by Steve Turner
John Wesley, the great British preacher, visited Colne several times in the latter half of the eighteenth century and knew of its tough and violent reputation. Although still a minister of the Church of England, Wesley believed in evangelizing in the open air and he relentlessly traveled across Britain on horseback, preaching the gospel to those who would never enter a place of worship. His approach outraged traditional churchmen who believed it degraded preaching and removed the mystery and splendor from religion. George White, the vicar of Colne, was a vociferous opponent of Wesley and would organize drunken mobs to attack him when he visited the area. One of Wesley’s helpers was even thrown to his death off a bridge.
Wesley never left the Church of England, but his followers did. The breakaway denomination became known as Methodism and had a particular appeal to ordinary working people who found the established church out of touch with their needs—too much a church for the well-off and powerful. When Methodism gripped a community it had observable social effects because Wesley taught that followers of Christ should be thrifty, charitable, sober, honest, and concerned with developing their minds and bodies as well as their souls. The result was an increase in schools, music groups, orchestras, and benevolent societies, and a decrease in wasteful drunkenness, violence, poverty, and ignorance. Methodists believed not only in personal salvation but also in holiness, self-improvement, and charity. Communities became more law abiding and better educated. Husbands became more responsible. Workers became more eager to learn.
In this way the Colne that had once spurned Wesley became a beneficiary of his ministry. The first Methodist chapel was built in 1722 and by the time Wallace was born in 1878, there were eight chapels catering to different areas of the town and different stripes of Methodism (Free, Primitive, Independent, and Wesleyan). All of the buildings were funded by donations from benefactors (as Methodists improved their lives some became leaders in industry) and public subscriptions. Then the chapels built schools in the same way and the schools used their premises to found Reading Associations and Friendly Sick Societies, (groups who helped financially when someone was out of work due to ill health). Methodism affected Colne life at every level and produced many citizens who were the first in their families to make the transition from laboring to clerical work and eventually to management.
The remains of Bethel Chapel. The main building was on the right.
Albion Hartley was a prominent member of the Bethel Independent Methodist Chapel on Burnley Road. Since it was built in 1871 he had been its choirmaster and was also the superintendent of the Sunday school. When Wallace Hartley was born on Sunday, June 2, 1878, at the family home, 92 Greenfield Hill, the visiting doctor joked with Albion that he’d give him five shillings for the collection plate if the chapel choir would sing “Unto Us a Child Is Given” at the Sunday school anniversary later that day. Unbeknown to the doctor, the song was already in the repertoire and Albion replied: “Let me have your five shillings. We have been rehearsing it and will sing it today!” That day the collection reached £100 for the first time.
Birthplace of Wallace Hartley at 92 Greenfield Road, Colne.
Wallace was the second Hartley child but the first son. His older sister, Mary, had been born the year before and Elizabeth and Hilda would soon expand the family to five, but two more sons born to Elizabeth wouldn’t make it to their second birthdays. Hartley was seven when Ughtred Harold Hartley died and nine when Conrad Robert Hartley suffered the same fate. Both children were buried in Colne Cemetery.
In 1885 the mill where Albion worked burned down and many of the workers lost their jobs. Albion took the opportunity not just to get a new job but also to move and start a new career. At the age of thirty-four he left the cotton industry, became an insurance agent in the nearby town of Nelson, and moved the family from Greenfield Hill, which was an isolated row of cottages on the outskirts of the town, to a larger property at 1 Burnley Road, close to Bethel Chapel and not far from Wallace’s school.
Hartley had begun his education at George Street Wesleyan School. The building had been built as a Methodist Sunday school in 1869 but eighteen months later had become a day school capable of accommodating more than six hundred children. Emphasis was put on teaching the children to read, write, and do basic math.
The former George Street Wesleyan School, Colne, where Hartley was educated.
Musically Hartley learned from his father, who had him join the choir at the Bethel Chapel, and from one of the congregation, Pickles Riley, who taught him violin. One of his school friends, Thomas Hyde, recalled music lessons at school around 1890. “We all started learning music and the violin together in the bottom classroom at George Street,” he remembered. “There would be about 20 of us and we were all about eleven or twelve years old. I don’t remember that Wallace was any different from any of us in his violin playing but he seemed to come on remarkably afterwards.” Writing to the Huddersfield Examiner in 1958, the old headmaster’s son, J. M. Baldwin, had a slightly different recollection of Hartley’s reputation from the same period. “He was one of my heroes,” he said, “for I knew from the talk of my elders that he was already a musician of repute, but more definitely because he possessed a bicycle, one of the earliest ‘safeties’ to be seen in Colne.”
Just as his schooling came to an end, his father was promoted to assistant superintendent at the Refuge Assurance Company in Colne. Possibly because of the increased wage, he moved to 90 Albert Road, a terraced house close to the railway station and on Colne’s main street. Albion wasn’t keen for his Wallace to become a professional musician. He wanted him to pursue something more secure. An obedient son, Wallace took his first job as a clerk at the Craven Bank that stood on a corner five minutes up the road from the Hartley home.
