1

My son was three and my daughter five. It was the summer of 1997. James Cameron’s film had not yet appeared, but a great human tragedy was unfolding on our living-room carpet.

‘Here it comes!’ said my son to his sister, and began to push a small toy ship across the floor from the direction of the television set. ‘Here it comes, brm, brm, brm,’ (the noise of marine steam engines, as a three-year-old thinks of them). My daughter moved a scrunched-up ball of white paper towards the course of the toy ship. They would meet, there would be an accident. My son swung his boat to the left, but the paper ball was too quick for him.

‘Bang! Crash!’ my son said, tilting his toy up and turning it over. ‘Glug, glug, glug.’

‘Let’s get the passengers into the lifeboats,’ his more humanitarian sister said. ‘Look at all the people in the sea.’

We needed to imagine them, just as we needed to imagine the carpet as the North Atlantic, the paper ball as the iceberg, the toy boat as the Titanic.

‘Don’t worry,’ my son said. ‘Here comes the Carpathian.’ Another toy was being pushed across the carpet to the rescue.

They played the game on many afternoons, but there were dissatisfactions. No detachable lifeboats; a funnelling discrepancy. The model ship had three funnels (it was based on the Queen Mary), whereas the Titanic had four. I explained to my son that the Titanic didn’t need four to suck the smoke from its boiler furnaces – one funnel was a dummy – but that there was a fashion for over-funnelling in the Edwardian age – ‘a long time ago’, I said – when numerous funnels implied grandness, size and speed; the more funnels the better the ship. Of course, this was just an impression, the equivalent of go-faster stripes and spoilers on family saloons at the other end of the century, but for about twenty years (like many other fashions, it died with the First World War) it held sway among the public and the premier passenger lines of the North Atlantic. Germany’s Norddeutscher Lloyd line started the trend with the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in 1897. Britain’s Cunard Line followed after the turn of the century with the Mauretania and Lusitania. When the White Star company came to order their trio of Titanic-class ships from Harland and Wolff’s yard in Belfast in 1909, four funnels were the only way to go.

‘Doesn’t matter. We’ll just pretend it has four funnels,’ said my son of his toy. But I could see that it was niggling him and when, a few months later, I spotted a model Titanic in a junk shop window in Lancashire, I went in and bought it for £9.95. It was new – the Hollywood film was out by then and Titanic souvenirs were everywhere – and, oddly, made of coal, or at least a sort of coal-based resin. ‘British coal’ said the label on the back with its Union Jack. The same shop window had coal railway locomotives, coal vintage cars and coal English country cottages – all a dull black, like Victorian memento mori. Coal had fuelled Britain and its industrial revolution; when the Titanic was at speed, the ship’s 196 stokers had shovelled up to a hundred tons of it through 159 furnace-doors during each of their four-hour shifts. Now, to judge from the display in the window, it had dwindled from the country’s leading power source to a raw material for folk art. Further back in the shop, I could see shiny brass coal miner’s lamps, equally new, which people could put on their mantelpieces above their ‘coal-effect’ gas fires.

The shop was in a back street of an old cotton town, Nelson, which is high in the Pennines and close to the border with Yorkshire. Nelson had been a considerable town, growing in the last half of the nineteenth century from a crossroads with a pub (the Lord Nelson, from which first a railway halt and then the town had taken its name) to an industrial settlement of 30,000 people, twenty mills and 26,000 steam-driven looms weaving specialist cottons for the clothing trade: flannelettes, poplins, ginghams, twills. But that Nelson had gone. A few old weaving-sheds and their mill chimneys still stood; terrace houses of the local millstone grit still ran straight up the hillside towards the moors; there were still a few Nonconformist chapels, churches and municipal buildings in the centre (though many more had been demolished and replaced by roads and a sad concrete shopping mall).

The shop, like many other shops in small English towns where trade in essentials has been drawn away by supermarkets, sold ornaments – strange and sometimes florid objects in porcelain, clay, wood, imitation bronze, and (in this case) coal, which could be placed on a domestic flat surface and regularly dusted. Many were old, or imitation-old. ‘Vic-toari-ana’, said the elderly Lancashire man who ran the shop, deliberating over the word, ‘they’re very keen on it round here.’ He was happy to see a customer and even happier to sell me the Titanic. A hunch had been proved right. ‘I ordered a few of these,’ he said as he placed the ship in its cardboard box, ‘I thought it would be topical, like.’

At home in London, the coal Titanic steamed across the carpet on many voyages, all of them fatal. So many sinkings took their toll on its most vulnerable parts: the funnels. One by one, they split from the upper works. When there were three, my son sometimes imagined his toy as the Queen Mary; when there were two, it became the Queen Elizabeth; when there was one, it stood in for the Carpathia, the single-funnelled Cunarder which had picked up the Titanic‘s survivors and sailed with them to New York in April 1912. It could be all these ships to my son and still, when required, be imagined as the Titanic. Then the last funnel came off. A ship without funnels was . . . a wreck. This was the coal Titanic‘s final form, as a discard buried deep in our cellar, a tiny replica of the funnel-less, broken hull that Dr Robert Ballard and his expedition eventually discovered 13,000 feet down on the seabed of the North Atlantic in September 1985.

In 1998 in our house – in millions of houses and thousands of cinemas, wherever the sea rushed in, the stern tilted vertically, and Rose called to Jack from the screen or the video recorder – art continued to imitate death.

2

The film Titanic, directed by James Cameron and funded by Twentieth Century Fox, is said to be the most commercially successful film of all time. This is a questionable claim; when American receipts are adjusted for inflation, Gone With the Wind comes first and Titanic fourth. But at least in the span of the 1990s, no other film comes near it. By the end of June 1999, it had earned more than $1,835 million at box offices worldwide and repaid its costs ten times over. Other large sums came from the video release, compact discs, books and general merchandising which ran the gamut from Titanic champagne flutes to Titanic yo-yos. It won eleven Oscars – only Ben-Hur forty years before won as many and no film has won more. Young adolescent girls formed a large part of its audience; newspaper reports from several countries – India, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and the US – said that some had watched the film scores of times, mainly to see its young lead actor, Leonardo DiCaprio.

But its phenomenal appeal was more than hormonal. According to the London Evening Standard (27 April 1998), the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, saw in the film a parable of the class war, in which ‘the third-class passengers (the proletariat) struggle valiantly against the ship’s crew (craven capitalist lapdogs and stooges)’. In a statement published in Beijing, the president applauded the film’s ‘vivid descriptions of the relationship between money and love, rich and poor’ and urged all fellow socialists to see it. The French also considered Titanic in political terms. Serge July, the editor of Libération, wrote: ‘The subject of the film is not – this is obvious – the sinking of a famous ship, but the suicide in the middle of the Atlantic of a society divided in classes.’ In Germany, according to the New York Times (26 April 1998), ‘heady articles . . . with no discernible tongue in cheek, have spoken of the movie as an emblem of the Zeitgeist, an allegory that provides catharsis for all, a surrogate myth in a trivialized era, an icon at the end of history’. In Die Zeit, Andreas Kilb, the paper’s cultural critic, wrote that the key to the film’s appeal lay in its representation of a ‘lost wholeness’. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, again in the New York Times, compared the durability of the Titanic myth with the transience of modern catastrophes, and wondered if the contrast demonstrated that we were losing a proper sense of history. (My son also became a critic. Owing to a lapse in parental attention, he watched the video. We worried that he might have been affected by the disaster and death which Cameron had so realistically evoked, as well as – though this, I admit, was ridiculous – the sight of Kate Winslet’s bared breasts. But he was chuckling on the sofa. ‘They had smoke coming from the fourth funnel. What a mistake!’)

