The Band That Played On (9 page)

This all helped make music a viable profession. There was an increasing demand for players, teachers, conductors, and directors. A good versatile musician could move from opera house to tearoom and from concert hall to bandstand. Many of the great classical composers—including Mahler, Delius, Elgar, Ravel, Holst, and Debussy—were still writing, their latest works being premiered around the country and appreciated by the same people who liked Gilbert and Sullivan or the latest hits from the music hall.

It must have been while working at Collinson’s that Hartley met Maria Robinson, a tall dark-haired girl who lived with her family twelve miles away in Boston Spa. She was the eldest of four children, her father, Benjamin, being a woollen manufacturer in the Leeds suburb of Wortley. He’d become prosperous enough to buy St. Ives, a huge detached villa in Boston Spa that had once been an inn. Hartley became a regular visitor and he and Maria, along with her sister Margaret and Margaret’s boyfriend John Wood, would go for long walks in the surrounding countryside or take a rowing boat out on the River Wharfe.

By the time of his thirtieth birthday in 1908, Hartley didn’t yet feel ready to settle down with his twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend. There was a world to see, more money to save, and more musical avenues to explore. His parents moved to Dewsbury, where the Refuge Assurance Company had relocated Albion, and the traveling distance between Wallace and Maria doubled. He was also now touring with opera companies, first with the Carla Rosa Opera Company and then the Moody-Manners Company. Although Dewsbury was now home, he was rarely ever there.

It’s not known why, but in 1909 Hartley decided to go to sea. Charles Black, who had just started booking for Cunard, could have spotted him, or maybe a musician he met in the opera companies had suggested it. It’s not hard to see the appeal. He not only would have consistent and varied work, but also would get to see places that few of his British contemporaries could ever hope to see.

This was an age of emigration to America and yet there were few young people who traveled there with a return ticket other than the wealthy or employees of shipping lines. Many of his contemporaries in Colne, Dewsbury, or Leeds wouldn’t have traveled more than a few miles from their birthplaces. America was a country they only read about in newspapers and books and most of them would have never met an American.

Hartley’s first ship was the 12,950-ton
Lucania
, a Cunard liner that had once held the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic. He boarded her in Liverpool bound for New York on June 6, 1909, and arrived back on July 3. It was to be a short-lived association because on returning the
Lucania
, which had been in service since 1893, was taken into dry dock for repair and there it caught fire. It was then sold for scrap. Hartley was transferred to another Cunard liner, the great
Lusitania
.

Life on board the
Lusitania
was unlike anything he had experienced before. When he boarded her on July 16, 1909, for a nineteen-day round trip to New York, she was, along with the
Mauretania
, the last word in luxury travel. It was said that the second-class accommodation was equivalent to first class in any other ship and that first class was comparable to the glory of King Solomon’s palace.

The first-class dining saloon, where Hartley played, was spread over two stories, the centerpiece of which was an open circular well capped with an elaborate dome that must have reminded him of the glass roof of Collinson’s Café. The style was sixteenth-century French. One of Cunard’s innovations was to have the band playing on the balcony while passengers were eating, as well as on the saloon floor later in the evening when tables and chairs were removed to allow passengers to dance. The
New York Times
found the idea of music at mealtimes so amusing that it published a cartoon portraying the musicians trying to play during a storm while plates, glasses, cutlery, and bottles of wine flew off the nearby tables.

When Hartley joined the
Lusitania
, the Blue Riband for the fastest westbound crossing of the Atlantic was held by its sister ship the
Mauretania
, but on its fifty-ninth westbound crossing, the
Lusitania
beat this record by arriving in New York four days, eleven hours, and forty-two minutes after leaving Liverpool. The passengers were drawn into the spirit of competition, counting the miles covered each day and calculating the ship’s chances of entering the history books. During a concert mounted on the last evening at sea, a resolution was announced congratulating the captain, the chief engineer, and the ship’s crew for the speed of the journey and the privilege of crossing “in the steamship when it breaks the transatlantic record between Europe and the United States.”

It must have been a heady time for Hartley and the band, knowing that they’d been a part of a record-breaking trip, but the victory was to be short-lived. Only a week later the
Mauretania
won the Riband back after clipping just seven minutes off the
Lusitania
’s time. The
Lusitania
would never regain it. This meant that the
Mauretania
was regarded as the supreme ocean liner. In October 1910 the Black brothers approached Hartley with an offer to work on the
Mauretania
, not just as a member of the band, but as its leader. On October 28 Hartley signed the deal and the next day was on board sailing for New York yet again.

He brought with him three members of the
Lusitania
band—Pat O’Day, Henry Taylor, and Albert Felgate—and sailed to New York the next day. It was to be the first of twenty-six round trips he would make on the
Mauretania
between England and America. With the addition of Fred Stent, the five-piece band would remain unchanged until May 1911 when Clarence Kershaw replaced O’Day and Ellwand Moody of Leeds replaced Taylor. Then, in November 1911, Ernest Drakeford took over from Kershaw.

Moody later described the band on the
Mauretania
as a very happy group. So why did Hartley leave? Some contemporary newspaper accounts suggested that Charlie Black approached him with the offer to become bandleader on the
Titanic
when he arrived back in Liverpool on the
Mauretania
on April 8, 1912, with the
Titanic
about to leave from Southampton on April 10. Hartley’s letter of that day to his parents (“I’ve missed coming home very much & it would have been nice to have seen you all if only for an hour or two, but I couldn’t manage it . . .”) implies a hurried change of plan, but it’s implausible that the Blacks would leave such an important appointment to the last minute.

