editors, and reporters. Everything from advanced planning and breadth of coverage to shorthand skills and speedy copyediting would be put to the test. This truly was journalism as the first draft of history.
The New York Times had led the way in the accuracy and scope of its reportage. Its newsroom received the first Associated Press report that the Titanic was in trouble at 1:20 on April 15, based on a message picked up by a Marconi station at Cape Race, Newfoundland. It stated that an iceberg had been hit, lifeboats were in the water, and a distress signal had been sent. Half an hour after this initial contact, wireless communication from the stricken liner ended. Working late that night was the paper’s inspirational managing editor, Carr Van Anda, who cast his eye over the facts and intuitively felt that something far worse than a damaging collision had taken place.
After telling correspondents in Montreal and Halifax to pursue the story, he trawled the cuttings library and found that there was a history of shipping collisions with icebergs in this vicinity. The Carmania, which had arrived in New York only the day before, had reported a field of ice. A year before the Anchor line ship Columbia had smashed her stern in the same area. Two years before that the Volturne had found itself “pinched” by moving ice, some of which ground along its side.
Other ships had reported an ice pack during the past week. The Niagara had been badly dented, the Lord Cromer and the Kura had both been damaged below the waterline, and the Armenia reported an ice field at least seventy miles long. Captain Dow of the Carmania had been quoted as saying: “I never saw so much ice and so little whisky and lime juice in all my life. Had the ingredients been handy there would have been a highball for every man in the world!”
Although Van Anda knew that he couldn’t go into print announcing the loss of the Titanic—as yet there was no conclusive evidence—he used his hunch to give the story of an Atlantic collision the prominence worthy of a disaster. He spread the news over four columns, and around the core information about the distress call and subsequent radio silence, he packed stories of the other ships that had encountered ice, listed important passengers, and used images of the captain and his ship. He employed the word sinking in the early editions, and there are claims that he used sunk in later editions, although, if he did, no copy of this edition is known to exist.
The arrival of the Carpathia with its hundreds of eyewitnesses presented a logistical problem for all newspapers. Who were the best passengers or crew members to interview? How should the rapacious appetite for facts and truth be balanced against the need of survivors for peace and consolation? What was the most effective yet honest way of getting an exclusive on a story that would spread as quickly
as a virus once the survivors were home?
Van Anda hatched a plan. He booked an entire floor of the Strand Hotel at 502 West 14th Street, close to Pier 54, to use as the New York Times base while it covered the arrival. Telephones on this floor would be linked directly to a desk at the Times where quotes and descriptions filed by reporters could be instantly hammered into stories by skilled rewrite boys. The journalists could then be reassigned to other interviews. The Times, in common with all other papers, was only granted four pier passes, but Van Anda ordered an additional twelve reporters to head down to the area to mingle with arriving survivors and their kin.
The most vital source, Van Anda knew, was Harold Bride, the Titanic’s twenty-two-year-old junior Marconi operator, who had not only survived the sinking but had worked the wireless of the Carpathia as it sailed back to America. With the captain and most of the senior officers dead, he was the only person alive who would have been present at the heart of the drama. He had been in direct contact with Captain Edward Smith, had communicated with nearby ships, had witnessed the rescue, and would have been one of the last men to leave the ship. He also had the advantage of being able to explain what he saw in nautical terms.
But how could the New York Times gain access to the Carpathia when both Cunard and the docks authority were fiercely guarding it? Van Anda came up with a solution. He would involve the Marconi organization. Cunard might turn back a reporter, but not Guglielmo Marconi, the celebrated inventor, entrepreneur, and Nobel Prize winner, whose name was synonymous with wireless communications. It was his recently developed equipment that was revolutionizing sea travel. It was unlikely that any Titanic passengers would have been saved if not for the Marconi wireless transmitter.
If Bride gave an exclusive interview, it would enhance the name of Marconi as much as that of the New York Times. Bride wouldn’t lose out either. The fee for his story would equal three years’ wages as a wireless operator. The Marconi office had already sent three messages to its own wireless room advising the operators to hold their stories until approached by the New York Times. The last of these, addressed to “Marconi Officer, the Carpathia and the Titanic” and signed by American Marconi’s chief engineer Frederick Sammis, simply said: “Stop. Say nothing. Hold your story for dollars in four figures. Mr. Marconi agreeing. Will meet you at dock.” This was later assumed to be another reason for the Carpathia’s media blackout. Even President Taft couldn’t get in touch to find out whether his trusted military aide Major Archibald Butt had survived. (He had not.)