The Band That Played On

by Steve Turner

  The two sources that did bother to describe the size of the band suggest that all the musicians were present. Within a week of the Carpathia arriving in New York, the Brooklyn Eagle ran a story that acknowledged the existence of a five-man “saloon orchestra” and a three-man “deck band.” The story specifically said that the deck band was “known to have joined Hartley when the call came for music.” As the Brooklyn Eagle had interviewed survivors, it’s reasonable to assume that this is where the information came from. The other source is survivor Elizabeth Nye who, when describing her experience to author Walter Lord in a 1955 letter, said that “the ship’s orchestra of ten young men were standing knees deep in water playing.” She got the number wrong, but it was clearly a guess at eight rather than five. Lord didn’t use her comment when he wrote A Night to Remember.

  It’s possible that Brailey and Taylor could have continued playing on other instruments once they moved away from the upright piano at the top of the staircase. We know, for example, that Hume had two violins with him and that Brailey was a multi-instrumentalist. The fact that the musicians played for the passengers as the lifeboats were lowered can’t seriously be questioned. There were a handful of survivors who claimed not to have heard them, but the evidence for the music is far too substantial to ignore.

  When Frederick Barrett, a twenty-eight-year-old English crew member, was asked at the Titanic inquiry whether he had heard the band playing, he answered: “I had not heard the band; my friends told me they heard it; some of my mates said they heard it. I did not hear it.” Yet he was in lifeboat 13 in the company of Hilda Slater, who heard them playing “lively airs,” and Lawrence Beesley, who heard them playing the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Thomas Oxenham oddly enough recalled men singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” on deck but denied that the musicians were involved. “It was impossible for a band to play,” he said, “because all the instruments were below in the quarters and the hatches were battened down.”

  Why the band came to be playing in these circumstances is a question that will never be satisfactorily answered. Pierre Maréchal, the French aviator, informed the chairman of the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union that they’d been told to do it. He was sure that instructions had come down from Captain Smith, possibly via Purser McElroy, saying that they should play in order to prevent panic. The sound of bright music would have suggested that even if all was not well, at least all was under control. He reasoned that in the captain’s mind, the eventual deaths of eight men were a reasonable sacrifice for the saving of hundreds of passengers.

  If Maréchal had hard evidence, he didn’t mention it. He was certainly a figure influential enough to have spoken to J. Bruce Ismay and Captain Smith as the ship went down. A steward who spoke to the Western Daily Mercury also claimed that orders had come down from the bridge. Even if Smith had made this demand, however, the band was under no obligation to obey him. As had been made very clear from the outset, they were not employees of White Star, they had not signed the ship’s articles, and they had the same rights as any other passenger to expect their safety to be a prime consideration of the crew.

  The other possibility is that the idea came from Hartley and was supported by the bandsmen. By all accounts he was a man of faith, character, and moral strength. At Sunday school and later at church, the importance of sacrifice and putting the needs of others first would have been stressed. We know that he had discussed what he would do in the face of death and so he was more prepared than most.

  He apparently believed that music could be more powerful than physical force in bringing order to chaos. John Carr, the Celtic bandsman previously quoted, had played on ships with Hartley, and in April 1912 told the New York Times: “I don’t suppose he waited to be sent for, but after finding how dangerous the situation was he probably called his men together and began playing. I know that he often said that music was a bigger weapon for stopping disorder than anything on earth. He knew the value of the weapon he had, and I think he proved his point.”

  Why he would have said such a thing is not clear, because preventing disorder would seem to be the last thing on the mind of a bandsman playing in the first-class lounges of transatlantic liners, but his point is valid and has since been supported by research into the psychological and neurological effects of music. It also displays Hartley as someone who took his faith, his position, and his craft seriously. Sarah Stap, who like Violet Jessop, had been a stewardess on the Olympic, didn’t believe that the band had been coerced. At forty-seven years of age, she had vast experience of ships and the ways of captains. She had served on the Baltic, Adriatic, and Celtic and was the daughter of master mariner Captain Henry Stap of the White Star Line. “We could hear the music of the band all the time,” she told the Birkenhead News. “They were heroes if you like. I must say that everything that has been said about them is perfectly true. They were not asked to play but did it absolutely on their own initiative.”

  There were sixteen lifeboats on the Titanic, divided between both sides, and they were lowered into the sea over a sixty-five-minute period. Additionally there were four Englehardt collapsible boats kept in reserve. The passengers were mostly calm as the boats were winched down, although husbands were parted from wives and fathers from children because of the established “women and children first” policy and this led to poignant scenes of farewell. At first many of the passengers were reluctant to leave, feeling safer on the listing liner than in a dark and flimsy lifeboat on the freezing Atlantic with no provisions, no heating, and the vague promise that the Olympic was somewhere in the vicinity. Many passengers spoke of the unreality of the situation, as though they were observing something being acted out rather than being participants.

