The musicians who played as the Titanic sank

When Paddy Dillon, a 34-year-old coal trimmer, arrived back in England on 28 April 1912, after having been rescued from the Titanic, he gave a vivid account of how he slid off into the Atlantic along with most of the ship's orchestra when the deck inclined to an angle of around 60 degrees.

I found his words in a contemporary provincial newspaper as I researched the lives of the eight musicians who sailed on the Titanic for my book The Band That Played On, a story that has now been retold for the Yesterday channel.

His description confirmed the oft-repeated account that the members of the orchestra sacrificed their chances of escape by continuing to play as the lifeboats were lowered, but added the information that even after the majority had been swept to their deaths, a lone player dutifully clung on.

"There was only one musician left," he said. "He was the violinist and was playing the air of the hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee. The notes of this music were the last thing I heard before I went off the poop (deck) and felt myself going headlong into the icy water with the engines and machinery buzzing in my ears."

By the time Dillon arrived home the legend of the band's heroism was well known. On 20 April, five days after the ship sank, the Daily Mirror had given over its front cover to the words and music
of the final hymn. "In the whole history of the sea, there is little to equal the wonderful behaviour of these humble players," it reported.

The violinist that Dillon remembered would almost certainly have been bandmaster Wallace Hartley. The Lancashire-born musician had been selected by the Liverpool agency of CW and FN Black to assemble a five-piece band to play in the main first-class areas and a trio for the nearby Cafe Parisien. They needed to be experienced musicians capable of playing any of the 352 tunes in the White Star Line music book. This was a prestigious appointment and the tips were expected to be good.

Hartley had been band leader on the Cunard liner Mauretania where two of the Titanic musicians, French cellist Roger Bricoux and London-born pianist Theo Brailey, had played for him. Cellist John Wesley Woodward from Oxford and Scottish violinist Jock Hume had both been in the orchestra on Titanic's sister ship the Olympic. Belgian violinist Georges Krins, pianist Percy Taylor from London and Liverpudlian bass player John Clarke had never sailed before.

One of the clearest descriptions of them came from the author and interior designer Helen Churchill Candee who wrote, "Nothing on board was more popular than the orchestra.
You could see that by the way everyone refused to leave it. And everyone asked of it some favourite hit."

Candee requested Puccini on the last night in the dining saloon, and her friend Hugh Woolner, a British businessman, something by Dvorak. The music finished at 11. "Folk drifted off to their big cabins, with happy 'see-you-in-the-mornings', until… the only sounds the musicians made were those of instruments being shut in their velvet beds."

The rest of the story has a nightmarish quality: the sound of scraping 45 minutes later; the brief judder that few took notice of; the slow flooding in the corridors on the lower decks; the assembling of passengers; the lowering of lifeboats. Some reported seeing the musicians hurrying towards the upper decks with their instruments. At least one person said that they were jeered because passengers thought they were trying to flee.

Were they ordered to play? No one can say for sure. They were not employees of the White Star Line (they were paid by the booking agency) and so had as much right as any other passenger to leave the ship. Instead they provided music in the hope of preventing panic: "lively airs" to begin with, some ragtime and then, when death was inevitable, the tunes of sacred songs.

Initially they played in the entrance on the Promenade Deck, then at the top of the Grand Staircase and finally on the Boat Deck itself. They were in action for over two hours during which time none of them made any attempt to join a lifeboat. They all drowned and the remains of only three of them were found.

Their action bears the imprint of Wallace Hartley, a devout Methodist and son of a choir leader, who once told a fellow musician that music was a bigger weapon for stopping disorder than anything else.

Hartley had already been asked what he would do if faced by death on a sinking ship. He answered that he could think of nothing better than to play either Oh God Our Help in Ages Past or Nearer, My God, to Thee.

"I shall never forget hearing the strains of that beautiful hymn as I was leaving the sinking ship," an anonymous rescued sailor told the Western Daily Mercury in 1912. "It was always a favourite hymn of mine, but at such a time and under such tragic circumstances it had for me a solemnity too deep for words."

Titanic: The Band Played On was a documentary aired on the Yesterday Channel earlier this week.