The Band That Played On

by Steve Turner

  Wedding of Mabel Brailey to Percy Hanson, Sept. 10, 1910. Teresa Steinhilber is in the black hat behind the bride. Theo stands to her left.

  His main interest outside of music and his relationship with Teresa was aviation. Like many boys of his age, he was captivated by the exploits of the first generation of pilots and the great advances being made in aircraft technology. Yet his interest went beyond merely reading about the latest records to be broken. According to the Liverpool Echo, “Mr. Brailey was at one time associated with Mr. Compton Paterson at the Freshfield aerodrome and Mr. J. Gaunt at the Southport hanger.” Associated is a strangely imprecise word to have used. Was he merely a friend or was he involved in some way with their flights? Or did he have a financial stake in their experiments?

  Ronald and Theo Brailey standing. Amy Brailey, Percy Hanson, Mabel (Brailey) Hanson, Lily Brailey seated.

  Freshfield was eight miles south of Southport, close to the town of Formby, and the “aerodrome” at the time was no more than an expanse of heather-and sedge-covered dunes where aviators could fly and land their planes without fear of crashing into houses. The hangar in Southport was built by the Southport Corporation in 1910 and then rented out to John Gaunt who designed, built, and successfully flew a plane from there in 1911.

  If Brailey’s connection with these two men was notable enough to warrant a mention in the Liverpool Echo, he may well have flown with them because they often took paying passengers for a spin. Paterson once took two schoolboys who’d won the opportunity through a local lottery. These people would be among the first in the world to experience flight, although the altitudes were ridiculously low and the length of the journeys quite short.

  Orville Wright had made the first “manned, powered, sustained and controlled flight by a heavier-than-air aircraft” in 1903—duration, twelve seconds. He and his brother, Wilbur, regularly broke records. In 1907 the first “aerodrome” with hangars was built in France and in July 1909 French aviator Louis Blériot became the first person to fly across the English Channel. Transport and warfare would never be the same again. The U.S. Army quickly signed up the Wright brothers and commissioned them to develop a biplane for use in combat.

  The 1911 census records Cecil Compton Paterson as a twenty-six-year-old “aviator” living in Freshfield. John Gaunt, from Southport, was a thirty-five-old “aero plane builder.” During Brailey’s time at the Pier Pavilion they were both at elementary stages in getting their homemade contraptions off the ground. It was a time when a one-hundred-yard advance at ten feet off the ground was still considered a successful flight and would duly be reported in newspapers and magazines.

  Brailey spent two years in Southport, apparently building up a wide circle of friends. Then, according to the Southport Guardian, he left the town “to go to a musical college to complete his education,” although there are no records of him attending any of the major colleges of the day. By 1911 he was composing instrumental music and two manuscripts of his work survive—“Ballet of the Roses” (February 1911) and “A Little Scherzo” (November 1911).

  He must already have gone to sea by this time. His first ship was the Saxonia, a 14,281-ton Cunard vessel built in 1900 that boasted one distinct 106-foot-tall black funnel. Originally it sailed constantly between Liverpool and Boston but in 1911 began the New York to Mediterranean route, and then Liverpool to New York calling in at Queenstown, Ireland. One of these trips got him back to Liverpool late in January 1912 and on February 10 he joined the Carpathia.

  On the Carpathia, playing alongside Roger Bricoux, he heard of the Titanic work for the first time. It was a spectacular offer for someone so young. His only apprehension at first was that he’d recently become engaged to Teresa and had promised to bring his seagoing days to an end. Then, when he got back to England, there was the warning of his clairvoyant father who felt that the Titanic would come to no good …

  6

  “A THOROUGH AND

  CONSCIENTIOUS

  MUSICIAN.”