James Cameron’s own gloss on his film was similarly myth-driven. He wrote in the ‘production information’ (the press-pack for critics and other journalists): ‘April 10, 1912. Technology had been delivering a steady stream of miracles for the better part of two decades and people were beginning to take this never-ending spiral of progress for granted. What better demonstration of humanity’s mastery over nature than the launch of Titanic [the missing definite article was important to the film’s marketing; ‘the’, presumably, carried too nautical and traditional a ring], the largest and most luxurious moving object ever built by the hand of man. But four-and-a-half days later, the world had changed. The maiden voyage of the “ship of dreams” ended in a nightmare beyond comprehension and mankind’s faith in his own indomitable power was forever destroyed by uniquely human shortcomings: arrogance, complacency and greed.’

Then, perhaps aware that public chastisement had not made good box office since the time of Savonarola and John Knox, the director added that his film was also ‘a story of faith, courage, sacrifice and, above all else, love’.

Most of those latter qualities enter the film through its fictional story, a shipboard romance. Briefly: Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) is a seventeen-year-old, upper-class American girl, ‘suffocating under the rigid confines and expectations of Edwardian society’ according to the press-pack, who meets a free-spirited young American from the Midwest called Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). Rose is travelling first class and Jack steerage. They fall in love, have sex, and then, when the ship begins to sink, help each other to survive a villainous sub-plot. In the sea, Jack urges Rose to hold on to life and the wreckage. Jack drowns, but his love and her freshly discovered will-power enable Rose’s survival. The story is framed by the present or the near-present. Rose, rediscovered in her hundredth year, narrates the events of the voyage from a perspective which suggests that both experiences – forbidden love across the class boundaries, the awakening of a tougher, unladylike strength – have turned her into a prototype of modern, independent womanhood. The title song, ‘My Heart Will Go On’, is sung by Celine Dion, but the same sentiments, to better music, can be heard in Edith Piaf.

I saw the film twice at the cinema. There were many things to admire in it. The ship was wonderfully and faithfully recreated (the fourth funnel, in fact, carried the fumes from the kitchen fires; smoke was therefore a possibility). Some scenes had a painterly touch. The Titanic overtaking a tiny yawl as the liner leaves Southampton; an officer in a lifeboat casting a torch-beam on the sea to scan it for survivors – scenes such as these could have come from the easel of a Victorian narrative painter seeking, in contrary moods, to capture technological triumphalism and maritime peril. The cleverest aspect of the film, however, depended neither on computer-created images, nor on expensively researched historical detail, nor even on the ninety per cent scale replica of the ship itself, with the stern that tilted almost to the vertical – people falling screaming from it, bouncing from the propellers – before it slid under the sea. Its cleverest aspect, I thought, was how it had taken a previously masculine story – male blunder, male heroism, male sacrifice in that most male of environments, the sea – and feminized it as a monument not to the dead but to a modern notion of . . . ‘girl power’ is probably the phrase.

The true opposition was not between classes (pace the president of China), just as the film’s true subject was not the ‘suicide’ of the society that produced these classes (pace the editor of Libération). In Cameron’s film, the armies that clashed on that calm north Atlantic night represented youth and age, the new and old. To be young and new (to be, in a sense, now) was to smoke and spit and wear a flat cap and no tie like Jack; to be creative, an artist, like Jack; to be free and resourceful like Jack; to have heard, improbably, of Picasso and Freud like Rose; to make love in the back of a car, part of the ship’s cargo, like Rose and Jack; to drink and dance Irish jigs in the steerage; to be Irish or Italian or Scandinavian or American (though not clipped, rich, East Coast American – Anglo-American). To be young and new was to have, as your soundtrack, the ghastly Celtic-twilight pastiche of James Horner’s music.

And to be old? That was to lose, to be part of dying things, an ancien régime; to be repressed and repressive; not to have heard of Freud; to have as your soundtrack the hymn ‘Nearer My God, To Thee’, like Captain Smith (Bernard Hill) as he stood stoically, purposelessly, in the wheelhouse and saw the sea come crashing through its windows; to be smug and autocratic like the ship’s officers and owner before the disaster, and then to be weak, brittle and cowardly after it; or to be weak and servile like the crew, before and after.

In other, shorter words: to be old, to be the enemy, was to be British.

I watched the film and felt a slight sense of ancestral, racial injury, and eventually took the train to Lancashire.

3

Four days out from Southampton on its maiden voyage to New York, the Titanic hit the iceberg at 11.40 p.m. on Sunday 14 April, and sank at 2.20 a.m. on 15 April. Its last known position was 41° 46’ N, 50° 14’ W; about 350 miles south-east of Newfoundland and 1,000 miles and three days away from New York. According to the British Board of Trade inquiry, 1,503 passengers and crew died and 703 were saved. The Titanic had steamed into an ice field at twenty-two-and-a-half knots; it had ignored ice-warnings tapped out in Morse from other ships; its lifeboats had room for only 1,178 people; its watertight bulkheads did not rise high enough in the hull. But these reckless errors of navigation and flaws in ship design were largely ignored in the immediate British coverage of the disaster. Tragedies needed heroes. Titanic’s band supplied them. To preserve order and calm, they had started to play soon after the iceberg was hit and had gone on playing until the very end, insouciantly, stoically, and finally religiously and comfortingly. Their last number was said to have been the hymn, ‘Nearer My God, To Thee’.

‘Why is it,’ George Bernard Shaw wrote in the Daily News and Leader one month later, ‘that the effects of a sensational catastrophe on a modern nation is to cast it into transports, not of weeping, not of prayer, not of sympathy with the bereaved . . . but of . . . an explosion of outrageous romantic lying?’ Shaw listed what he called the ‘romantic demands’ of a British shipwreck. The first was the cry ‘Women and Children First’ and the second that all the men aboard (‘except the foreigners’) should be heroes and the captain a superhero. Finally, Shaw wrote, British romance demanded that ‘everybody should face death without a tremor; and the band, according to the Birkenhead precedent, must play “Nearer My God, To Thee”.’ The Birkenhead was a troopship which foundered off the South African coast in 1852. While the women and children were got off in the boats, the troops held ranks at attention on deck. In Victorian Britain, the story had a powerful effect.

