The Band That Played On (20 page)

Jock Hume had arrived back in Liverpool on the
Carmania
the same day that the
Titanic
was undergoing its sea trials. Although he must have been desperate to get back to Dumfries to see his family and his expectant girlfriend, Mary, we know he stayed around in Liverpool for at least two days, because on Thursday, April 4, he paid a visit to the naval outfitter J. J. Rayner at their shop on Lord Street to collect his bandsman’s uniform. Actually, according to the receipt, it wasn’t so much a new uniform as whatever he had been wearing but cleaned up, mended, pressed, and with White Star buttons and a new collar sewn on. The uniforms recovered after the sinking were described as having “green facing,” which most likely referred to the collar, and Hume’s receipt refers to his “tunic” having a “new collar” (cost: two shillings and sixpence). He was also charged two shillings for a small lyre, the White Star emblem, to be worn on the lapel. It’s likely that he had handed in his uniform for alteration the day before, which would explain why he hadn’t been able to proceed to Dumfries immediately.

Fred Clarke played his last concert with the Vasco Akeroyd Symphony Orchestra at the Philharmonic Hall on February 27. On the night of April 6, knowing that he was about to leave Liverpool, he took the ferry over to Birkenhead to meet up with some of his old colleagues still working at the Argyle Theatre. He struck his friends as being a little “morose.” They couldn’t tell whether he was feeling ill or whether he was just apprehensive about his first sea voyage. Rather than about the excitement of the journey, his talk was more about his hopes of making good tips from what would be a very rich collection of travelers. Maybe inspired by being back at the Argyle, he spoke of his desire to get back into the theater. “You know, it would be just my luck to go down with the ship,” he apparently said to his drinking companions. “I’ve kept away from it so long it might finish me on this trip.”

He went to the second performance of that Saturday night, which was a typical variety show of the period headlined by magician Gus Fowler (“the latest London novelty”) and comic singer Cissie Curlette and included some moving film images by Brooke and Brown’s Royal Bioscope. Fowler’s act was based around watches and clocks, which he could seemingly make appear and disappear at will, ending with the sound of thirty bells coming from his hat. Cissie Curlette, a British singer who’d made her American debut in 1910, was, according to the
New York Dramatic Mirror
, “a talented and quite good-looking English singer [with] songs which relied for their success solely upon the double entendre of their lyrics and theme, rather than any tunefulness or brightness of lines.” Among her songs were “Toodle-I-Oddle-I-Oo,” “Yea Verily Yea,” “I’d Rather Lather Father,” and “What You’ve Never Had You Never Miss.”

He probably stayed at Birkenhead overnight because the newspaper reports claimed that he left for Southampton on the Sunday morning train from Birkenhead’s Woodside station, next to the ferry terminal, “in company with other of the vessel’s staff.” There were only three other Birkenhead residents working on the
Titanic
—stewardess Sarah Stap, engineer J. C. Evans, and assistant storekeeper Charles Morgan. There were twenty-five crew members from Liverpool, but there would be no reason for them to travel from Birkenhead when they could go via Birmingham from Liverpool’s Lime Street station.

The trains from Woodside station could have taken him directly to London Paddington, from where he could have made his way south to Waterloo station and the boat train (a boat designed to take passengers from land to a boat) to Southampton. Or he could have changed trains in Birmingham in order to avoid coming through London.

With the miners’ strike at an end by April 6, it was reckoned that the coal mines would be working as normal by Wednesday but there would still be a three-week wait for coal. This would affect the
Titanic
in two ways. First, it meant that crew would be easy to pick up because the strike had left more than seventeen thousand men unemployed in Southampton. Second, it meant that coal for the
Titanic
had to be taken from other ships, including the
Oceanic
and the
Majestic
, to make sure it had enough on board. This, in turn, caused delays and cancelations, which resulted in passengers from those ships being transferred to the
Titanic
.

The next day, April 8, the
Mauretania
arrived in Liverpool, bringing with it Wallace Hartley, Theo Brailey, and Roger Bricoux. The front page of the
Daily Mirror
was dominated by the image of a Norwegian ship that had run aground on some rocks on the coast of Cornwall during heavy fog. The paper noted that it was “the twentieth vessel to be wrecked off the Cornish coast this winter.” In the sea near Eastbourne, divers were still exploring the submerged wreck of the P & O liner
Oceana
, where they had already salvaged eight boxes of gold and fifteen ingots of silver after locating the keys to the strong room in the left-hand drawer of the captain’s desk.

As the
Mauretania
didn’t dock until late in the day, the three musicians may well have stayed on board the ship for the night and then made their way into the city the next morning. They would each have needed to sort out their uniforms and make a visit to the offices of Charlie and Frederick Black. We know from a letter found on Hartley’s body that he’d planned to rendezvous with a musician friend named Bill, near a violin maker’s workshop at 14 Brook’s Alley run by George Byrom, where he had presumably gone to get a fresh supply of strings for his violin.

Letter to Hartley from his friend Bill.