  On May 1, 1911, the Oruba, a 5,850-ton steamship, arrived back in Southampton after a twenty-four-day trip from the British colony of Jamaica via Trinidad, Barbados, the Azores, and Cherbourg. On board, traveling as class passengers, alongside some members of the MCC cricket team who’d recently played thirteen matches on the island, were a group of five musicians who had just spent the past three and a half months as the orchestra of the Constant Spring Hotel at the foot of the Blue Mountains, six miles outside the capital of Kingston. This establishment had a checkered past. Built as a luxury hotel for the 1891 Jamaica International Exhibition, it had never made money for its owners. Despite its desirable location, 165 acres of grounds, one hundred rooms, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a croquet lawn, and a nine-hole golf course, it had suffered from bad management and incompetent staff. Guests repeatedly complained about everything from the irregularly manned reception desk to the length of time the kitchen took to boil an egg.

  Things became so bad that the government took it over. Then in 1908, Sir Alfred Jones, of the British shipping line Elder, Dempster & Co, bought it and attempted to turn around its fortunes by marketing Jamaica as a holiday destination for wealthy Britons.1 He died the following year and Elder Dempster was taken over by Sir Owen Phillips, later Lord Kylsant, who was described by the New York Times as “the Napoleon of British shipping.” Phillips was based in Liverpool and one of the lines he owned was the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, a client of C. W. & F. N. Black. The Oruba was a Royal Mail ship.

  Through this connection the Black brothers became musical agents for the hotel, responsible for providing a top-notch orchestra the equal of anything to be found in Paris, London, or New York. By December 1910 the hotel that called itself “the finest in the West Indies” was able to advertise in the local newspaper that it was offering “two music concerts a day and a Saturday Cinderella Ball” for the winter season ending April 1911. “A first class orchestra consisting of five professionals has been engaged in England who will play at all our dances. Select concerts will be given daily from 1–3 pm and every evening from 7:30 to 11 o clock. The orchestra is bringing a full programme of classical and all the latest dance music.” In the Times of London, Elder Dempster had a series of advertisements promoting Jamaica as “The New Riviera” and offering an inclusive deal that included transport to Kingston on one of their ships and six days at the Constant Spring.

  A correspondent for the Times captured the experience of staying at the Constant Spring Hotel in a story titled “An Impression of Jamaica,” which opened:

  A large proportion of tourists get their first view of the West Indies from Kingston Harbour in the early morning, and there are not many things in the world to be seen more beautiful than the sunrise on the Blue Mountains. But most vividly is likely to live in the memory the delight of waking on the following morning at, for choice, the Constant Spring Hotel, when, having but a few days before left behind a land grey and locked in ice, one wakes to brilliant sunshine with the air full of the music of the “Jamaican Nightingale” or mockingbird; and one goes out on the balcony to look down on a sea of bougainvillea, where great butterflies flutter, with, beyond, a tangle of tropical shrubbery in which humming-birds hang poised at the white trumpets of the Beaumontia.

  Whites were in a minority in Jamaica—only around 15,000 out of a population of 830,000—but they were the governing elite who owned and ran the valuable sugar plantations that provided the island with its most valuable export. They lived in the best houses, didn’t mix socially with the descendants of slaves, and, as in India and Africa, created a parallel society where British customs, values, and prejudices prevailed. The world that the Daily Gleaner of Kingston reported on at this time could have been in Tunbridge Wells or Brighton, as could the goods the paper advertised. It was for these people that the orchestra from England played.

  Portrait of John Wesley Woodward.

  Edgar Heap was one of the musicians returning to England that May. He
was soon to be bandmaster on the Carpathia with Roger Bricoux and Theo Brailey under his direction, and immediately after that voyage, part of the Mauretania band with Wallace Hartley. Although it’s not on record that Heap was ever approached for a job on the Titanic, he’s the one person who unites all five Titanic musicians with previous experience of playing on ships, because in the Constant Spring orchestra were violinist John Law Hume and cellist John Wesley Woodward. It’s possible that he could have recommended the two players to Hartley when sailing back to Liverpool on the Mauretania.