Wallace Hartley at eighteen, with his music teacher Pickles Riley, after receiving an award at a Methodist music festival.
90 Albert Road, Colne. Hartley’s early teenage home.
Hartley didn’t like office work. He said he found it “irksome.” His joy in life was to be playing music and he sought every opportunity to do so. He accompanied his sister Mary on the violin when she sang at local concerts. And when the manager of the bank, James Lascelles Wildman, who was a Methodist circuit preacher and the son of a Sunday school superintendent, formed the Colne Orchestral Society, he joined.
It’s not easy to build up a picture of Hartley’s character at this time because all the comments made by those who knew him were collected after he’d become a national hero. Albion thought he was “an ideal son” who “never caused his father or mother a single moment’s trouble.” A Methodist preacher, Thomas Worthington, confirmed that he was a “strong Christian”; Thomas Hyde found him “smart looking,” “fun,” and a “very nice lad”; an anonymous friend described him as “a noble manly fellow, incapable of anything mean.” The only note of discord came when Hyde added that he was “a bit what you might call ‘roughish,’ ” a description that seems at odds with all the talk of delicate fingers, artistic sensitivity, and filial obedience.
Plaque on the Albert Road house in Colne.
The former bank building where Hartley worked in Colne.
Hartley left Colne with his family in 1895 when he was seventeen. Albion’s career was still progressing and he would soon become a superintendent. They moved over the border to Yorkshire and a home at 35 Somerset Street in Huddersfield. It’s unclear where Hartley worked during his early years in the new county, but we know that he played with the Huddersfield Philharmonic Orchestra and that in the 1901 census he was able to describe his occupation as “professional musician.” Two years later he was first violinist with the Municipal Orchestra of Bridlington, a resort on the Yorkshire coast.
It was in vogue at this time in Britain to employ Austrian and German conductors because of their connection to the lands that produced Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. The Bridlington Orchestra was no different. It had engaged the services of Sigmund Winternitz, a thirty-thre
e-year-old musician from Vienna with a waxed mustache, whose influence on the orchestra was such that it became known as the Royal Viennese Band. The members were kitted out in dark trousers, military-style jackets, and stiff felt hats and were expected to give two daily performances at the bandstand during the week and a concert of sacred music on Sundays. In 1904 they moved indoors to the Floral Pavilion, which could hold seventeen hundred.
In 1905 Hartley’s parents moved to 48 Hillcrest Avenue in Leeds. This is likely to have been when he joined the Municipal Orchestra in Harrogate, which performed at the newly built Kursaal at least twice a day, excluding Sundays, alternating performances with a military band. Leeds became his new base. He apparently joined a local bohemian arts group called the Savage Club that met in an artist’s workshop, and certainly led the orchestra at Collinson’s Café in King Edward Street in the heart of a newly developed shopping area.
Wallace Hartley with the Bridlington Municipal Orchestra aka Royal Viennese Band (front row fourth from left). Orchestra director Sigmund Winternitz stands next to him.
The recording industry was in its infancy in the early 1900s and music was still synonymous with live performance. Children learned to play instruments not with the hope of becoming a “star” but because playing and singing were regarded as social assets. (James McCartney, born in Lancashire in 1902, told future Beatle Paul: “Learn to play the piano, son, and you’ll always get invited to parties.”) It was the age of sheet music and the pianoforte, when families would gather in living rooms to sing the latest popular songs. Collieries, mills, and factories, particularly in the north of England, formed bands and the Victorian emphasis on temperance and clean living resulted in parks, “recreation grounds,” and “pleasure gardens” furnished with often-ornate bandstands.
Teahouses and coffeehouses began as genteel rest spots where people could take light refreshments in a nonalcoholic environment. They were safe alternatives to public houses, and women, in particular, were drawn to them. During the first decade of the century, they began to offer afternoon “tea dances” and fashionable restaurants introduced dance floors. Prestigious hotels such as the Ritz and Savoy in London already had their own orchestras that would play during afternoon tea and evening drinks.
Collinson’s Café, Leeds, now a Jigsaw fashion store but with many origianl features retained.
Roof at the site of Collinson’s Café, Leeds, where Hartley played in the orchestra.
Collinson’s Café was a stylish property that opened in 1903 and would become a Leeds institution. A long narrow entrance area opened up into a large semicircle where the orchestra would have played. Above them was a balcony and above the balcony a tall glass dome. Staircases swept upward from the ground-floor level and all the windows were leaded with stained glass designs. The streaming light, colored glass, and music combined to produce an atmosphere of elegance and beauty.
Towns and cities considered their musical calendars to be indicators of sophistication, and seaside resorts used music to pull in visitors. Visitors might choose Eastbourne over Bournemouth or Southport over Blackpool simply because of the quality of music available in the hotels, bandstands, pavilions, and concert halls. Local councils would subsidize orchestras because of the value they added to their towns.
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 cli
pping 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.”