By 1912 he had become engaged to Maria and a wedding was planned for the summer. Since going to sea their meetings had been snatched between trips. Sometimes she would visit him in Liverpool and at other times they would meet at the Hartley family home in Dewsbury and go to a Sunday service at St. Mark’s Church in Halifax Road. His intention was to give up the sea and return to concert work.

The evidence is that Hartley had been offered the
Titanic
job long before April 1912. Ellwand Moody later told the
Leeds Mercury
that he spoke about it while on the
Mauretania
and tried to persuade Moody to join him. Moody’s twelve-month contract expired on April 9, 1912, but he was determined to stay on land. “I should not have gone on any other boat in any case,” he said, “but I didn’t fancy the
Titanic
at all. The
Mauretania
was plenty big enough for me.”

Moody was one of a handful of musicians who later claimed to have turned down the
Titanic
’s maiden voyage. Another was Seth Lancaster, a cellist from Colne, who said that he’d been approached as far back as December 1911. It wasn’t until early April 1912 that he was told he wasn’t needed. If this story is true, the Black brothers had been planning and sounding people out for at least four months. The trip that Lancaster was given in its place was on the
Mauretania
, in the band that Ellwand Moody and Hartley had just left. The ship sailed from Liverpool on April 13, three days behind the
Titanic
.

Violinist Ernest Drakeford rejected the
Titanic
offer because he’d recently settled in Liverpool and didn’t want to move to Southampton. He was married and his wife, Priscilla, was expecting their first child. Ironically he went on to join the band of the
Lusitania
, which was sunk by a German U-boat in May 1915. He was only saved after clinging to a wooden barrel for two hours.

For Hartley’s final journey on the
Mauretania
he had taken on two extra musicians while in New York—Frenchman Roger Bricoux and Londoner William Theodore Brailey. They’d arrived together in America after a two-month Mediterranean cruise on the
Carpathia
. The Blacks had definitely chosen them by mid-March because on March 17 Bricoux wrote to his parents to say: “As for sending letters, I can no longer do this because we are going to New York where I will board the
Mauretania
, the biggest ship in the world at 32,000 tonnes, and once we have arrived in Liverpool I leave for Southampton where I will board the
Titanic
which will be launched on April 10th and will be the biggest ship in the world at 50,000 tonnes.”

Bricoux was a very conscientious correspondent and therefore it’s reasonable to assume that the transfer news from C. W. & F. N. Black was recent. The Blacks clearly wanted him and Brailey badly enough to get them back to England as soon as they’d arrived in New York. A scribbled note in the margin of the ship’s register indicated the speed of the transfer. Against the names of Brailey and Bricoux is the remark: “Owing to being transferred to
Mauretania
on the point of sailing, this seaman was unable to appear before consul.”

Had Hartley requested them or were they chosen by the Blacks? There’s no evidence that Hartley had ever played with them. Roger Bricoux had been part of the orchestra at the Grand Central Hotel in Leeds from the spring of 1910 to early June 1911, but this was at a time when Hartley was regularly crossing the Atlantic. He wouldn’t have had time to play with the orchestra, but Charlie Black, who was the hotel’s music agent, could have recommended that he check him out. It’s less likely that he had met Theo Brailey. By the end of the month the names of these three musicians returning on the
Mauretania
would be inextricably tied together.

4
“I W
ILL
W
RITE TO
Y
OU
ON
B
OARD THE
T
ITANIC.
”

A
t twenty years of age, Roger Bricoux was the youngest of the
Titanic’
s musicians, yet he’d also had the most thorough formal training. The son of a talented horn player, he had studied music in conservatories in Italy and France (1906– 1910) before joining an English orchestra as a cellist. The
Leeds Mercury
remembered him as “a very handsome young fellow, although his gait was somewhat marred by a limp, the result of an injury due to a motor bicycle accident. When he first came to Leeds he could speak scarcely a word of English, but he quickly picked up the language.”

Roger Bricoux.

He was chosen for the
Titanic
voyage to be part of the trio in the Café Parisien, adding an authenticity to the Continental ambience. It would be his third voyage on a ship and it was something he was looking forward to. When he was on board the
Carpathia
, he told a steward named Robert Vaughan: “Soon I’ll be on a real steamer—with real food!” To his parents he wrote excitedly about the prospect of Turkish baths, bicycles that could be used on deck, a gymnasium, and a one-hundred-meter swimming pool.

Bricoux was born Roger Marie Leon Joseph Bricoux on June 1, 1891, 168 miles south of Paris in the Burgundy (Bourgogne) town of Cosne-sur-Loire. This was the home region of his mother, Marie-Rose, and the place where she had met his father, Leon, during his service in the army with the 85th Infantry Regiment, but it wasn’t where the couple were currently living. The house on la rue de Donzy most likely belonged to Marie-Rose’s parents, because after marrying in 1883, Leon had taken a job playing first horn in the resident band at the famed Casino de Monte Carlo and Monaco had become their principal home.

In the 1850s Monaco’s ruling Grimaldi family was on the verge of bankruptcy, but the arrival of the first casino and the development of the seafront transformed the fortunes of both the Grimaldis and Monaco. It rapidly became the stylish place to go, attracting the affluent, foreign royalty, writers, artists, actors, dancers, and musicians. The landmark Casino with its commanding pinnacles and cupola in the Beaux Arts style was designed by Charles Garnier, architect of the Paris Opera, and opened in January 1879 with a performance by the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who read a poem and waved a palm branch.

Because Monte Carlo attracted some of the most urbane people in the world, it found itself in the advance of many new developments. Car races were organized between Marseilles and Monte Carlo; movie competitions were held starting in 1897; the Palais des Beaux Arts presented lectures on exciting new scientific discoveries, such as the X-ray; renowned architects and designers such as Gabriel Ferrier and Gustave Eiffel worked on new hotels; and the streets of the principality were the first to be covered in tar.