  Like Wallace Hartley, “Wes” Woodward, as he was known, had been raised in a Methodist family and his father, Joseph, had been as conscientious as Albion Hartley, working his way up from a maker of molds for holloware (pots, pitchers, bowls, teapots, trays, pans, scoops) at Hill Top Iron Works, West Bromwich, to become manager. Wes, the youngest son of Joseph and his wife, Martha, was born on September 11, 1879, at 24 Hawkes Lane in Hill Top, just over five miles northwest of Birmingham. When Hill Top Methodist Chapel was demolished in 1962, four large sealed jars were discovered in the foundations with newspapers from 1874 and the names of the chapel’s officers. Prominent among them was Joseph Woodward, who was also a trustee of the Methodist school.

  West Bromwich lay in what was known as the “Black Country”—one of the most heavily industrialized areas of Britain during the late nineteenth century. The locally mined coal was used to fire the furnaces of the foundries that produced pistols, guns, locks, screws, nails, springs, and kitchen utensils. They also produced the soot and fog that gave the region its bleak nickname. Queen Victoria is said to have pulled down the shutters of her train carriage window when she passed through the region.

  Woodward had six brothers and two sisters, but by the time he reached his midteens he had lost two of his brothers as well as his father. Martha was left to raise the large family on her own with the older boys having to leave school early and work in the foundry to bring in an income. An opportunity for a better life came in 1894 when Thomas, the oldest son, who had left home the year before to become a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral, auditioned to become a tenor lay clerk in the Chapel Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford. According to the college records, he was one of sixty applicants but the only one to be offered a job.

  The choir was made up of what they termed “academical clerks” (undergraduates at the college who sang until they graduated) and “lay clerks” (professional musicians who might have other work to top up their income). Because of the post the whole Woodward family left West Bromwich and moved to a house in Cowley Road, Oxford. After the industrial midlands, life in the university town offered a literal breath of fresh air along with inspiring architecture and a fascinating sense of history.

  It’s likely that Woodward left school at around the time of the move and may have done some casual work, but, like his brother Tom, he wanted to make music his career. The Woodwards were a musical family. Relatives on his father’s side had been church organists, choirmasters, and players in professional orchestras. In 1900 Woodward took exams set by the Royal College of Music in London that would qualify him to teach music. With a pass mark set at 75 percent, he passed and was awarded a licentiate as a performer of the cello. In the next year’s census he described himself as “a musician,” meaning that at the age of twenty-one this was how he earned his living.

  His years in Oxford are not documented beyond a passing comment by the Oxford Times that “he appeared in several solos and string quartets, notably with the Misses Price and Mr H. M. Dowson.” The Misses Price, who were violinists, have been lost to history, but Henry Martin Dowson is remembered because he was married to Rosina Filippi, one of the best-known stage actresses of the time. He lived in Iffley, a village outside of Oxford, played the viola, and was a brewer.

  Rosina Filippi came from Venice, where her father, Filippo Filippi, was a celebrated writer and music critic. Her mother, Vaneri Filippi, was a French singer and professor of singing at the Milan Conservatoire. Rosina had wanted to be an opera singer, but her voice didn’t develop sufficiently and she turned to acting. She became a popular figure in the London theater, involved herself in tutoring younger actors, and was an author. One of her greatest achievements was adapting Jane Austen for the stage for the first time. Her book Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen Arranged and Adapted for Drawing-Room Performance was published in 1895, and in March 1901 her production The Bennets (“A Play without a Plot adopted from Jane Austen’s Novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’”) was premiered at London’s Royal Court Theatre. The critic from the Times wasn’t impressed: “Is there not something of a profanation in throwing the glare of the footlights upon the art of Miss Austen, so dainty, so demure, so private and confidential?” he asked. “Is there not something of callousness in abandoning to the noisy traffic of the stage those exquisitely discreet duologues which are properly to be enjoyed at leisure, word by word, in little sips?”

  Dowson certainly performed around Oxford and was known by the musicians who belonged to the Oxford University Music Club (later to become the Oxford University Music Society). Woodward was becoming familiar with a more cultured world than he would have been exposed to if he had stayed in West Bromwich. Rosina Filippi was a well-connected woman who played opposite many of the giants of British theater and by playing with her husband Woodward would have been introduced to that layer of society.