The evidence from the Titanic, according to Shaw, ran in the opposite direction. ‘The captain and officers were so afraid of panic that, though they knew the ship was sinking, they did not dare tell the passengers so – especially the third-class passengers – and the band played Rag Times [sic] to reassure the passengers, who, therefore, did not get into the boats, and did not realize their situation until the boats were gone and the ship was standing on her head before plunging to the bottom.’

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle replied to Shaw’s attack in the Daily News of 20 May.

‘Mr Shaw tries to defile the beautiful incident of the band by alleging that it was the result of orders issued to avert panic. But if it were, how does that detract either from the wisdom of the orders or from the heroism of the musicians? It was right to avert panic, and it was wonderful that men could do it in such a way.’

Shaw, as usual, was being controversial; he was England’s leading controversialist. But he was also being brave, because in the middle of this still familiar London newspaper phenomenon, the columnar spat, the body of its chief subject, the leader of the Titanic’s band, had been unloaded from a ship in Liverpool and taken by hearse inland across Lancashire, up past the noisy weaving-sheds of Preston and Blackburn, Burnley and Nelson, to the town of Colne. If disasters need heroes, heroes need burials, and burials need bodies. The body of Wallace Henry Hartley, violinist and bandmaster, had been retrieved from the sea and brought to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 30 April. In Halifax it had been coffined and taken by train to Boston, and from there shipped by the White Star’s Arabic to Liverpool, where it arrived at South Canada Dock on 17 May.

Even before his body had been found, Hartley was a hero. Reports of the band’s behaviour, how they had continued to play, first appeared in the New York Times on 19 April, the morning after that newspaper’s reporters interviewed survivors who disembarked from the Carpathia. Newspapers in Britain magnified these reports – Shaw was right about ‘outrageous romantic lying’ – until Hartley became the man who not only went on playing his violin when the ship began to settle by the bows, but continued playing even when he was waist-deep in water.

On 18 May, Hartley was buried in Colne. About 26,000 people then lived in the town. The local newspaper, the Colne and Nelson Times, estimated that a crowd of about 40,000 attended the funeral, drawn from across northern England by trains and trams. They made Hartley’s funeral the largest single solemnization of the Titanic disaster on either side of the Atlantic. The Colne and Nelson Times reported that the town had reached ‘the highest eminence of its character and tradition . . . The whole world has been at the feet of Wallace Hartley; then why wonder at the jealous pride of Colne?’

4

In Lancashire, I went first to Liverpool to consult the newspaper archive and look at the Titanic monuments. The city has two of them; the ship, like all of White Star’s fleet, was registered here (when the last of the hull slips under in Cameron’s film, the sight of the word liverpool on the stern jolted me into remembering that this was a city of global importance, once). Many Liverpudlians were in the crew, especially as firemen and coal-trimmers in the stokeholds, and it was a Liverpool musical agency that recruited the band. One monument stands at the Pierhead, originally intended for the ship’s engineers (no engineering officer survived) but later modified before its unveiling in 1916 to take account of the First World War and ‘honour all heroes of the marine engine room’. In the bas-reliefs, stokers with bare chests stand with rags and shovels in hand while an officer in a naval cap and jacket holds a spanner. They stare out at an empty river – a process of desertion which began when White Star moved their finest transatlantic liners to Southampton, so that they could cross the Channel to Cherbourg and embark the rich passenger trade from continental Europe. The legend beside them reads: the brave do not die/their deeds live forever/and call upon us/to emulate their courage/and devotion to duty.

Inside the city, away from the waterfront, a bronze plaque to the Titanic‘s musicians is fixed to the wall in the foyer of the Philharmonic Hall. There were eight of them: Wallace Hartley, violin and bandmaster; Theodore Brailey, piano, of Ladbroke Grove, London; Roger Bricoux, cello, of Lille, France; Fred Clarke, bass, of Liverpool; John ‘Jock’ Hume, violin, of Dumfries, Scotland; George Krins, viola, of Brixton, London; Percy Taylor, cello, of Clapham, London; Jack Woodward, piano, of Headington, Oxfordshire. They performed in two groups, as a trio and a quintet, in different saloons of the ship. All of them died. The legend in art-nouveau lettering said they had ‘continued playing to soothe the anguish of their fellow passengers’, followed by the words: courage and compassion joined/make the hero and the man complete.

According to the Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury (18 May 1912), ‘scenes of a very affecting character’ had been witnessed in South Canada dock when Hartley’s coffin came ashore. His father, Albion Hartley, had come from Colne to Liverpool and paced the floor of the dock shed as he waited for the casket to be swung from the ship’s hold to the quay. He was, said the Daily Post’s report, ‘a pathetic figure . . . suffering from intense mental agony . . . as he signed the receipt for the delivery of the body his hands quivered with emotion . . . his eyes filled with tears, and he walked away broken with grief’. Before he left, however, Mr Hartley ‘communicated a few particulars with respect to his son’s personal history’. These included: that his son had been engaged to be married (Miss Maria Robinson of Leeds); that his son had regretted moving from one of the Cunard Line’s bands because the switch to White Star meant that his home port became Southampton rather than Liverpool, taking him further from his parents’ home; and that a gentleman who regularly travelled by Cunard had told him, Albion Hartley, that he had heard his son play ‘Nearer My God, To Thee’ several times on board the Lusitania. (The last seemed to be offered as evidence to doubters. Already there were doubts).

Then the hearse’s two horses began the slow fifty-nine-mile pull to Colne, where the coffin with Hartley’s bruised body inside arrived at one o’clock the next morning.

5

It was dark when I got there; two changes of train, then a long ride up a bumpy single line which ended at a bare platform. The terminus: Colne. I walked across to the Crown Hotel – Victorian, built soon after the railway came in 1848 – where I’d booked a room for the night. Two women were propped against the hotel wall, pawing each other.

‘You’re a bitch, you’re a bitch,’ one woman was saying.

‘And you’re a right cow,’ said the other.

In the hallway, a man in a white shirt and black tie ran past me with blood dribbling from his cheek. In the bar, several men, also in black ties, were talking softly and urgently to their womenfolk.

‘Now love, just shut it . . . have another drink and then we’ll get a minicab.’

All the men were small and dark, as though they belonged to the same large family. A life-size model of Laurel and Hardy stood in one corner of the bar, and next to it (or next to Hardy at least) these men looked like angry jockeys.

‘He’s coming back in,’ said one man, who was watching the door.

‘Nay, he’d never, he wouldn’t dare,’ said another.

Eventually the Crown Hotel’s manager appeared and took me upstairs to my room. ‘It’s not usually like this,’ he said, by way of apology.

Outside the window I could hear a woman shouting: ‘Don’t give me that shite. You wanted to shag him, didn’t you, you bitch.’

The manager smiled and said: ‘It’s a funeral. Drinking and that. I think it got a bit out of hand.’

