by Steve Turner
The Carpathia arrived back in New York on Friday, March 29. Bricoux was able to enjoy a weekend in the city before boarding the Mauretania on Tuesday April 2 with Theo Brailey and meeting Wallace Hartley for the first time. While sailing to Liverpool he wrote what would be his final letter to his father.
Dear Papa,
You may find that my letter is delayed but that won’t be my fault because I have been on board the Mauretania for ten days [sic] and haven’t had a chance to post it. At last I come to the point which is to wish you a happy anniversary [April 9 was their wedding anniversary] and good health. Nissotti wrote and told me that you were suffering a bit but I hope it’s nothing serious and that my letter will find you well. If not, let it bring you health. The boat’s vibration is so annoying that I can’t write. Just think, we are doing 400 nautical miles in 24 hours, a world record! [A mile is 1,837 meters.] Five days from New York to Liverpool. I will write more on board the Titanic. Love to Maman and you. Best wishes, Roger, on board the Titanic, Southampton, England. I am counting on a letter from you in New York.
5
“AN EXCEPTIONALLY
GOOD PERFORMER
ON THE PIANO.”
Family legend says that William “Theo” Brailey had been told by his father, Ronald Brailey, not to sail on the Titanic, but he was determined to go anyway. Like Wallace Hartley, Theo was recently engaged and planning to give up the sea, but until then he wanted to take advantage of every opportunity to travel. He would have known that shipwreck was always a danger, but the Titanic was supposed to be the last word in safety.
Normally such parental warnings could be dismissed as signs of over-protectiveness but Mr. Brailey wasn’t like that. He’d let his son join the army at fifteen and Theo had hardly been back home since. His fears were probably connected with his profession because he was an established clairvoyant who was well known in spiritualist circles and had even been featured in the national press.
Spiritualism had grown in popularity during the late nineteenth century, just as traditional religion was being questioned by modern science. Spiritualists believed in an afterlife not merely as an article of faith, but through experiences with what they believed to be the spirits of the dead. Thus spiritualism appeared to satisfy the demand of modern science for proof and the requirement of religion for comfort. Spiritualists offered reassurance of reunions with departed loved ones, while at the same time claiming that their encounters could be verified by impartial observers.
The Christian church opposed spiritualism, pointing out Bible verses that forbade contact with the spirits of the dead.1 Spiritualists were therefore keen to demonstrate the compatibility of Christianity and spiritualism. It was possible, they argued, to be a faithful church member yet to attend séances. Spiritualism, they said, was not an alternative to religion but a companion. Their best-loved example of this harmony was the newspaper editor, social campaigner, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee W. T. Stead, who was a spiritualist but also a faithful member of his local Congregational church. Ironically, he would be a passenger on the Titanic.
Spiritualism naturally attracted charlatans and fraudsters. The hunger to witness the miraculous frequently clouded the judgments of people anxious to hear good news from “the other side.” In 1906 a supposed psychic named Charles Eldred, who claimed to be able to conjure up visible spirits and produced photographs of himself with various emanations, was exposed as a fraud who used theatrical props concealed in his specially made chair. The person brought in to reveal his chicanery was not a skeptic, however, but Ronald Brailey. Inside the arm of Eldred’s chair, he found a head made of marl (a claylike substance), a flesh-colored mask, six fragments of silk, three beards, two wigs, and a metal frame. An account of the exposé was run in the Daily Mirror.
Ronald Brailey.
The same year the Daily Express engaged Ronald after a girl’s skeleton was found during an archaeological dig at Avebury near Marlborough. The paper figured that his fabled gifts could be used to tell who the girl was and how she died. Ronald gripped onto a bone and claimed that images of her past life appeared to him. He could see tented structures near Stonehenge and five or six white-bearded druids surrounding the girl. Then one of them lifted a dagger and plunged it into her body in a ritual sacrifice. The Daily Express thought it had got its money’s worth out of the “Bayswater seer” and the story was run on the front page.
