by Steve Turner
Ships’ musicians were now not only poorer but also lower in status. “A musician on board a ship is still but a queer creature,” complained the Orchestral Association in its journal. “He is a square peg in a round hole. There is really no place for him on board unless he does a bit of waiting at table. He is not a seaman, fireman, steward, or any article mentioned in the regulations of the mercantile marine. Not even a chattel!” The New York Times ran a story on March 24, 1912, headlined “Bandsmen Now Passengers” that ended with the observation “This method takes them out of the jurisdiction of the Captain, as they are not members of the crew.” The archives of the White Star Line are incomplete, making it impossible to know the exact terms of the contract with C. W. & F. N. Black.
There’s no extant correspondence to reveal how the brothers managed their coup. They may have known J. Bruce Ismay through Liverpool business connections or through social circles on the Wirral peninsula. They lived in a seven-room house on Heron Road. Ismay’s inherited family mansion, Dawpool (designed by Richard Norman Shaw, architect of New Scotland Yard, the Savoy Theatre, Bedford Park, and the Piccadilly Hotel among other London buildings and Albion House in Liverpool), was only six miles away, overlooking the River Dee at Thurstaston.
The Blacks would have followed the progress of the building of the Titanic and the battle between Cunard and White Star for supremacy on the transatlantic route. The two shipping lines had a lot in common. Thomas Henry Ismay, the founder of White Star, was born in 1837, Samuel Cunard in 1839. Ismay’s Oceanic Steamship Company was formed in 1869, the Cunard Steamship Company in 1879. Both lines were built out of the remnants of previous companies.
The formative years of Cunard and White Star witnessed the transition from sail to steam and from wood to iron. It also saw a rapid increase in emigration from Europe to America. The question both lines faced was how to best capitalize on the lucrative North Atlantic route. Cunard opted to sell speed. It reasoned that most of the passengers were one-way ticket holders who weren’t sailing in order to pamper themselves but to get to their destinations in the shortest time. White Star instead chose to highlight luxury, reasoning that it was possible to transform the journey from an ordeal into a memorable experience by the addition of comfort, splendor, and style.
The innovations on White Star liners were impressive. First-class accommodation was shifted from the back of the ship to the middle where there was less noise from the engines. Spacious promenade decks, more portholes, and grand dining saloons were introduced. The capacity for third-class passengers was doubled and they were given their own dining room with linen napkins, silverware, and printed menus.
Thomas Ismay died in 1899 and J. Bruce Ismay, his son, inherited his company and his position. In 1902 the line was acquired by John Pierpont Morgan (J. P. Morgan), whose International Mercantile Marine Company was slowly swallowing up British shipping. Along with White Star, it would acquire Dominion, Red Star, Leyton, and Atlantic Transport. To avoid high U.S. port taxes and potential violation of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, however, Morgan ensured that the ships remained registered in Britain and had British captains, crews—and orchestras.
The British government saw White Star’s access to American money as a threat to the supremacy of its country’s shipping, and so it bolstered Cunard with a £150,000 annual subsidy plus a low-interest loan of £2.5 million. As a direct result, Cunard began an ambitious building program for two of the fastest liners ever constructed—the Lusitania and the Mauretania. The Lusitania made its maiden voyage in September 1907 and the next month made history by slashing more than eleven hours from the existing record for a westbound crossing and ending German dominance of the Blue Riband, an unofficial accolade given to the ship with the fastest transatlantic crossing.3 It was the first time a ship had made the crossing in less than five days.
For years White Star had worked exclusively with the Belfast shipbuilders Harland & Wolff. Thomas Ismay had met a Liverpool merchant, Gustavus Schwabe, who offered financing if Ismay had his ships built by his nephew Gustav Wolff, who was in partnership with Edward Harland. Ismay accepted the deal. Harland died in 1895, but the arrangement continued under his successor, William James Pirrie, later Lord Pirrie.
The legend is that the Titanic was conceived in the spring of 1907 during an after-dinner conversation between Pirrie and Ismay at Downshire House, Pirrie’s London home in Belgrave Square (now the Spanish Embassy). Sometimes the tale is rounded off with Ismay making provisional sketches of the great ship on his table napkin. Several aspects of the story don’t ring true. The most obvious is that the Lusitania had already been launched by then, and so it was a bit late for a White Star response. Also, Ismay was a ship owner, not a ship designer. What details could he have communicated in a crude sketch that he couldn’t explain in words?
Swiss Titanic scholar Gunter Babler has picked up on several other inconsistencies in this story based on the preparations made at Harland & Wolff for the construction of a bigger class of ship. The earliest of these was the building of the large Thomson dock in 1904. Babler believes that the Olympic-class liners were decided on in 1903, although the specifics were kept under wraps for obvious reasons. The earlier date makes sense in light of the purchase of White Star by J. P. Morgan in 1902, which made the larger ships possible, and the response to this by Cunard.
