The Band That Played On (2 page)

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.)

On the night of April 18, presumably unaware that the
Carpathia
was ahead of schedule, Marconi was at a party. Van Anda sent a messenger to fetch him down to Pier 54 to board the ship with Sammis and
New York Times
reporter Jim Speers. It was now around 11:30 and almost all the passengers had already disembarked. The copy would have to be ready for the printer within an hour if it was to make the first edition on April 19.

When they got to the pier, police stopped them. The reporter, Speers, protested: “Sir, we are Mr. Marconi, his manager, and a
New York Times
reporter.” The officer pushed the Marconi engineer Sammis back, believing him to be the journalist in question, saying, “Mr. Marconi and his manager may pass through. The reporter can’t.” Speers and Marconi boarded, while Sammis had to remain behind the police line. The two men made their way to the wireless room where they found Bride still tapping out messages left for him by passengers. “That’s hardly worth sending now, boy,” said Marconi. Bride, his frostbitten feet still bandaged, looked up slowly and then recognized his distinguished employer.

Bride’s story, which he poured out to Speers in a rambling monologue, was everything Van Anda had hoped it would be. He’d got out of bed on the night of April 14 to relieve the senior operator, Jack Phillips, only to find that the
Titanic
had been in a collision. He watched as Phillips calmly made contact with the
Carpathia
and the
Olympic
and saw Captain Smith’s dawning realization that the ship was beyond salvation.

In a sensational comment, he revealed that a stoker (one of the men who stoked the ship’s furnaces with coal) had come into the
Titanic
’s wireless room to steal Phillips’s life jacket. Bride attacked him. “I did my duty,” he said. “I hope I finished him. I don’t know. We left him on the cabin floor of the wireless room and he was not moving.” It was never clear from this or subsequent interviews whether Bride was claiming to have killed him or merely to have knocked him unconscious and left him to drown.

Phillips died of exposure while in the water. Bride found the last remaining collapsible boat, but when it was pushed overboard, it landed upside down with him underneath it. Bride managed to swim away as sparks poured from one of the
Titanic
’s funnels, and the ship finally disappeared from view. After some time in the water, he was given space on his original boat, which had since been righted.

Bride gave a detailed account of how the ship’s band had carried on playing throughout the sinking. The matter-of-fact way he told the story gave it added poignancy: “From aft came the tunes of the band,” he said. “It was a ragtime tune, I don’t know what. Then there was ‘Autumn.’ Phillips ran aft and that was the last I ever saw of him alive.”

His description of the ship’s final moments suggested that the musicians didn’t even attempt to escape in a lifeboat. “The ship was gradually turning on her nose—just like a duck does that goes down for a dive. I had only one thing on my mind—to get away from the suction. The band was still playing. I guess all of the band went down. They were playing ‘Autumn’ then. I swam with all my might. I suppose I was 150 feet away when the
Titanic
, on her nose, with her after quarter sticking straight up into the air, began to settle—slowly.”

Bride ended by saying that two things about the sinking stood out in his mind above all others. One was that Jack Phillips had continued to send messages even after Captain Smith told him he was free to leave his position and look after his own life. The other was the band that played on. “The way the band kept playing was a noble thing . . . How they ever did it I cannot imagine.”

The twenty-five-hundred-word first-person account appeared in the next day’s
New York Times
along with fifty-two other stories about the ship. The headline was “Thrilling story by
Titanic’s
wireless man.” The subheadings were “Bride tells how he and Phillips worked and how he finished a stoker who tried to steal Phillips’s life belt—Ship sank to tune of ‘Autumn.’ ” The image of the lighted ship sliding under the waves (“She was a beautiful sight then”), while the band carried on regardless, captured the public’s imagination.

Getting to talk to Bride was a journalistic scoop and one that would be associated with Van Anda for the rest of his life. But there was another journalist who’d been one step ahead. Unbeknown to the
New York Times
, Carlos F. Hurd, a thirty-six-year-old reporter from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, owned by Ralph Pulitzer, had been with his wife, Katherine, on the
Carpathia
as a paying passenger headed for the Mediterranean when it had diverted to pick up the
Titanic
survivors.

Hurd found himself in the sad but privileged position of being a writer surrounded by eyewitnesses of one of the biggest peacetime tragedies in living memory and having plenty of time to amass an oral record. He began to speak to those who’d been rescued and found that there was no need to coax information from them. Happy to have been saved, they “found a certain relief in speech.” He took notes and employed Katherine as his assistant. The
Carpathia
’s crew members, who’d been instructed by Captain Rostron to keep him away from the
Titanic
passengers, impeded his job. The crew refused him supplies of paper, banned him from contacting America by wireless, and had his cabin routinely searched for notes and transcripts. He was forced to write on anything available, including toilet paper, and to keep his material with him at all times.

Messages sent to him care of the ship’s wireless room were not passed on, so he was out of contact with his editors. Despite that, he knew the New York staff would find a way to get to the
Carpathia
so that he could pass on to them this huge story. One of the telegrams that didn’t reach him was sent on April 18 by Ralph Pulitzer: “Chapin is on tug Dazelline. Will meet Carpathia between New York and Fire Island Thursday. Been [
sic
] on lookout and deliver to Chapman [
sic
] tug your full report of wreck with all interviews obtainable.” Charles Chapin was the editor of the Pulitzer-owned
New York Evening World
and Hurd had already anticipated what Chapin would want and had packaged his manuscript in a white waterproof bag, attached it to a cigar box, and added champagne corks on lengths of string, ready to toss it overboard. It was an unusual way of delivering copy, but these were unusual times.