Two years later Ronald Brailey appeared in the Daily Mail after a skeptical reporter watched him in performance at the sixth annual Spiritualists’ Convention held in Finsbury, North London. “Mr Ronald Brailey gave a touch of novelty to his clairvoyance. With a blackboard and a piece of chalk he produced portraits of the spirits he said he saw,” the journalist wrote. He explained further:
As works of art Mr Brailey’s drawings had the superlative merit of leaving much to the imagination. They were outline drawings, dimly but distinctly suggestive of the human profile. They were frequently recognised as indeed seaside silhouettes are by the expectant eye that knows beforehand whom to look for. But to the general view they conveyed less a suggestion of portraiture than an idea that spiritualism has receded into kindergarten stage.
The headline was “Is Spiritualism Declining?”
Within the world of psychics, however, Ronald Brailey enjoyed good standing. In March 1909 he was, for instance, invited to the Dublin home of the writer James Cousins and his pioneering feminist wife, Margaret, who, like their poet friend William Butler Yeats, were curious about psychic phenomena.2 They wanted to test the clairvoyant’s powers, especially his automatic writing that he claimed to act as a conduit for the messages of the dead. James Cousins remembered:
Brailey sat quietly in a chair looking over Dublin Bay from the windows of our drawing room. When the writing ceased, the clairvoyant said he had not the slightest impression of what was behind it, probably because his attention had been caught by what appeared to be a special event taking place over the hill [Howth] across the water. A procession in archaic costumes circled in the air just above the hill. It was not a joyous procession, but sorrowful. We could throw no light on the phenomenon. Next day’s newspaper announced the death of the aged Earl of Howth, the last of an ancient line of Irish nobility.3
18 Clarendon Road, Walthamstow, birthplace of William Theodore Brailey.
Theo (back row, center) celebrating Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897.
William Theodore Brailey was born at 18 Clarendon Road in Walthamstow, Essex, on October 25, 1887. He was the first child for William Richard Brailey (who only started calling himself Ronald in 1902) and his wife, Amy. There was a piano in the home and Theo, as the family called him, and his sisters, Mabel and Lily, were encouraged to play. When they were of school age they were sent to Miriam Geary, a lady who ran a private school with her daughter Elizabeth at their large rambling home on the corner of Clarendon Road and Copeland Road.
Brailey family with Ronald standing second from left and Theo seated (center).
Miriam Geary was a teacher with a special interest in music. She had married a man almost thirty years older. When he died, she turned her house into a school especially for children who’d shown musical ability. A boot repairer named Clifford Buttle, who knew the Brailey family at this time, spoke about Theo’s talent in a 1955 interview. “From the commencement of his education the boy displayed a marked talent for music,” he said. “So much so that he soon outpaced his teacher and as there was no further advancement to be made in Walthamstow, Mr. and Mrs. Brailey, with their family of three, moved to Lancaster Road, Ladbroke Grove, West London.”
Buttle may have been accurate about the musical aptitude, but he was wrong about the reasons for the move to Ladbroke Grove. The Brailey family was living at 36 Merton Road, Walthamstow, in 1902 when Theo left home. They didn’t leave there until 1903, going first to Charlotte Street in London’s West End and then, four months later, to Elgin Crescent in Notting Hill. The move to Lancaster Road w
asn’t until 1906, first to 142 and then, in 1910, to a larger three-story house at 71.
Theo Brailey’s family home when he left on the Titanic. 71 Lancaster Road, London.
Did the moves have anything to do with Brailey’s musical progress? Following school he’d become an office clerk, but by 1902 he was part of the orchestra at the Kensington Palace Hotel in West London under newly arrived Dutch conductor Simon Von Lier who would go on to work at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne. Von Lier was impressed with Brailey’s musicianship, later describing him as “a highly efficient pianist.” His work in London may have prompted Ronald to consider leaving Essex where there were fewer opportunities for musicians.
Leaving Walthamstow might also have had something to do with Ronald’s aspirations as a clairvoyant. His employment record indicates a knack for reinvention. In 1887, at the time of Theo’s birth, he was a commission agent. By 1891 he was working in insurance but somehow managed to combine that job with being a Baptist minister. Ten years later he was a traveling salesman selling watches. Then, in 1902, he began advertising himself as a “trance clairvoyant, medical and general psychometrist” able to give private readings at his Walthamstow home. Psychometrics was the ability to make predictions from handling something that the subject had worn, touched, or owned.