Babler traced the dinner story back to a single source: the 1961 book The Ismay Line by William J. Oldham. No previous account had mentioned it. As Oldham had access to Ismay’s widow before she died in 1937, it’s likely that she told him the story. It may be that the dinner happened but in another year or that the talk of the Titanic at a 1907 meal was merely the culmination of a four-year planning process. Possibly Mrs. Ismay didn’t know the year of the dinner, and Oldham guessed based on the fact that the orders for ships 400 and 401, as the Olympic and the Titanic were initially known, were registered in Harland & Wolff ’s books on April 30, 1907.
The plan was for three ships: first the Olympic, then the Titanic, and finally the Gigantic.4 Responsibility for their design was given to Thomas Andrews, Pirrie’s nephew and newly promoted head of Harland and Wolff ’s design department. Ismay and the other White Star directors approved his drawings in July 1908. The Titanic would accommodate up to 2,599 passengers and 903 officers and crew. It would have twenty-eight first-class suites, four electric elevators (three of them in first class), a heated swimming pool, a squash court, a fully equipped gymnasium, two libraries, four restaurants, a medical bay, and an operating theater. In first class it would have all the luxuries of an English country house, a gentleman’s club in London, or a town house in New York, and rich passengers would pay as much as one hundred times more than those in steerage for the privilege.
All the latest advances in marine construction would accompany these embellishments. There would be sixteen watertight compartments with electronically operated doors and sensors to detect water levels. This was believed to virtually guarantee that the ship could deal with any puncture. It had three propellers, twenty-four double-ended boilers, and five single-ended boilers. Although the advance publicity did not specifically boast that the ship was unsinkable, it did state that it was “designed to be unsinkable,” and Shipbuilder magazine in 1911 declared it to be “practically unsinkable.”
Because the proposed liners were so much bigger than anything built before—50 percent larger than the Lusitania or Mauretania—the Belfast shipyards of Harland & Wolff had to be reconfigured to make room for them. Two new slipways were created from three old ones, and new gantries over 200 feet tall with electric lifts had to be built above the hulls. It would take an unprecedented three thousand men to work on the Titanic, and everyone concerned was aware that this was the largest man-made transportable structure ever built.
Charlie and Frederick Black would have known of the Titanic’s advancement not only through their connections in Liverpool but also because there was national interest in this feat of Bri
tish engineering and example of twentieth-century progress. Ships were an indication of a nation’s wealth, power, and technological advancement. They were the most powerful form of transport then known, and the shrinking of the distance between Britain and America gained the sort of attention that the Space Race would get in the 1950s and 1960s.
News coverage of the ship’s building expressed awe and wonder. It was an age of record breaking, invention, and mankind’s seemingly limitless ability to master nature. Reports were full of dizzying statistics about the weight of iron plates, the numbers of rivets, and the measurements of decks. It was hard to know what to do with such facts as “the stern frame weighs 70 tons,” or “it would take 20 horses to haul one rudder.” The accumulative effect was to impress the average reader with the ingenuity of designers and the capacity of humans to construct on such a large scale.
White Star booklet featuring the Olympic and Titanic.
The first report on the ships in the Times came on September 1, 1908, in a page-ten story headlined “The New White Star Liners.” It mentioned that all the preliminaries had been settled and that construction had been started.
They will be longer, broader, and deeper than the Lusitania and the Mauretania. The exact dimensions are not yet obtainable but the gross tonnage will be about 8000 tons more than that of the two Cunarders. It is reckoned that the vessels will take three years to build. One is to be called the Olympic; the name of the other is not yet decided upon, but it will probably be the Titanic. The question of speed, which will not be high in a record-breaking sense, is being left in abeyance, doubtless pending the result of an experiment which is now being made by Messrs. Harland & Wolff with a combination of reciprocating and turbine engines, in which exhaust steam from the first engine is utilized in the second.
In November 1909 the paper reported that Trafalgar Dock in Southampton would have to be rebuilt to take these huge ships. (Ismay had decided to switch his transatlantic operation to Southampton rather than compete directly with Cunard from Liverpool.) The new dock would be 1700 feet long and 400 feet wide, and would require four new cargo sheds to be built.
In April 1910 there was news that the channel leading to Southampton docks would need to be deepened. It had already been dredged to 30 feet for the American Line and then to 32 feet for the Adriatic and Oceanic. Now the bed beneath the shipping lanes would need to be lowered an additional 3 feet. The International Mercantile Marine Company then had to petition the federal government in America to allow the city of New York to lengthen its piers by 100 feet. The New York Dock Commission was happy to do it, but the government was concerned that the additional length would constrict the river.
News interest turned to insurance in January 1911. This was no small matter because sea travel still had a high element of risk. In its Mail and Shipping Intelligence column, the Times had a regular list of the latest wrecks and casualties, and in the January 6 edition that carried news of the Titanic and Olympic insurance, it mentioned fourteen calamities during the past two days, mostly involving collisions resulting in damage. The report claimed that the Titanic and Olympic had been insured for between £700,000 and £800,000 although the actual cost of each ship was £1,500,000.