6

Wallace Hartley’s funeral began a few hundred yards from the Crown Hotel at the Bethel Independent Methodist Chapel. May the eighteenth was a Saturday. The next week’s Colne and Nelson Times spared no detail; the idea that Britain, and especially northern Britain, shied away from emotional display at that time, that crying began with the Princess of Wales in 1997, is confounded by this single report. A thousand people crowded into pews which had been built to hold 700. Before undertakers screwed down the coffin lid – ‘a coffin of an unfamiliar American make, polished to appear like rosewood’ – Hartley’s parents and sisters came to take a last look at the body. The body is described; ‘somewhat discoloured by a blow he had evidently received and by the embalming process’. Then the congregation stood and began to sing in an atmosphere of ‘fervid emotion’. Hartley’s mother, who remained seated in the front pew, wept bitterly at one point and almost choked with suppressed grief at another. Hartley’s two sisters and his fiancée, Miss Robinson, ‘shook visibly’; and when ‘Nearer My God, To Thee’ was sung (for the second time) almost the entire congregation was in tears: ‘girls had not the heart to sing . . . men and women broke under the strain . . . voices shook with emotion’.

Mr T. Worthington, an Independent Methodist preacher who had sailed with Hartley on the Mauretania, gave the address. Reading it in Colne library almost ninety years later, I was struck by how vividly it had been phrased. ‘She [the Titanic] had been only a few days out . . . when she comes into contact with another force, designed in no engineer’s office, constructed in no dockyard, possessed by no compass and guided by no rudder, giving off no steam, nor driven by any machinery; but a force with which man’s latest and noblest construction coming into contact bolts, shakes, reels, sinks . . .’ Worthington concluded: ‘The traditional British character was magnificently shown . . . Yes, it is brave to be British. It is both brave and noble to be Christian. In fact, it is easier to be British when we are Christian.’

People stepped up to the catafalque to place wreaths on the coffin. ‘To Uncle Wallace,’ from his sister’s children; ‘Teach me from my heart to say, Thy will be done,’ from Miss Robinson. Then the cortège set out for the cemetery. The procession was half a mile long. Five brass bands came first, followed by a battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment, buglers from the Boy Scouts, the town’s ambulance brigade, the congregation of the Bethel Chapel, the Colne Orchestra, the Bethel Choir, the representatives of Colne Town Council and, at last, the carriages with coffin, wreaths and mourners. The bands took it in turns to play the ‘Dead March in Saul’ with muffled drums: ‘the subdued tones of the bands thrilled one with the immense tragedy of the proceedings’. Great whispering crowds lined the route, men doffed their hats as the coffin passed, flags floated at half mast, blinds were drawn in every house. And, unusually, no large amount of coal smoke blew across the town; the town’s mills had shut for the morning shift. According to that day’s Manchester Evening News, ‘workmen and masters assembled together in awed silence on the tramless streets’.

At the cemetery gates, twelve men, all cousins of Hartley, took the coffin. Worthington read the last rites. The reporter from the Colne and Nelson Times noticed a lark singing overhead. The hillsides all around were dotted with groups of men who stood silent and bareheaded.

In 1912, it was the most impressive scene Colne had ever witnessed, and – my guess – most probably ever will. But were there no sceptics, people who wondered about the fuss? A week later a letter appeared in the Colne and Nelson Times. There were plans for a civic memorial to Wallace Hartley. The anonymous writer hoped, drily, that it would not be a drinking fountain: ‘surely there has been enough water in this sad affair’.

7

I left the Crown Hotel that night and went to look at Hartley’s memorial, not a fountain but a bust on a pedestal, flanked by two carved figures representing Music (with a lyre) and Valour (with a laurel wreath). The people of Colne had subscribed £265 to its cost, but when the mayor unveiled it, in 1915, Hartley’s death was no longer so remarkable and the mayor took care to connect him with thousands of other young men ‘who were giving their lives freely’. In 1992 the bust had been vandalized and four years later repaired. Now, because of the film, in which Hartley makes a fleeting appearance, people had recently begun to bring flowers.

I walked higher up the main street, inspecting the prices of houses in estate agents’ windows. There were few people about. I went to a pub – a large saloon with only three drinkers – and heard a middle-aged woman who was slightly tight sing ‘Once I had a secret love’ to the karaoke machine. The wallpaper and the lamps, like the Crown Hotel’s, were new-Victorian. Original Victoriana lined the streets: there were several handsome buildings, but most of them adapted to purposes other than their original. In the ground floor of the old Colne Co-operative Society headquarters I ate spaghetti at Carlo’s Pizzeria in a room that pretended to be a red-tiled Tuscan cottage.

Colne and this part of Lancashire once had a singular culture – a way of thinking and being, which, though many parts of it were common to northern Britain, had special twists and peculiarities. Even Nelson, just down the hill, was different, and Colne people still – a cultural relic – spoke of it disparagingly. Nelson was an upstart, a pure nineteenth-century invention. Once Colne people had called Nelson ‘Little Moscow’ because of its socialism; on my visit I heard an old man call it ‘Little Calcutta’ because so many Southern Asian families lived there. Colne had very few Asians; also it was a much older town; also it was higher, 600 feet up and surrounded by moorland which rose another 1,000 feet still.

Did Hartley’s stoicism and nobility – if he had been stoic and noble – depend on Colne, grow in Colne? That would be absurd, though in Colne in 1912 the claim was often made. On the other hand, two Colne specialisms had placed him on the Titanic, had given him the chance to behave like a Christian gentleman, if that is what he had been. Without cotton and Methodism, he would never have learned to play the violin and, consequently, never have gone to sea.

8

Cotton came later to Colne than the rest of Lancashire. From the fifteenth century it developed a thriving woollen business, then, after the narrow canal from Liverpool reached Colne in the late eighteenth century, cotton began to be imported from the United States and India. By 1824, there were only three manufacturers of wool in Colne but twenty-two of cotton. By 1843, seven of these mills were driven by steam. More cotton, coal and supplies of Welsh roofing slate came with the railway. Over the next sixty years, Colne changed from a riotous little town with bad sanitation, smallpox and public stocks, into a model of municipal enterprise and self-improvement, with electric trams, reservoirs, good drains, and libraries. Express trains from Colne ran all the way to London, as well as to Leeds and Manchester and Liverpool.

The Hartley family improved with the town. Their addresses and occupations were listed in each ten-year census, and with every entry there was change. Wallace’s grandfather, Henry, was a weaver of woollen worsted in 1841 but a weaver of cotton twenty years later. Henry’s son, Albion, was a cotton ‘sizer’ in 1871 but a cotton-mill manager ten years later. By 1891 Albion had become an insurance agent, about as far away as could be got then, in Colne, from physical work, smoke and machinery. And so Wallace, born in 1878, grew up in the middle stages of his family’s social progress. Unlike his grandfather, his father, his uncles and aunts, he never went to work in a mill. He had an education and got a job in a bank.