  Despite the awfulness of what was happening, the backdrop was a scene of beauty: a clear sky, a bright moon, clearly visible stars, flat undisturbed water, and an immense liner blazing with pinholes of light. The music would have carried farther than usual because for most of the time there were no competing sounds from engines or waves. Passengers who left from both port and starboard told similar stories of being able to hear the band as they were quickly rowed away to avoid the inevitable drag of the suction. Emily Rugg claimed she could hear the band from a mile away.

  What the band played has always been more a matter of controversy than whether it played at all. This is sometimes presented as an issue raised by modern historians, but it was there from the very beginning in the divergence of the accounts given by Harold Bride to the New York Times and by the survivors on the Carpathia to Carlos Hurd for the Pultizer newspapers. Had the musicians gone down playing a tune known as “Autumn” or the music of “Nearer, My God, to Thee”? The public inquiries in America and England raised the additional issue of whether they had played any religious music at all. Some witnesses claimed that they’d stuck to popular tunes and that hymns would have been inappropriate at such a time of despair.

  The biggest opponent of the story that they’d played hymns was the wealthy merchant Archibald Gracie. In his account written soon after arriving back in America, he said:

  If, as has been reported, ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’ was one of the selections, I assuredly should have noticed it and regarded it as a tactless warning of immediate death to us and one likely to create a panic that our special efforts were directed towards avoiding, and which we accomplished to the fullest extent. I know of only two survivors whose names are cited by the newspapers as authority for the statement that this hymn was one of those played. On the other hand, all whom I have questioned or corresponded with, including the best qualified, testified emphatically to the contrary.

  In November 1912, shortly before his death, Gracie gave a talk at the University Club in Washington DC in which he went further, saying that if they had dared play that hymn they would have been forcibly restrained by the men on board who were trying to calm the women. “If the band had played that familiar hymn, panic would have resulted. Fixing the minds of the passenge
rs on the possibility of their being nearer to God, and I say it seriously, would have been the last thing they wanted.”

  Most passengers who mentioned the band didn’t describe the music in any detail, but of those who did, the bias was toward the “lively airs” that Hilda Slater reported hearing. Jack Thayer said he heard “Star Spangled Banner” and someone else the hit tune “In the Shadows.” Algernon Barkworth heard a waltz. Lily May Futrelle, wife of the novelist Jacques Futrelle, heard Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Gracie, who watched from A Deck as the lifeboats were being lowered on the port side, wrote: “It was now the band began to play, and continued while the boats were being lowered. We considered this a wise provision tending to allay excitement. I did not recognize any of the tunes, but I know they were cheerful and were not hymns.” Second Officer Charles Lightoller, who helped lower lifeboat 6 on the port side at 12:55, said that as he did so, “I could hear the band playing a cheery sort of music. I don’t like jazz music as a rule, but I was glad to hear it that night. I think it helped us all.”1

  The most likely explanation for this confusion is that they played both Popular music and hymns. After all, by the time the ship started its final heave, they would have been playing for more than two hours. If each piece took four minutes to play, that would have allowed for thirty tunes. It’s also worth considering that not all popular tunes were “lively” and not all hymns were “reminders of death.” Dr. Washington Dodge told the San Francisco Bulletin that before the lifeboats began to be lowered, the orchestra was “playing a lively tune,” but added that when he was out on the water he heard the music of the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light.”

  It can be difficult for contemporary commentators to appreciate the place that hymns occupied in the lives of typical Edwardians. They were not indicators of doom and gloom but of hope and joy. They were also a register of commonly held assumptions about the most important issues in life. The difference between the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first century can be illustrated by Elizabeth Nye’s reminiscence: “On Sunday the 14th it became very cold. We couldn’t stay out on deck so we all came together in the dining room for a hymn sing.” It’s hard to imagine passengers on a twenty-first-century cruise liner opting for such an alternative.

  When survivors specifically mentioned that hymns were played, the consensus was that it was toward the end. It would make sense that the band members played the popular tunes as the lifeboats were loaded and the more reflective pieces once they only had themselves and their destinies to contemplate. Survivor Charles William Daniels (aka Robert William Daniel), who was on lifeboat 3 lowered at 1:00, recalled: “All the lifeboats reached the water safely and the ship’s band played as the boats were being lowered. The musicians played selections from opera and the latest popular melodies from Europe and America. Only before the final plunge did they change the character of their music. They then played ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ We had been in the water for two hours at least [sic].”

  All of the band members had been raised as churchgoers—Bricoux, Krins, and Clarke as Catholics, Hume as a Congregationalist, Woodward and Hartley as Methodists, Brailey and Taylor as Anglicans. Harley and Taylor had sung in choirs, and Hume played his violin in church. It’s impossible to determine the commitment they each had to the religion of their birth, but it’s likely that they all had knowledge of and affection for hymns.

