The Band That Played On (12 page)

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 came 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.

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?