The education came courtesy of Methodism, which arrived in Colne when John Wesley preached at the opening of the town’s first Methodist chapel in 1777. By the middle of the next century it was rampant, evangelizing and schismatic. Wesleyan Methodism became identified with the new middle class of manufacturers and shopkeepers and was seen as autocratic. More radical preachers, anxious to proselytize and uplift the new working class, broke away into new groups: the Bible Christians, the Kilhamites, the Primitives. The Primitives set to work in the poorest and most squalid parts of the town, but they too split into conservatives and radicals, the radicals favouring volunteer rather than paid preachers and renaming themselves the Provident Independent Methodists.

In 1857, the Providents decided to evangelize the growing working-class quarter of Primet Bridge, close to Albion Hartley’s house and Wallace Hartley’s birthplace. They built a chapel there: the Bethel Independent Methodist Church. Albion Hartley became its choirmaster and the superintendent of its Sunday school and sent his son to Colne’s Methodist day school, which existed to educate the children of the poor but self-improving. In Colne, the Methodists stimulated many improving activities – elocution lessons, temperance groups, evening lectures for adults – but music was their special strength: glee clubs, brass bands, choirs, the Colne Orchestra. Sometimes rival choirs would combine to sing a great oratorio: the Messiah or Elijah. Sometimes a musically gifted millworker left the town and became a professional singer or player. One or two had careers at Covent Garden. At school, Wallace Hartley learned to play the violin. After a few years in the bank, he left Colne for a middling career as a violinist with tearoom trios in department stores and touring opera companies. He played at Bridlington, Harrogate, Leeds, and for the operas put on by Carl Rosa and Moody Manners. Then he joined Cunard.

That is really all that is known about him. There are no family memoirs or (so far as I could find) surviving members of the Hartley family. Two of his brothers died in infancy; his sisters died childless. In his last letter home, written on board the Titanic and collected from the ship at its final port of call, Queenstown, Ireland, he wrote: ‘This is a fine ship and there ought to be plenty of money around . . . We have a fine band and the boys seem very nice.’ At his funeral, he was recalled as ‘tall, handsome, and of a pleasant disposition – he was popular with passengers and proved a merry companion.’

There are no more clues to his character. And the particular society of Colne that might have influenced it, one way or another, has gone; or almost.

9

Jack Greenwood took me to see the tombstone. Greenwood was an old Colne man, a retired bus driver, a local historian who specialized in the history of Colne’s most famous figure, Wallace Henry Hartley. Like the shopkeeper who sold me the coal Titanic, he spoke in the broad, deliberating accent which, in the valleys of the Colne Water, the Calder and the Ribble, takes on a special peculiarity, as though vowels were warm beer twisting down a plughole. He said ‘thee’ for ‘you’, ‘nowt’ for ‘nothing’, and ‘brew’ for ‘hill’. It would be useless to try to reproduce it.

We met at the library and walked west through the town. It was a grey winter’s day with cloud on the hills and a dampness in the air that would later settle into steady, unremitting rain. Eventually we came to a gate. Through the gate, Colne’s cemetery ran down a steep hill. ‘It’s down theer on the left,’ Greenwood said. ‘I’ll stay at the top. That brew’s too steep for me.’

I went down on my own. Hartley’s tomb was more monumental than the rest and included the names of his father, mother and infant brothers. It was topped by a broken pillar covered in a shroud while at the base a stone violin reposed on its side next to the first words and musical bars of ‘Nearer My God, To Thee’. It was here, at Hartley’s funeral, that the Bethel Chapel choir sang the hymn for the third and last time to the accompaniment of the Trawden silver band, and here, as Hartley’s coffin was lowered into the earth, that buglers from Colne’s Boy Scouts blew the ‘Last Post’. Their notes, said the Colne and Nelson Times, ‘went rolling through the valley and came back again, loth to be done.’

A few old flowers lay at the foot of the monument. Those apart, there was no sign of pilgrimage or a continuing memory. I went back up the hill and asked Greenwood if he thought the grave had the right hymn to the right tune – one of the most vexing questions in the historiography of the Titanic. Greenwood didn’t doubt it. He’d done his work in the local archives. It was Albion Hartley who had introduced Colne to ‘Nearer My God, To Thee’ in the musical arrangement by Sir Arthur Sullivan when he was the Bethel choirmaster; it had been regularly sung during Whitsuntide processions. The tune is called ‘Propior Deo’ and its first notes were those on the tomb. Furthermore, Greenwood added, a Mr Ellwand Moody of Farnley, Leeds, had made twenty-two trips on the Mauretania with Wallace and had once asked him, as one cheerful north-countryman to another: ‘What would you do if you were on a sinking ship?’ And Wallace, according to Moody, according to Greenwood, had replied: ‘I don’t think I could do better than play “O God Our Help in Ages Past” or “Nearer My God, To Thee”.’

We walked back through the centre of Colne and started down the hill which runs towards Nelson. It was raining hard now; in the fading light, the town was wet and black; at the foot of the streets that went off steeply to each side, there were patches of wasteland where the mills had been. I remember feeling how good it would be to take the small, slow train down to the junction at Preston and then sit in a much faster one to London. Or to sign up as violinist with the White Star line.

Instead, we went to Greenwood’s terrace house and his wife made tea and biscuits. I asked her about ‘Nearer My God, To Thee’. Not many people these days, I said, believed that this was the last tune Wallace Hartley had played on the Titanic. Mrs Greenwood said firmly: ‘Well, we believe it in Colne, don’t we, Jack? Look at the last verse – “Out of my stony griefs, Bethel I’ll raise.” Bethel, you see. That would have reminded him of the Bethel chapel, his father, this town, everything he’d grown up with and loved.’

10

The hymn ‘Nearer my God, To Thee’ was written by an Englishwoman, Sarah Flower Adams, and first appeared in a hymnal compiled in 1840 and 1841 by the Reverend William Johnston Fox for use by the congregation at his Unitarian chapel in Finsbury, London. The first two verses – there are four in all – go:

Nearer, my God, to Thee
Nearer to Thee!
E’en though it be a cross
That raiseth me.
Still all my song would be,
Nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer to Thee.

Though, like the 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.

Mrs Adams died (childless and ‘of decline’ according to the Dictionary of National Biography) in 1848 at the age of forty-three. To try to learn a little of her life is to face one of the great problems of the modern secular imagination: how to imagine a time when God was a powerful idea, when Biblical tags and stories were a part of everyday life, when hymns were as familiar and meaningful to most of the population as advertising slogans are now. Mrs Adams might easily be imagined as a Christian sop, disappointed on earth and pining for heaven. In fact, so far as one can tell, she was a spirited woman, a friend of the poet Robert Browning, with whom she corresponded about her religious doubts and difficulties. But perhaps the most surprising thing to discover about her is that she was not, in the strictest sense, a Christian; as a Unitarian she did not accept the Holy Trinity or the divinity of Christ. Neither is her hymn about Christ. It tells, elliptically, the story of Jacob who, fleeing the wrath of his brother Esau, falls asleep on a pillow of stone in the wilderness and dreams of a ladder lined with angels that descends from heaven with God standing at the top. He erects a monument of stones at the site of his dream and calls it Bethel, which in Hebrew means ‘the House of God’. According to the Reverend James Hudson’s Hymn Studies, ‘it is a song of the soul in a lonely and gloomy place.’

