SHOW MUST GO ON
At the beginning of the 20th century, owners of luxurious liners like the Titanic offered the highest standards to meet the expectations of the most demanding clients. Therefore, they employed excellent chefs, waiters and even doctors. Also, bands got hired and performed live music on decks of liners. It was quite easy to find artists for this kind of job as there were a lot of candidates. The reason was that band members were provided with food and accommodation free of charge and salaries were relatively high. However, the real magnet which attracted performers was a job environment that could match no other.
The White Star Line, the company which owned the Titanic, also wanted to find musicians before the ship’s virgin voyage. Interestingly, at the beginning of the cruise liner era, musical passengers or crew members performed on luxurious ships. However, the company wanted only professionals, so they turned to the Liverpool firm of C.W. and F.N. Black, who recruited and placed musicians on almost all British liners. The talent agency employed eight musicians who boarded the Titanic as second-class passengers in Southampton. The players performed in two separate groups led by band leader Wallace Hartley. There exist various accounts as to whether the band played their final tune “Nearer, My God, to Thee” until the end after the Titanic hit an iceberg. But did they really do it?
One of the first accounts is from Edith Russel. She had no doubts that the ship’s band did not play “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and added that it did not continue playing as the Titanic sank. “When people say music played as the ship went down, that is a ghastly, horrible lie,” she said. Third-class passenger Gherson Coen agreed that the band did not play at all as the ship went down, not to mention the famous tune. He said he heard the band playing when the boat struck the iceberg as he was trying to get on deck. However, when he decided to jump into water, he saw the musicians standing back, just holding their instruments.
Other survivors told a different story. Colonel Archibald Gracie said he heard a cheerful tune that was unknown to him. He said he would surely have recognized “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” “I assuredly should have noticed it and regarded it as a tactless warning of immediate death to us all and one likely to create panic,” he added.
So what did the band really mean to passengers? As Collier’s Weekly reported, first-class passenger Helen Candee recalled that “after dinner, there was coffee served to all at little tables around the great general lounging place where the orchestra played. Some said it was poor on its Beethoven work; others said the violin was weak. But they didn’t mean it; that was for conversation’s sake, for nothing on board was more popular than the orchestra.”
On April 14th, after the Titanic struck the iceberg, John Law Hume, the first violinist on the Titanic, told his friend, stewardess Violet Jessop, when they bumped into each other while trying to get to the upper deck: “We’re just going to play a tune to cheer things up a bit.” John and Violet had become friends while working together through the years, including on the Olympic. Violet became widely known as the only person to have survived three sinkings aboard three sister ships: the Titanic, the Britannic, and the Olympic.
The band leader of the Titanic, Wallace Hartley, was one of the 1,517 people who died when the Titanic struck the iceberg and his violin was believed lost in the 1912 disaster. Some reports at the time suggested his violin floated off and was lost at sea. However, auctioneers Henry Aldridge&Son say the instrument was recovered in 2006. They used a lot of resources to research the violin’s story. At last they came across documents which showed that Hartley was found with a large leather valise strapped to him and the violin inside. The auction house said the rosewood instrument has two long cracks on its body, but is "incredibly well-preserved" despite its age and exposure to the sea. The violin was returned to Hartley's fiancée, the auction house said, and later ended up in the hands of the Salvation Army before being given to a violin teacher and, ultimately, to Henry Aldridge&Son.