Soul No. Three

Wallace Hartley

A bank clerk's job, a chapel choir, and eight musicians who kept playing.

Played to the End
Wallace Hartley, painted by Dirk Strangely
Born
2 June 1878, Colne, Lancashire
Age in 1912
33
Aboard
Bandmaster, travelling Second Class
Fate
Lost
Body
Recovered, No. 224
Resting place
Keighley Road Cemetery, Colne

Before the voyage

His father was choirmaster at the Bethel chapel in Colne. He sang in that choir, learned the violin from a member of the congregation, and went to work for the Craven and Union Bank.

He played with the Huddersfield Philharmonic, spent six years with the Bridlington municipal orchestra, and joined Cunard in 1909, serving on Lucania, Lusitania and Mauretania. He had recently proposed to Maria Robinson.

He was not White Star crew. The musicians were contracted through an agency in Liverpool and carried as Second Class passengers on a single shared ticket. Neither company insured them, and after the sinking each pointed at the other.

That night

No member of the band survived, so there is no account from anyone who played. Everything known comes from people listening in the dark at varying distances.

Several of them, Boxhall and Peuchen among others, remembered ragtime first. Harold Bride, the surviving wireless operator, told a reporter that from aft came a ragtime tune he did not know, and that the last he saw of the band, while he was floating in the sea in his lifebelt, they were still on deck playing "Autumn."

Other survivors named hymns. Mrs Schabert said they turned to hymns after the ragtime. Dr Dodge heard "Lead, Kindly Light" from his lifeboat. Two stewards said the band changed to "Nearer, My God, to Thee" before the end, and Marie Jerwan wrote in May that they were playing it as the bow went under.

What is said, and what is known

Whether that hymn was the last tune cannot be established, and the honest answer is better than the legend. Gracie said the band stopped about half an hour before the end and he saw them put their instruments down. Barkworth saw them playing a waltz and then throwing the instruments away. Bride, the closest named witness, said "Autumn," and even that word is ambiguous, because it is both a hymn tune and a popular waltz of 1912 called Songe d'Automne.

What survivors agree on is that there was music in the last half hour, played by men who had been given no reason to stay and stayed. That is enough.

Afterward

He was recovered by the Mackay-Bennett as body No. 224. The Halifax record describes a man of twenty five with brown hair and no marks. He was thirty three. Under remarks, the clerk wrote one word: Bandmaster.

His body came home through Boston aboard the Arabic. His father met the ship at Liverpool on 12 May 1912. He was buried on the eighteenth at the chapel in Colne where he had been a choirboy. About a thousand people came to the service, and somewhere between thirty and forty thousand lined the route.

Only three of the eight musicians were ever recovered and identified.

The painting

Artist
Dirk Strangely
Year
2025
Subject
Wallace Hartley and the band
The panel
8 x 10 inches
Standing
An early study, unfinished. Hartley's numbered painting belongs to the twelve
Painted
Begun after the founding painting, while the genre was still being worked out
Status
Unfinished, held in the studio

The strings at every Souls of the Titanic evening play his repertoire. The coal in his eyes came off the ship he played her down on.

Sources: Encyclopedia Titanica · Nova Scotia Archives, body No. 224 · Musicians of the Titanic · Tim Maltin on the band