For many years after it was published, it remained problematic as a Christian hymn. It lacked any mention of Christ; the ‘cross’ in the first verse is simply a metaphor for human suffering. Various churches tried to amend it, but none of the new versions caught on, until, in 1855, Henry Ward Beecher included it in a general, non-Unitarian collection of hymns (his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, published Uncle Tom’s Cabin four years before and was sometimes miscredited with the words of the hymn). In 1856 another American, the prolific hymnographer Lowell Mason, replaced the original setting, composed by Mrs Adams’s sister, Eliza, with a tune called ‘Bethany’, in 4/4 time, that was altogether more stirring and affecting.

By the time of the Civil War it seems to have reached most corners of North America. One Bishop Martin, fleeing Union troops in Arkansas, heard its tune as he stumbled through backwoods country; located the source as a log cabin; found in the log cabin a poor old woman singing lustily; felt therefore ‘an unreserved trust in God, thus ridding him of his fears’.

The books I looked at – old, unvisited books in church libraries, books of earnest, pre-First World War Christian sincerity, books that it now seemed inconceivable that anyone had ever read – told many similar stories. The late Queen Victoria had expressed her love for the hymn. It was the favourite of the late President McKinley, who had repeated it frequently on his deathbed. It was the absolute favourite of His Majesty, King Edward VII, who considered it as ‘dear to the peasant as the prince’; and also of the Australian Antarctic Expedition who had sung it ‘amid blizzards, in ice caves and at the end of the day’s toil’.

A Reverend Dr Moulton, for thirty years a missionary to the Tonga Islands in the South Seas, recounted how he had visited the hut of an old and now dying convert and there met ‘a curious sight’. Two friends had propped the old man so that he could hang from a beam in the roof. ‘Judge of my astonishment,’ wrote the Rev Dr Moulton, ‘when I heard these words uttered over and over again – in Tongan of course – “Nearer, O God to Thee! Nearer to Thee”.’

The tune, however, was not always the same. North America sang it to Mason’s Bethany, while British Christians were divided by denomination; Anglicans favoured a tune called ‘Horbury’ by John Bacchus Dykes, while Methodists chose Sir Arthur Sullivan’s ‘Propior Deo’. However they were sung, the words were a hit throughout the English-speaking world. According to the Reverend Canon Duncan in his Popular Hymns (1910), the hymn was ranked at number seven in ‘The Sunday at Home List’ of the hundred best and most popular hymn tunes. He wrote: ‘The testimonies are many and from all quarters as to the comfort and help this hymn has been to the souls of men, women and children, even in some of the most depressing circumstances of life.’

Could there be a more depressing circumstance than to stand in a fearful crowd on a slowly tilting deck with a child in your arms, waiting to die in a near-freezing sea? In the early morning of 15 April 1912, the hymn’s greatest hour had arrived. Wallace Hartley tapped his violin (the moment is in James Cameron’s film) and his band struck up its last tune: ‘Nearer My God, To Thee’. So it was said, so it was reported in the newspapers, so it was widely believed. Within days of the Titanic‘s loss, the words were on memorial postcards, within weeks they were in instant books and the dialogue titles of silent films. By 12 May, according to Reuters news agency, 55,000 copies of a French translation had been sold in one week at the equivalent of a penny each: ‘the hymn is even being sung by groups at street corners after the manner of popular songs’.

But which of the three possible tunes had they heard, Dykes’s, Mason’s or Sullivan’s? On 24 May, at a concert for the Titanic Relief Fund in the Albert Hall, conducted by Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Henry Wood and Thomas Beecham, London’s massed orchestras played Dykes’s tune, ‘Horbury’. Hartley’s grave uses Sullivan’s. Cameron’s film uses Mason’s.

Then again, had anyone heard any of them? As the Titanic’s story moved though its various revivals in the century, a new and secular orthodoxy was slowly established.

11

Mrs Vera Dick, a first-class passenger from Alberta, was the origin of the story. Fresh off the Carpathia, she told the New York Times (19 April): ‘What I remember best was that as the ship sunk [sic] we could hear the band playing “Nearer My God, To Thee”. We looked back and could see the men standing on deck absolutely quiet and waiting for the end. Their conduct was splendid, splendid.’

Almost all of the Titanic’s many historians over the past fifty years have chosen to disbelieve her. Mrs Dick was among the first to leave in the boats, at one a.m., and she was probably at least a quarter of a mile away when the ship went under. On the other hand, it was an unusually still night (everybody attests to that) and on a quiet day the noise of a cello and a couple of violins will carry half a mile across a London park. There is also the private testimony of Mrs Charlotte Collyer, second-class and also in a lifeboat when the Titanic sank, whose husband did not survive. She wrote to her parents-in-law in England from Brooklyn in a letter dated 21 April: ‘I feel I shall go mad sometimes but dear as much my heart aches it aches for you, too, for he is your son and the best that ever lived… But mother we shall meet in heaven. When that band played Nearer My God, To Thee I know he thought of you and me for we both loved that hymn . . .’

Other witnesses had different memories. A.H. Barkworth, firstclass, from Yorkshire, wrote: ‘I do not wish to detract from the bravery of anybody but I might mention that when I first came on deck the band was playing a waltz. The next time I passed…the members of the band had thrown down their instruments and were not to be seen.’ Second Officer Charles Lightoller remembered the band playing ‘a cheery sort of music . . . I think it helped us all’. Archibald Gracie, a retired US Army colonel, recalled that the band stopped playing half an hour before the ship sank. ‘I did not recognize any of the tunes, but I know they were cheerful and were not hymns. If, as has been reported, “Nearer My God, To Thee” was one of the selections, I assuredly should have noticed and regarded it as tactless warning of immediate death to us all and one likely to create a panic that our special efforts were directed towards avoiding.’

Lightoller and Gracie, unlike Mrs Collyer and Mrs Dick, were among the last to leave, swept overboard by the wave that came rushing up the deck. Harold Bride, the ship’s second wireless operator, went into the sea at the same time. Like Mrs Dick he was interviewed by the New York Times on 18 April and was quoted as saying: ‘The ship was gradually turning on her nose – just like a duck that goes down for a dive . . . the band was still playing. I guess all the band went down. They were heroes. They were still playing “Autumn.” Then I swam with all my might.’

Bride did not specify ‘Autumn’ as a hymn, and some versions of his interview include an earlier reference to ‘the ragtime tune’. But when Walter Lord came to write his book, A Night to Remember, published in 1955, he decided that ‘Autumn’ and not ‘Nearer My God, To Thee’ was the hymn that had been played. Lord’s book, an early example of quick, episodic, narrative history, became a bestseller, the most influential retelling of the story that has ever been published. Three years later, in the British-made film of the book, ‘Autumn’ is the tune the band plays.

