The Band That Played On (28 page)

Hartley’s grave at Colne.

Twelve bearers took the coffin from the cemetery gates down the grassy hill to its final resting place in the family vault. Thomas Worthington spoke the last rites, the Bethel Choir sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee” to the accompaniment of a local village band, and as the remains of Wallace Hartley were lowered into the grave, a group of scout buglers played “The Last Post.” Later the words “Nearer My God to Thee, Nearer to Thee” would be added to the gravestone, along with the opening bars of Sullivan’s tune “Propior Deo.”

There were already plans to establish a memorial for Hartley in Colne’s main street and there was similar talk in Eastbourne and Headington about doing something for Wes Woodward and in Dumfries for Jock Hume. In London, New York, Liverpool, Boston, and Southampton there were those who wanted to remember the entire band with a plaque, tablet, or statue.

Memorial to Wallace Hartley in Colne, Lancashire.

None of the other musicians would have a send-off to match Hartley’s. For the families of Theo Brailey, Georges Krins, Roger Bricoux, Wes Woodward, and Percy Taylor, there was the agony of never knowing what happened to the bodies of their loved ones. Had they been killed instantly because of the ship’s suction dragging them down or had they frozen to death after time in the water pleading for help? Had they been on the deck when the ship went down or had they been trapped beneath as the machinery tore through the ship’s innards and the lights finally went out? Were their bodies lost, or picked up but never identified?

Leon Bricoux had obviously pondered these questions and had written to Charlie Black to try to elicit more information. On May 1, Black wrote back:

In response to your letter I have the sad task of letting you know that the body of your son has not been found. If it was to be found the White Star Company has told me that it would be necessary for you to deposit 500 francs with them for the expense of having it embalmed in New York. The company has agreed to transport the body from New York to Southampton or Liverpool. In this case you would have to go to one of these two towns and transport it to France at your own expense . . . In the event that the body was found and buried in New York the company will arrange to give a separate burial space and a stone cross to each one.

Enclosed was a postal order for nineteen shillings, presumably Roger Bricoux’s wages for the five days he served on the
Titanic
.

There had been a memorial service for Jock Hume led by the Reverend James Strachan, who had known him since childhood. Strachan noticeably didn’t praise Jock for his strong Christian faith as Thomas Worthington had praised Wallace Hartley. Reading between the lines it would appear that Strachan was unsure whether Hume had continued in the faith and was unwilling to make false claims. In an interview at the time, he’d rather pointedly said he’d known Jock intimately for “fifteen of his twenty years,” implying a break with the church after Hume left for the sea. In his sermon he made no claims about Christian faith in action nor did he offer any promises about heaven. Instead he concentrated on Hume’s cheerfulness and the grief of those left behind.

“We are here to drop a tear on the watery grave of one who for years sat within these walls as a member of the Sabbath school and as a member of our Band of Hope,” he said.

We knew him as a child, a boy, and a youth. His presence, up to the time of his leaving for the sea, was a familiar one here. We see him again with the violin rendering assistance in the conduct of the service of prayer in the sanctuary. We see on his lips and in his eyes the smile which was a striking characteristic of his familiar countenance. Through our teardimmed eyes we see him as he leads his bandsmen [
sic
] in the last of their and the vessels life, in the sweet holy strains of the music of the well known hymn “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”
²
Thus he dies. We weep for him. We weep for his friends.

The minister at St. Antholin’s Church in Peckham, where Percy Taylor had been a chorister and where his brother Frederick was still the organist, spoke about the tragedy. He said that Percy had been “one of that greathearted company of musicians which played ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ in those awful moments of direst need, as the company went down, in their council, into the profundity of the immutable sea.”

In the May 11 edition of
Light
, the journal of the College of Psychic Studies, someone by the name of Mr. H. Blackwell claimed to have been at a séance in London on April 24 where both W. T. Stead and Theo Brailey made appearances. Blackwell said he wrote down word for word what was said:

I am Brailey. I am so happy to be with you. I thank God that I knew something of this [referring to what Stead had just communicated]. Dear Mr Stead was speaking on the subject frequently on board to numbers of people. He went to bed very late. It was at his suggestion that we played “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” some moments before the boat went down. We had no suffering, only cold for a few moments. My father did not wish me to go on this voyage, but I thought it would be a good thing. I must go now. God bless you. Please let Father know.

The Brailey family’s friend Clifford Buttle went one further. He had a visitation. On June 19, 1912, he was at his boot mender’s shop in East London, when be began to feel an extreme chilliness, despite the weather being hot. Fearing the onset of flu, he left his assistant in charge of the shop and went home to lie on his bed. He then felt the room fill with mist and heard the sound of dripping water. “I was lying on my right side, and I saw the mist part like the halves of a curtain,” he told
Psychic News
.

Then, distinctly, I saw young William Brailey standing before me, water apparently cascading from his clothing to the floor.

William Brailey held forth a crucifix, and I saw that it was beautifully made in nickel and ebony. According to my judgment it was about six inches long. Young Brailey spoke quite distinctly. He said to me, “Send it to Dad.” This he repeated three times as if to impress me that the matter was most urgent. Then, still holding the crucifix out towards me, he . . . retreated into the mist and vanished from my sight. A cool breeze came into the room and dispersed the mist. Gradually the icy chill left my limbs. I arose from my bed. I was alone.