This latter change coincided with Theo’s departure from the Kensington Palace Hotel orchestra to join the army, signing up as a boy soldier with the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers (motto Omnia Audax—“Daring in all things”), whose regimental headquarters was in Bury, Lancashire. It seems unusual that a boy who’d grown up in Essex and was currently living in London would join a regiment based two hundred miles away with no obvious emotional ties. A possible motivation is that in February 1901 soldiers from the Lancashire Fusiliers lined Piccadilly for the funeral procession of Queen Victoria and then on August 3, 1902, a composite battalion was sent to do the same job for the coronation of King Edward VII. While in London they camped in Kensington Gardens, just across the road from the Kensington Palace Hotel, which was in De Vere Gardens.
Theo in the uniform of the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers.
It’s easy to imagine the teenage Brailey seeing these soldiers and being impressed by their red tunics with white facing and black trousers with red side stripes. Possibly he heard the regimental band practicing in the park or soldiers came to see Van Lier’s orchestra play and spoke to him enthusiastically about military life. Coincidentally, the Lancashire Fusiliers originated as the East Devonshire Regiment of Foot and Brailey was a Devonshire name. Ronald Brailey had been born near Exeter and his father, William Brailey, was in the Royal Marines based near Plymouth in the mid-nineteenth century.
He signed up on October 9, 1902, at the age of fourteen years and eleven months at the regimental headquarters in Bury. He was five feet four and a half inches tall, weighed 106 pounds, and had a thirty-inch chest. He contracted to serve for twelve years. After just six weeks of basic training, he was dispatched to Barbados in the Caribbean. To modern ears it sounds an exotic posting, but in the early years of the twentieth century, Barbados was an impoverished West Indian island that had recently suffered riots and assassinations and needed a massive bailout from Britain to avoid total economic collapse.
Brailey left England on RMS Tagus on November 26 with ninety-nine other privates, one sergeant, and two corporals from the 4th Battalion. When they arrived in Barbados on December 9 they were absorbed into the 3rd Battalion, bringing its strength up to 1,003. The battalion diary shows that other than quelling riots in Trinidad in March 1903, they had no incidents to deal with during their tour, which allowed for a lot of practice (marches, maneuvers, field training, shooting, bayonet drills), sports (athletics, polo, football, horse racing), and entertainment (meals, concerts, dances).
Music threaded its way through many of the activities: a string band at a moonlight picnic in honor of the birthday of the lieutenant-colonel’s wife, “minstrel” entertainment to raise money for a memorial fund, the Trooping of the Colour on August 1, smoking concerts, playing off senior personnel who were returning to Britain.
It was never Brailey’s intention to be an ordinary private. The British army was one of the biggest employers of musicians and he had his eyes set on being part of the regimental band. On October 26, 1903, just over a year after signing up, he was appointed as a bandsman. He would then have taken part in the torchlight tattoo on November 5, a dance later that night in the officer’s mess, and a ball on December 14 at Government House.
On December 4 a telegram was received from the War Office ordering the 3rd Battalion to South Africa via St. Helena. When Brailey boarded HMT Dunera on December 17, it already contained three companies of Lancashire Fusiliers from Jamaica and would later pick up two more companies from Trinidad. Two companies disembarked on January 4, 1904, at St. Helena to take over from the 3rd Manchester Regiment, then the Dunera proceeded to South Africa, arriving in Cape Town on January 13.
Brailey and the rest of the bandsmen took a train the same day from Cape Town to Naauwpoort along with the drummers, six boys, and the staff needed to set up their HQ. It was a three-day journey at the hottest time of the year that involved traveling almost nine hundred miles in a north-westerly direction toward Johannesburg and Pretoria. A writer, who had made the same journey four years previously with troops from New Zealand, commented: “The place [Naauwpoort] is nothing but a huge desert. In fact, ever since we left Cape Town, we have seen nothing but sand and rocks, except at the townships, where little patches are irrigated.”