The British hymnologist, Sir Richard Johnson, decided that the New York Times reporter had misheard ‘Autumn’ for ‘Aughton’, an American Episcopal hymn and tune written by a pupil of Lowell Mason’s. The English composer, Gavin Bryars, accepted the idea and incorporated ‘Aughton’ in his orchestral piece, The Sinking of the Titanic, first performed in 1969. In the meantime, Lord had discovered something he did not disclose until he published his follow-up book on the Titanic in 1986. In 1957, a former Cunard Line bandmaster wrote to him remembering that ‘Songe d’Automne’, a waltz composed by Archibald Joyce, had been a big hit in London in 1912. The waltz is on the playlist of the White Star line’s bands for that year. Books began to reproduce the playlist.

By 1998, God and his comforts were in full retreat.

12

The Bethel chapel in Colne was demolished in the early 1980s – dry rot – but Independent Methodist services still take place in a smaller outbuilding that used to be the Sunday school. I had told Jack Greenwood I would like to attend one, and somehow the word got round. On the Sunday morning, as I was walking across the waste ground where the chapel used to be, an elderly man came forward to greet me. They were going to sing The Hymn in my honour.

There were eight or nine people inside, all of them, save the woman organist and a couple in their fifties, at least sixty-five years old. We sat on metal chairs and sang several hymns, including ‘Nearer My God, To Thee’ to Mason’s tune. A woman preacher addressed us on St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Communion wine and bread – small, torn pieces of sliced brown – went between us. Outside, Colne people were doing whatever they now do on a Sunday in March. Waking up, driving to the superstores, looking out from their kitchen windows at bare gardens and wondering when spring will come.

Eric Lambert, the caretaker, took me to see Wallace Hartley’s birthplace. On the way I asked about the communion wine, it seemed sweet. ‘Vimto,’ Lambert said. ‘We don’t hold with alcohol.’

We walked across a bridge over the Colne Water, and then over a motorway slip road. We were now on the very edge of Colne, among fields. Hartley’s birthplace was down a track in a lonely terrace of millstone grit houses: 92 Greenfield Road. ‘Don’t look in,’ Lambert said as we passed the house, ‘they don’t like folk looking.’

We walked on. ‘You know what did for the churches?’ he said. ‘It was the First World War.’ He remembered an old preacher at Bethel, a Mr Diggins, telling him what people had said in 1917: ‘There can’t be a God or he wouldn’t allow this sort of stuff.’

It had made Mr Diggins despair.

I went back up the hill to look at Hartley’s bust and now considered the war memorial next to it. There are eight columns of the dead from the First World War and about ninety names to each column. More than 700 young men from a community of about 25,000 people had died in four years, mainly in Flanders. Twenty-one of them were called Hartley: there were even three W Hartleys. Who in Colne could now remember where, how, and for what they had died? If, at the age of thirty-three, there is ever a right time to die – a time to be remembered for the act – Wallace Hartley had chosen it.

13

The little train took me down the valley. Two drunk youngish men got on at Accrington. They had no tickets. The ticket inspector and the driver were women. They said the train wouldn’t move until the men paid. ‘Away ye go to fuck,’ said one of the men; they were travelling to Glasgow. Eventually the women gave up and the train moved on. The rest of us studied our newspapers.

One of the questions Cameron’s Titanic plants in our imagination is: how would we, the modern audience, behave on the deck of a slowly-sinking liner without enough lifeboats, surrounded by a freezing sea? Worse, better, the same? The question implies that we know how people behaved then, and that Cameron’s film portrays it accurately. These things are difficult to know. Perhaps Hartley and his men continued playing because it occupied them in what they slowly realized was a hopeless predicament. Perhaps they threw down their instruments long before the end and tried to paddle off on deckchairs, or anything else that would float. The fact is that all eight of them died and many of the people who survived were thankful to them. As to general good behaviour – good in the sense that men hung back and allowed women and children to fill the boats – there are many testimonies and one interesting statistic, which comes from the percentage of passengers saved, arranged by age, gender and class. These are the British Board of Trade Inquiry figures:

In the first class: thirty-four per cent of the men, ninety-seven per cent of the women, a hundred per cent of the children.

In the second class: eight per cent of men, eighty-four per cent of women, a hundred per cent of the children.

In the third class: twelve per cent of men, fifty-five per cent of women, thirty per cent of the children.

The usual juxtaposition is to compare the percentages of the first- to third-class children, or of first-class men and third-class children. These are shameful – by the principle of equity and the code of women and children first. But the interesting statistic in the context of ‘good behaviour’ is for the second-class men: eight per cent. Unlike the third class, they had easy and early access to the boat deck, and yet only thirteen survived out of 160. Could it be that this class, which on the Titanic was largely drawn from the middling tradesmen and professionals of Britain and North America, behaved more nobly and stoically than the men above and below them?

Hartley came from such a class. It may have been a heroic class or a foolish one. ‘The old Lie,’ Wilfred Owen wrote six years later, ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’ But it is hard to dismiss the thought that a way of thinking, of being, in Colne and in Britain, must have affected the way people behaved, and that they behaved differently then.

14

Still hunting for scraps of Hartley’s life, I followed his passage back to Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was from Halifax on 17 April 1912 that a Canadian cable ship, the Mackay-Bennett, was dispatched under hire to the White Star line. It sailed towards the Titanic’s last known position with a cargo that included one hundred coffins, several tons of ice, and embalming tools and fluid for use by the professional embalmers who were also on board. By the time the ship returned to Halifax on 30 April, it had recovered 306 bodies. They were often found in clusters; a member of the crew counted more than a hundred floating together in their white life-jackets ‘like a flock of seagulls’. Some had drowned in the immediate turmoil of the sinking; others had floated off and frozen to death. As each body was hauled on board, it was given a number before clothes and personal effects were removed and put into a bag with the same number. Bodies that were too damaged or decomposed – though decomposition was not much of a problem in such near-freezing water – were returned to the sea weighted with iron, which had been brought for that purpose. One hundred and sixteen bodies from the Mackay-Bennett’s haul went back into the Atlantic, but that still left 190 for the voyage home to Halifax.

On board, the bodies, or the identifiable majority of them, were divided in death as in life. The dead from the Titanic’s crew were stacked unembalmed on the foredeck or in the ice-filled hold. Second- and third-class passengers were sewn up in canvas bags. First-class passengers were embalmed and encoffined and placed at the stern. All of this last class had been successfully identified, perhaps because they carried so many valuables and inscribed memorabilia. When the bodies reached port, some were claimed by relatives and taken for burial at final destinations across North America and in Europe. Halifax undertakers buried the rest: 150 in all, sixty of them never identified.

Of the band, only three were found. John ‘Jock’ Hume, the violinist, was body number 193; and Fred Clarke, the bassist, body number 202. Hartley’s body was found soon after, perhaps in the same group; body number 224. His details were in the Nova Scotia Archive. Reading through them I cleared up one small mystery. In several accounts of the Titanic disaster, Hartley was said to have been found with his music case strapped to his body – as though he had died to save the muse as represented on his memorials. The original handwritten entry for him reads:

sex: male, est age 25. hair brown, clothing – uniform (green facing), brown overcoat, black boots, green box. [my italics], effects – gold fountain pen, WHH diamond solitaire ring, silver cigarette case, letter, silver match box marked to WHH from Collingson’s staff, Leeds, telegram to Hotley [sic], Bandmaster, Titanic, watch, gold chain, gold cigar holder, stud, scissors, sixteen shillings, 16 cents in coins.