He reurned to his shop, he said, and once inside noticed a sickly man looking through the window. The man came into the shop and tried to sell Buttle something. It was a nickel crucifix, but Buttle’s mind was so distracted that he didn’t make the connection and sent the man away. When he came to and realized the crucifix was a replica of the one he’d seen the apparation hold out to him, he sent his assistant to find the man and buy it from him.

It was soon in my possession. It was a perfect twin to the one the young musician had brought to my bedside. The same night I wrote a record of this, my experience, and sent it, with the crucifix, by registered post to Mr. and Mrs. Brailey. Some time after my amazing experience I called on Mr. Ronald Brailey to ask him to explain the enigma of the crucifix. He told me that William, at the time of the
Titanic
disaster, was engaged to a young woman who was a Catholic. William Brailey was not a Catholic, so in all probability the crucifix was brought to convince his fiancée of his life after death.

Thousands of Sunday church services were turned into memorials for the
Titanic
victims and the story of the band was used as an illustration of the Christian quality of self-sacrifice, as well as an example of the hope of immortality in the face of death. At the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, Bishop Greer preached a sermon that dwelt on the musicians.

From those who have gone not to return a message has come, which throughout the world has already been voiced, and I can but repeat it. It is the message of a courage, of a heroism, of a sacrificial bravery of the finest and highest type, not the courage of the soldier on the field who is facing physical danger or facing physical death, and to whom such courage has come through the discipline of war, but a courage greater than that—the courage of those facing death, the courage of those who were feeling then the anguish of separation from all that made their lives of earth dear and precious to them, who saw that precious freight lowered into the boats, drifting and floating from them, beyond their reach and call.

Where on all the famous battlefields of history do we find a finer and greater courage than that? And if what is reported be true, how fitting were then music strains which floated then about them! For were they not at that moment, while standing bravely on that sacrificial duty, standing nearer to God! Shall not their example teach this twofold lesson to us, that in spite of all their lacks and all the limitations, the men of this generation and the women are not lacking in courage, and that they do not need the training, the discipline, the experience of war to teach it or to give it?

Dr. Ernest Stires, preaching at St. Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue, and with at least one
Titanic
survivor in the congregation, said: “The disaster has made of the whole human race a sorrowing family. The band played ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ on its knees, sinking down into the depths. Today I hear from them the heights, for they died a death worth dying, to teach us how to live a life worth living.”

This sort of talk was too much for the novelist Joseph Conrad, who believed that newspapers had framed the whole disaster in sentimental terms that had then been adopted by public and clergy alike. He didn’t think there was anything “heroic” about dying involuntarily because of the greed and incompetence of others. He also didn’t think that the decency of many of those drowned was anything special. It’s what he would have expected of any group from any section of society when confronted with peril.

His words about the band sounded one of the few dissenting notes in the coverage of their actions.

I, who am not a sentimentalist, think it would have been finer if the band of the
Titanic
had been quietly saved, instead of being drowned while playing— whatever tune they were playing, poor devils. I would rather that they had been saved to support their families than to see their families supported by the magnificent generosity of the subscribers. I am not consoled by the false, written-up, Drury Lane aspects of that event, which is neither drama, nor melodrama, nor tragedy, but the exposure of arrogant folly. There is nothing more heroic in dying very much against your will, off a holed, helpless, big tank in which you bought your passage, than in dying of colic caused by the imperfect salmon in the tin you bought from your grocer. And that’s the truth. The unsentimental truth stripped of the romantic garment the press has wrapped around this most unnecessary disaster.

The other notable dissenter was playwright George Bernard Shaw, who wittily and acerbically expressed his view that the whole
Titanic
story had been created in the press to fit a rigid formula, which he called “an explosion of outrageous romantic lying.” The band playing on deck was, according to Shaw, part of the preordained story. He didn’t deny that it happened but offered a different interpretation of events. Possibly, he suggested, the music produced complacency rather than courage and therefore was in part responsible for the high death toll. What he referred to as “the romantic demand” was that “Everybody must face death without a tremor, and the band, according to the Birkenhead precedent,
³
must play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’”

It was duly proclaimed that it fell out exactly thus. Actual evidence: the Captain and officers were so afraid of a panic, that, although they knew the ship was sinking, they did not dare to tell the passengers so—especially the third class passengers—and the band played Rag Times to reassure the passengers, who therefore, did not get into the boats and did not realize their situation until all the boats were gone and the ship was standing on her head before plunging to the bottom.

The public was largely unswayed by this suggestion of manipulation by the press and there was massive sympathy for the victims and respect for the musicians. Several music concerts raised money for the families of the bandsmen. Two orchestras performed for Fred Clarke on May 20 at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall “in aid of the bereaved family, which depended in a large measure upon the financial results of Mr Clarke’s art.” The
Birkenhead News
commented: “If any glory at all attaches to the awful tragedy of the sea about which the world is still talking, it circles round the heads of these heroic bandsmen who played the mighty vessel to its doom. Materialists may scoff, as Mr Bernard Shaw has done this week, but there was something in the last scene, a pitiful grandeur, that makes all mankind kin, and defies hard reasoning.”

In New York, Sara Regneas, wife of the American musician Joseph Regneas, organized a fund-raising musical soirée at her home on the Upper East Side that raised $1,000, and pupils of the Music School Settlement on East Third Street performed a concert that raised $800 for the families. By far the biggest memorial concert was on May 24 at London’s Royal Albert Hall, where the largest orchestra ever assembled—five hundred musicians—played an afternoon concert for an audience of ten thousand. Thomas Beecham, Sir Henry Wood, and Sir Edward Elgar were among the guest conductors.