Naauwpoort was a strategic railway junction and had become a garrison town subject to frequent attacks during both Boer wars. Now that the fighting was over, there wasn’t a lot to do other than to ensure there were no additional uprisings. The men of the Lancashire Fusiliers were housed in tin huts and their main activities were reconnaissance and mapmaking. When they had time off they played football.
Brailey didn’t stay long because to progress as a bandsman he had to study for two years at the Royal Military School of Music back in England. The school then, as now, was at Kneller Hall in Twickenham, on the outskirts of London, and his accommodation was on site. Although the 1912 annual for the Lancashire Fusiliers praised him as “a talented musician, and an exceptionally good performer on the piano,” his chosen instruments when he enrolled on March 12, 1904, were cello and flute. He would have been taught performance, harmony, and instrumentation, with the rest of the time being taken up with individual and band practice, general education, and some sport. In January 1906 he was awarded two certificates—one to say that he had attained a “good degree of proficiency” on the cello and the other that he had attained a “very good degree of proficiency” on the flute.
He was promoted to lance corporal on leaving Kneller Hall on January 1906, and posted to the 4th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers at their headquarters in Tipperary, Ireland. In April and May his band competed with other military bands based in Ireland and was awarded third place. When reporting the achievement, the regimental annual commented on the youthfulness of the band. Brailey, still only eighteen, was clearly a typical member. “It may be truthfully stated that it would be impossible to collect sufficient hairs from the faces of the reed players to make up one respectable moustache.”
On November 15, 1906, the 4th Battalion was disbanded and Brailey was transferred to the 2nd Battalion stationed in Fermoy, forty-six miles northwest of Cork. The move may have been a catalyst because three months later he left the army. The full term he had signed up for committed him until October 1914, so he took the only option available and bought himself out. On February 22, 1907, he left the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers, the entry on his army record noting: “At his own request, on payment of £18.”
His family was now living at 142 Lancaster Road in Ladbroke Grove, close to Notting Hill, where Ronald the psychometrist offered private consultations, advice by mail for five shillings, and five séances a week. Brailey ca
me home for a while but soon found work with the Pier Pavilion orchestra in Southport, Lancashire, on the coast south of Blackpool. This seaside resort was among the most prestigious and popular of the era and had the latest in entertainment technology. Close to the seafront there were two large artificial lakes and, at the southern end, the Pleasureland Amusement Park with its Toboggan Railway, Flying Machine, Aerial Glide, and Helter Skelter Lighthouse. It was the ideal place for factory workers from such nearby northern towns as Liverpool, Bolton, Blackburn, Manchester, and Preston to let off steam.
The Pier Pavilion, at the entrance to the renowned pier, was a twelve-hundred-seat theater that put on variety shows. The orchestra’s job was to welcome the audience, support the performers, and play the national anthem. In January 1909 the nightly show featured ventriloquists, jugglers, wire walkers, dancers, vocal comedians, roller skaters, acrobats, equilibrists, a tambourine player, and someone who could whistle (a siffleur). Then there was Miss Vera Gaine, “the champion ball puncher”; Mr. Paul Lemaire, “the whimsical wizard” and a singing group known as the Nonentities.
During his time off he met a local girl, Teresa Steinhilber, who lived on a street close to the seafront. Known as Terry to her friends, she was two years younger than Brailey and working as a milliner. They began dating and Brailey was a welcome guest at the family home where she lived with her Irish mother, Kate; her German father, August; three brothers; and a sister. August, who’d arrived in Britain in the 1870s, was a watchmaker with two shops in Southport.
By 1910 Brailey and Teresa were sufficiently recognized as a couple for her to be invited to the London wedding of Brailey’s oldest sister, Mabel. In the wedding photographs, taken in the garden of the new Brailey home at 71 Lancaster Road, she stands at Theo’s right side, directly behind Mabel, wearing a wide-brimmed black hat and a light light-colored suit. It was a photo of Brailey taken at this wedding on September 10, 1910, with a carnation in the left lapel of his dress jacket, that would be circulated around the world in the immediate aftermath of the Titanic’s sinking.