A later typed entry amends the ‘green box’ to ‘green socks’, which were part of a White Star bandman’s uniform. Box/socks. I thought I could imagine the confusion: the undertaker’s clerk with his nib-pen scurrying across the page, a colleague opening each of 190 bags and identifying their contents, shouting his list in a noisy warehouse filled with bodies and ice.

That accounted for the music case. I decided I would pay my respects to the grave of John ‘Jock’ Hume of Dumfries.

The bodies which were buried in Halifax lie in three groups. The identifiably Catholic (such as the bassist, Clarke) were taken to the Mount Olivet cemetery. The identifiably Jewish to the Baron de Hirsch cemetery, from where some of them were quickly removed after an undignified squabble with the local rabbi, who was accused of being too eager to use debatable evidence (circumcision, probably) to call a body Jewish. But by far the largest number went to Halifax’s non-denominational cemetery, the Fairview, which is spread across a slope at the head of one of Halifax’s inlets from the Atlantic. It was a fine breezy afternoon, with a sparkle from the blue chop in the sound and the rippling green of the cemetery grass. Halifax now advertised itself as a chief port of call on the Titanic’s new tourist trail, and a big new sign had been erected: the titanic graves. A path, newly worn, led through the grass to a large oval of small uniform headstones, like those to the dead in Flanders. I bent among them, looking at this name and that, remembering the stories attached to some of them. Here (body 313) was Luigi Gatti, maître d’ of the ship’s French restaurant, who was found clutching the teddy bear his small daughter had given him before he left home in Southampton. And here (number 193) was ‘Jock’ Hume, whose parents in Scotland were later asked to stump up for an unpaid uniform bill – it became a small scandal.

There were 121 of these stones, some engraved only with numbers, and other than the occasional flower, very little sign that any of them had recently been remembered.

Then, further down the slope, I came across a grave which was heaped with tributes. Before the headstone to J. Dawson (number 227) candles had been lit and artificial flowers arranged. There were also several keys, some sweets, a crayon or two, a piece of chewing gum still in its wrapper, cinema tickets, and (the most striking thing) a large plastic model of a transatlantic liner – not the Titanic, but a three-funnelled ship which could have been the Queen Mary.

Someone had written a note: ‘Dear James Dawson, I feel sorry about your life. They should have built the Titanic stronger. Paula.’

This was the grave of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Keys, flowers, candles: all had been taken to the grave by the young people – girls mostly – who, I was told in Halifax, had towed their parents here from as far away as France and California. Most of the tributes I could understand, but the keys were a puzzle until I remembered that at one point in the film Dawson-DiCaprio is handcuffed to a pipe deep inside the sinking ship, the water rises to his neck, and, despite a frantic search, no keys can be found. (Can he be rescued? Yes. Enter Kate Winslet with an axe.)

But who was the J. Dawson under the headstone? According to the Novia Scotia Archive, he was a fireman, a stoker of coal. His body had been found unmarked and dressed in dungarees with a grey shirt. His estimated age was thirty. He had light hair and a moustache. The only item found on him was a card showing his membership (no. 35638) of the National Seamen’s Union. There was some confusion over his address, originally given as 17 Bolton Street, Southampton, then changed to 17 Briton Street, Dublin. Nothing else, so far as I can tell, is known about him, though we have some idea of how he worked.

Terry Coleman describes it well in his book, The Liners (1976). Here was the life of a fireman on a four-funnelled, coal-burning Atlantic liner:

At sea, they worked two four-hour spells in each twenty-four, lifting five tons of coal each a day . . . They worked in twenty-one minute spells. There were seven minutes to feed coals into furnaces whose heat scorched them, then seven minutes for cutting and clearing clinkers with long slicers, and then another seven for raking over. A man who was behind in any seven minutes could not escape being seen by his fellows to be weaker, and so the weak drove themselves to keep up with the strong. After three periods of seven minutes there was a short pause, and then a gong announced the beginning of another twenty-minutes. This was the fireman’s work for four hours on end, scorched by furnaces and choked by coal dust and by gases from white-hot clinkers and ashes. When they had finished their watches they often took the air with chests open to the cold Atlantic wind. They worked, ate, and then slept exhausted. They could not obtain drink aboard, so when they did get ashore they made up for this by getting and staying drunk. As firemen, only the Hungarians were as good as the Liverpool Irish.

It doesn’t seem, from this, that one of them would have had time to teach Kate Winslet to spit.

15

Flying home from Nova Scotia, the Titanic’s wreck somewhere in the sea beneath me, I thought: the Titanic story is so embarnacled with metaphor and myth that it hardly matters whether Wallace Hartley played his hymn or not (for the sake of Colne, I hoped he had). There are much bigger lies. The first is that the ship was billed as ‘unsinkable’. The great paradox of the Titanic is that it became unsinkable only after it sank, when White Star officials were anxious to counter early reports of the disaster. Previously the only reference in the company’s publicity to ‘unsinkability’ was a cautiously worded sentence in a 1910 brochure for the Olympic and the Titanic which said that ‘as far as it is possible to do so, these two wonderful vessels are designed to be unsinkable’.

Nor was the Titanic a particularly fast ship – her older Cunard and German rivals were three or four knots faster. Nor, though she was briefly the largest ship afloat, was the Titanic staggeringly huge; only one foot longer than her earlier sister, the Olympic, and significantly smaller than the German Imperator which went into Atlantic service later in the same year the Titanic went down.

But perhaps the largest untruth is in the hubris metaphor – in James Cameron’s words, that ‘mankind’s faith in his own indomitable power was forever destroyed by uniquely human shortcomings: arrogance, complacency and greed’. What in fact happened was that the lifeboat regulations were redrafted; ice patrols were introduced; hulls given a double lining of steel. Otherwise, Atlantic liners went on growing more luxurious, larger and swifter.

Hubris, if it had ever existed, was killed with the millions of names on the thousands of war memorials like the one in Colne. If it had ever existed, and – I thought, watching Titanic’s director holding his final Oscar aloft and calling out ‘King of the World!’ – if it has ever died.

16

On 20 May 1999, a cruise liner, the Sun Vista, caught fire in the Strait of Malacca and slowly began to sink. More than 1,100 passengers and crew were taken off in lifeboats and other small craft. Ram Yalamanchi, a businessman from India, said: ‘It was a true nightmare. I thought we were all going to die. We were on one of the last lifeboats, we watched her [the ship] slip into the water. People were screaming and praying.’

Many passengers sang to keep their spirits up. According to an Australian, Greg Haywood: ‘We were singing the Celine Dion song, “My Heart Will Go On”.’

Photograph © herbrm