The Titanic was launched on May 31, 1911, “in brilliant weather, and in the presence of thousands of spectators,” according to the Times, the same day that the Olympic, which had been launched in October, left Belfast for England to commence her maiden voyage. For the first and only time the ships that had grown up alongside each other were briefly seen together on the water. Despite the Titanic’s size it apparently slid with ease down an incline greased with twenty-four tons of tallow, soap, and oil, once the shores had been removed. With an eye on detail, the Times recorded that it took sixty-two seconds to move from land to river, that her maximum speed as she did so was twelve knots, and that “the wave produced as her stem dropped into the water was much smaller than might have been expected considering the mass of the structure.”
Although thousands of paying spectators and many dignitaries— including Lord Pirrie, J. Bruce Ismay, and J. P. Morgan—were present, there was no traditional naming ceremony, and tugs quickly towed her to a berth where she would spend the next eight months being fitted out. Flags hung on the side of the ship spelled out the word success. On February 3, 1912, she left the wharf and was taken to her dry dock for the final preparations.
The Black brothers knew that they were to supply the musicians for this much-talked-about ship. They would also have known that besides the traditional five-piece band for the main first-class restaurant, there was to be a trio for the ship’s nearby Café Parisien which, as the name suggested, would have a Continental flavor and would appeal to those who looked to Paris as the arbiter of taste in food, fashion, and art. It was a knowing touch of sophistication that allowed passengers to move from Pall Mall to Montmartre in a few easy steps.
Everything on the Titanic had to be the best that money could buy, and the onus on the Blacks was to look through the lists of musicians they knew or had worked with and find the best quintet and trio it was possible to come up with. The men needed to be experienced, versatile, smart, and able to converse easily with the wealthy and powerful.
Key to building a successful band was an inspirational bandleader. The ideal person would be someone who commanded respect among musicians, had an outstanding moral character, and was used to playing for a well-traveled, sophisticated, and international clientele. It also helped if this leader could recommend players, because a good band worked when the musicians gelled both personally and musically. They found their man in Wallace Hartley, a thirty-three-year old Lancastrian who was currently bandmaster on the Mauretania, the ship that had taken the Blue Riband from the Lusitania.
3
“A MAN WITH THE
HIGHEST SENSE OF DUTY.”
Wallace Hartley was an obvious choice as bandleader. Five feet ten inches tall with dark hair, blue eyes, and a winning smile, he’d had extensive experience as a musician both on land and on sea and had worked with many of the best players in the business. He was also a man of fine moral standing. Raised as a Methodist, he exhibited the diligence, honesty, and sobriety characteristic of a Christian denomination that had transformed working-class life in Britain. His first employers at a local bank found him “steady, attentive and capable.” John Carr, a cellist on the White Star liner Celtic, said that he was “a man with the highest sense of duty.” Another fellow musician spoke of his “commanding stature.” A Colne friend called him “one of the nicest and most gentlemanly lads I ever knew.”
Wallace Hartley.
Other than the few photographs that we have of Hartley, the best physical description of him comes from an interview given to the Dewsbury District News by his friend John Wood. “I seem to see him now in a characteristic attitude when seated—half reclining in an easy fashion in the armchair. Two long, white fingers of his left hand held along his chin, and two supporting his head—a long, lean face, dark-brown eyes, long hair, blackish, with a rich brown lustre—not overlong, but I never saw it short.”
By the time Charlie Black invited him to lead the band on the Titanic, he had been at sea for almost three years working his way up from second violin on the Lucania to bandmaster of the Mauretania. Each Atlantic crossing at this time took between five and six days. There would then be four days at the port for refueling, maintenance, replenishment of essential goods, and the taking on of cargo and passengers. It was during these times that Hartley came to know and love New York with its vibrancy, optimism, and range of new entertainment.
When Katherine Hurd arrived there with her husband, Carlos, in April 1912 to board the Carpathia, these were her initial impressions as conveyed in a letter to her mother: “New York is tremendous—something like I expected it to be only a thousand times more so. And with all its size it is so beautifully clean.” Although New York was large and bustling, it was still far from the densely packed cit
y bristling with skyscrapers that we bring to mind today.
Often described as a Yorkshireman because his last address was in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, Hartley was born and spent his formative years in Colne, Lancashire, five and a half miles north of Burnley. It was close to the Yorkshire border but the historic rivalry between the two counties, which had started on battlefields and continued on cricket pitches, meant that you belonged to one county or the other regardless of geographical proximity.
Hartley’s roots on both sides of the family were deep in the Lancashire soil. His father, Albion Hartley, was born in Colne, as were Albion’s parents, Henry and Mary. Albion married Elizabeth Foulds, also from Colne, whose parents had grown up in the area. All of them worked with cotton, the town’s primary industry. Henry Hartley had been a cotton weaver and Mary a dressmaker. Elizabeth was a worsted weaver (a person who worked with worsted wool), and Albion started as a cotton-sizer (a worker who applied a gluelike substance to prepared cotton to make it easier to work with) and eventually became a mill manager.
Cotton and the industrial revolution had turned Colne from a small hilltop village into a typical mill town of industrial buildings and back-to-back workers’ houses. An 1872 gazetteer summed the town up in numbers: three churches, five dissenting chapels, a mechanic’s institute, two endowed schools, a post office, a bank, and two inns. There were 1,357 houses and a population of 6,315. Twenty years later the population had tripled.