  In photographs John Wesley Woodward looks neat, solid, and dependable. He’s broad shouldered and well groomed with a carefully waxed mustache. His spectacles are wire rimmed and in some photos he instead wears a monocle in his right eye. His friends and acquaintances remembered him as being easygoing and having a positive attitude. He was “amiable,” “good natured,” and “modest,” and had “an easy, equable temper.” Outside of music he had an interest in photography and building primitive internal combustion engines, a technology still in its infancy.

  His career accelerated in 1907 when he was invited to join the newly formed Duke of Devonshire’s Band, sometimes known as the Duke of Devonshire’s Private Orchestra, based on the south coast of England at Eastbourne.2 The 8th Duke of Devonshire, Spencer Compton Cavendish, was an aristocrat and statesman who had entered parliament in 1857 and had at one time been leader of the Liberal Party. His family was one of the wealthiest and most powerful in Britain, its ancestral base being Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, one of Britain’s most impressive stately homes.

  Duke of Devonshire’s Orchestra (Woodward is to the immediate lower right of the conductor).

  No one is sure why the Cavendish family took the title Devonshire. Some suggest it was a misreading of Derbyshire made back in the sixteenth century. They went on to acquire land in other parts of the country, most notably in Eastbourne, where the Cavendishes and another family carved up the territory between them. The railway arrived in 1849 and ten years later the 7th Duke of Devonshire planned a new-look town that would be “built by gentlemen for gentlemen.” By 1891 the town’s population had gone from four thousand to thirty-five thousand and it had become a resort with a promenade, hotels, and a one-thousand-foot-long pier crowned with a four-hundred-seater pavilion.

  Eastbourne attracted a distinguished and prosperous clientele who were able to spend much of their time in leisure pursuits. It was imperative for them to let everyone know that they were “in residence” and the Eastbourne and Sussex Society and Fashionable Visitor’s List announced their comings and goings. Typical of the paper’s entries was the news that “the Duchess of Norfolk has been in very delicate health” and that “Lord Wimbourne’s condition has undergone no appreciable change.” The following advice was given for those contemplating driving in a newfangled motor car: “To make winter driving really enjoyable great care must be bestowed upon the choice of proper garment, for if one gets cold whilst driving, especially in ones hands or feet, all enjoyment is gone at once.”

  The Duke of Devonshire took a particular pride in Eastbou
rne and was careful that no other British resort would outclass it. He was alarmed that nearby Bournemouth, which had its own symphony orchestra, might outstrip it. For this reason the 8th Duke created his own orchestra. With forty-two musicians (fifty-four in the summer) and an average wage bill of £150 a week, it was an expensive project but one that produced the necessary effect. The Eastbourne Chronicle wrote in April 1907 that the Duke’s Orchestra was “an orchestra of such commanding size and proficiency as will serve the double object of making a powerful addition to the list of high class attractions and of assisting to advertise the town.”

  The Duke hired Dutch conductor Pieter Tas at the end of January 1907, so we can assume that the hiring of musicians took place in February and March. The conditions were that they could be required to play in any property owned by the Devonshire Parks & Baths Company, giving up to a maximum of twelve performances per week. They had to provide their own evening dress for the later performances but could have to “wear such uniform or costume as the company shall at its own expense provide.” Woodward was paid £2 15s. 0d. per week and lodged at “Leathorpe” on Upper Avenue with George Stevens, a fifty-five-year-old retired builder, and his wife, Mary.

  Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, as it looks today.

  Winter Garden, Eastbourne, venue of many concerts by the Duke of Devonshire’s Orchestra.

  Most of the orchestra’s concerts were given at the Winter Garden on the edge of Devonshire Park. In April 1908, for example, it gave a symphony concert on a Thursday afternoon, orchestral concerts on Tuesday afternoon and Thursday evening, a grand chamber concert on Friday afternoon, a Sullivan Night on Friday, a popular concert featuring a vocalist on Saturday night, a Grand Concert on Sunday at 8:00 p.m. (for which the audience chose the program), and a concert of songs by Madame Liza Lehmann on Tuesday evening.