  The New York Times drew the conclusion that “Autumn,” the music mentioned by Bride, referred to an Episcopalian hymn tune and claimed to have found a hymnal where this tune was the setting to words that began “God of mercy and compassion” and ended with a verse beginning “Hold me up in mighty waters / Keep my eyes on things above.” This reference to “mighty waters” appeared to prove the appropriateness of this hymn to the occasion. The Times said that line in particular “may have suggested the hymn to some minister aboard the doomed vessel, who, it has been suggested, thereupon asked the remaining passengers to join in singing the hymn, in a last service upon the sinking ship, soon to be ended by death itself.”

  What no one pointed out at the time was that Bride wasn’t an American Episcopalian and, even if he had been, would have been more likely to refer to a tune by the first line of the hymn’s words than by its name. The tune “Autumn” wasn’t in the White Star music book. Additionally, although there was a hymn known as “God of Mercy and Compassion,” it wasn’t in the Church of England or Methodist hymnals, and no version that anyone has been able to find, other than that discovered by a New York Times journalist in 1912, includes a verse about being held up in mighty waters.

  “God of Mercy and Compassion” was written by Edmund Vaughan (1827–1908) and starts:

  God of mercy and compassion

  Look with pity upon me

  Father, let me call you Father,

  ’Tis thy child returns to thee.

  The version quoted by the New York Times on April 21, 1912, already deviated from this by the second line of the first stanza:

  God of mercy and compassion!

  Look with pity on my pain;

  Hear a mournful, broken spirit

  Prostrate at thy feet complain.

  The only clue the New York Times gave about its origin was that it was found in “an Episcopalian hymn book.” No doubt there was such a collection, but it couldn’t have been widely used.

  Walter Lord speculated that Bride may not have been referring to a hymn at all but to a hit tune of 1912 (in London, at least) called “Songe d’Automne,” written by popular orchestra leader Archibald “the Waltz King” Joyce. Not only was this music commonly referred to as “Autumn,” but it was also in the White Star song book carried on the Titanic. Lord’s source for this information was Fred Vallance, bandmaster on the Laconia in 1912, who said there was general agreement among musicians that Bride must have been referring to the waltz tune that was an often-requested number in 1912 and popular in roller rinks and cafés. In several long, handwritten letters to Lord in 1957 written in response to the speculations about music in A Night to Remember, he argued that the mournful opening to Joyce’s popular tune could have been mistaken for a hymn and the jerky finish could have been heard as ragtime.2

  Interestingly enough, Bride made no further comment about “Autumn” and, when he arrived back in England after the sinking, he was the honored guest at a memorial service given by his local church in Shortlands, Kent, on May 19, where his father read the lesson and a solo of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was performed.

  The reports of the band playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” were enthusiastically received, particularly in England where the “Autumn” story was hardly pursued. The words of the hymn seemed so fitting to a culture where religious sentiment still held sway. The gist of the song is that whatever hardships befall us, they can only serve to bring us closer to God. In terms of the Titanic disaster, the image was of people being dragged to the depths of the sea and yet, paradoxically, scaling the heights of heaven. It was based in part on the story of Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:10–22), in which he sees “a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” It may have been a particular favorite at the Bethel Chapel in Colne because Jacob marked the spot where he had the dream with a stone “and he called the name of that place Bethel.”

  Nearer, my God, to Thee.

  Nearer to Thee!

  Even though it be a cross

  That raiseth me;

  Still all my song shall be,

  Nearer, my God, to Thee

  Nearer to Thee!

  Though, like a wanderer,

  The sun gone down,

  Darkness comes over me,

  My rest a stone;

  Yet in my dreams I’ d be

  Nearer, my God, to thee,

  Nearer to thee.

  There let my way appear

  Steps unto heaven,

  All that Thou sendest
me

  In mercy given;

  Angels to beckon me

  Nearer, my God, to Thee,

  Nearer to Thee!

  Then, with my waking thoughts

  Bright with Thy praise,

  Out of my stony griefs

  Bethel I’ ll raise;

  So by my woes to be

  Nearer, my God, to Thee,

  Nearer to Thee!

  And when on joyful wing

  Cleaving the sky,

  Sun, moon, and stars forgot,

  Upwards I fly,

  Still all my song shall be,

  Nearer, my God, to Thee,

  Nearer to Thee.

  Although popular among mainstream Protestants, the words were actually written by a Unitarian who was smitten by doubt. Raised in Christian orthodoxy, she was concerned about the faith she had lost. For the poet Sarah Flower Adams, the words were an expression of her one remaining certainty, which was that whatever spiritual torments she endured, God was always there. When the hymn first appeared in 1841 (with music by her sister Ella), and her Unitarian beliefs were made known, the Baptists and Methodists refused to include it in their collections.3

  American theologian J. Gresham Machen, writing in the 1920s, thought it was not as theologically sound as it first appeared:

  The thought is not opposed to Christianity. It is found in the New Testament. But many persons have the impression, because the word “cross” is found in the hymn, that there is something specifically Christian about it, and that it has something to do with the gospel. This impression is entirely false. In reality, the cross that is spoken of is not the cross of Christ, but our own cross; the verse simply means that our own crosses or trials may be a means to bring us nearer to God. It is a perfectly good thought, but certainly it is not the gospel.