Steve Turner
Steve Turner is a music journalist, biographer and poet, who grew up in Northamptonshire, England.
“I shall never forget the sight of that beautiful boat as she went down, the orchestra playing to the last, the lights burning until they were extinguished by the waves. It sounds so unreal, like a scene on the stage.”
In the whole history of the sea, there is little to equal the wonderful behavior of these humble players.
“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.”
The image of the lighted ship sliding under the waves, while the band carried on regardless, captured the public’s imagination.
For those out on the water it provided a bizarre soundtrack to a sight that so many would only be able to describe as “like watching a moving picture.”
In the last moments of the great ship’s doom, when all was plainly lost, when braver and hardier men might almost have been excused for doing practically anything to save themselves, they stood responsive to their conductor’s baton and played a recessional tune.
The band played marching from deck to deck, and as the ship went under I could still hear the music.
There is not in history a more splendid and inspiring example of self-control, of self-sacrifice, of courage and of manliness.
As the screams in the water multiplied, another sound was heard, strong and clear at first, then fainter in the distance. It was the melody of the hymn “Nearer, My God, To Thee,” played by the string orchestra in the dining saloon.
The story of their gallantry came to epitomize a spirit of courage, duty and self-sacrifice.
Not only had they behaved dutifully and without apparent concern for their own safety, but they also offered the hope that not all of the younger male generation were venial, lazy, proud, irreligious, inconsiderate, self-indulgent, weak-willed, and timorous.
It was 11:45 at night according to ship’s time when the Titanic grazed along the iceberg that would send it to the ocean bed.
It wasn’t hard for people to see the Titanic as a metaphor for Western civilization’s obsessions with speed, wealth, and conquest at the expense of contemplation, sharing and the well-being of one’s neighbor.
“They were brave and splendid, all the men. They died like brave men.”
By the twentieth of April, the story was widely accepted and was viewed as one of the most heartening acts of bravery in the whole tragedy.
The musicians had played on the deck as the ship went down. They had forfeited their lives for the sake of others. They had played the tunes of hymns to induce a spirit of peace and calm. They were heroic.
When everything on the ship was being turned upside down, the music remained the same. In the midst of mind-jarring abnormality, it was the one thing that retained its familiarity.
This object of great beauty—even in its stricken condition—went down with a terrifying roar…a sound that survivors later described as the most bloodcurdling they had ever heard.
The final dive of the ship, as the bow lay submerged and the stern rose out of the water, was truly horrendous for all who witnessed it.
Shipwreck was an ever-present possibility in 1912.