They missed each other and, as Hartley had Bill’s reply dated April 9 on him when he boarded the
Titanic
, we can only assume that Bill must have handed the letter to Charlie Black to ensure Hartley got it before leaving for Southampton. “My Dear Wallace,” Bill wrote, “Am very sorry that I missed you. I waited at the end of Brook’s Alley and got to Byrom’s just after you had left. Jolly good luck, old chap. Would give more than a trifle to be with you. Don’t forget to drop me a line at 61, Lea Road.” The address was in Egremont on the Wirral and was the home of a musical instrument maker named John McLeod; his wife, Eleanor; and their children. It could be that John was known as “Bill” and had done work for Hartley, but it is more likely that Bill was one of the many ship musicians working out of Liverpool (hence “Would give more than a trifle to be with you”) and one who would rendezvous with the McLeod family when on leave.

None of the three musicians had time to achieve all they wanted to before the sailing of the
Titanic
. Theo Brailey would probably have gone to see his fiancée, Teresa, in Southport, because it was not too far away but there wouldn’t have been time to call on his parents in London as well. Roger Bricoux checked into a guesthouse on Globe Street and may have had a rendezvous with Adelaide Kelsall. Hartley had no time to see either his parents or his girlfriend, Maria Robinson. He had to content himself with sending a parcel of washing home to his mother and sending letters of apology to those he felt he should have seen. Maybe one of the musicians read the “Thought for the Day” in the
Daily Mirror
with a wry smile: “It is good to hope for the best. It is good also to prepare for the worst. Both happiness and ill fortune shall be the reward of the man who considers each step before he takes it.”

Finally Hartley, maybe in the company of Bricoux and Brailey, made his way by rail from Liverpool to Birmingham and then from Birmingham directly to Southampton via the Midlands towns of Coventry, Leamington, and Banbury. Seated in a carriage with the smoke of the engine billowing past the window, he wrote a letter to his parents that he was able to pop into a post box on the platform at Reading before the train set off for Basingstoke and Winchester. In London, Georges Krins and Percy Taylor must have made plans to catch the boat train from Waterloo to Southampton Docks, a train that would arrive at 9:30 a.m. on the day of departure. Wes Woodward left from Oxford with his “best cello” and possibly caught the same train that Hartley was already on. Jock Hume, with two expensive rented violins that he planned to try out, took the train down to London from Dumfries.

The
Titanic
continued to fill its holds. Its eventual load would total almost 560 tons of cargo (including 11,524 individual pieces) and 5,800 tons of coal, 4,427 tons of which had to be taken from other ships. By Monday it was time to load the more perishable goods, such as 75,000 pounds of meat, 11,000 pounds of fish, and 7,000 heads of lettuce. Another Board of Trade surveyor, Captain Clark, inspected the ship, as did the captain appointed for the job, Edward Smith, who was photographed on the bridge for the one and only time. Thomas Andrews wrote home to his wife: “The
Titanic
is now about complete and will, I think, do the old Firm credit tomorrow when we sail.”

10
“W
E
H
AVE A
F
INE
B
AND.
”

W
hether or not they had traveled down to Southampton on the boat train that arrived early in the morning of April 10, the musicians would have joined the crowd of second-and third-class passengers streaming toward berths 43/44 of the White Star’s dock, where the majestic
Titanic
lay with its bow pointed at the Solent. They would have boarded by the second-class entrance on C Deck, toward the back of the ship, and taken the elevator or staircase two flights down to E Deck, where there was a designated musicians’ room on the starboard side with three sets of bunk beds, drawers, a wardrobe, a basin, and a separate cabin in which to store their instruments. A second room, again for 5 musicians was on the port side, squeezed between a room for washing potatoes, and accomodation for its workers. It’s likely that the ‘saloon orchestra’ took the better cabin.
¹

While the attention of the world was on the glamour and high living of the top decks, the musicians, along with stewards, nurses, clerks, cooks, waiters, and other second-and third-class passengers were down below, not far from the casings of the ship’s engines, in what the crew jokingly referred to as “the glory hole.” They would have perhaps been on board by 10:00 or 10:30 a.m., preparing for the arrival of the first-class passengers who were traditionally played on to the ship and offered a glass of champagne from a silver tray.

For Jock Hume and Wes Woodward it would have been a reunion after not having seen each other since the
Hawke
had rammed the
Olympic
six months previously. There was time to share their experiences of the Mediterranean—they were in Alexandria, Egypt, within days of each other—and discuss the highs and lows of life on the sister ships the
Carmania
and
Caronia
. They must have both felt a certain sense of
déjà vu
on entering the
Titanic
at Southampton, having gone through exactly the same process on the
Olympic
on her maiden voyage. Even though they’d only yet taken a short walk on this ship, they must have started making comparisons. Stewardess Violet Jessop, who’d also served on the
Olympic
, thought the crew accommodation was a vast improvement and was pleased that architect Thomas Andrews, who had canvassed her and her colleagues about how things could be made better, had implemented many of their suggestions. She thought the
Titanic
was “decidedly grander and improved in every way.”