Did the band play on until the end?
That Titanic‘s eight-man band played on until the very end and finished with the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee” is one of the most enduring myths surrounding the disaster. It is, however, just that: a myth. Not only would it have been physically impossible for the full orchestra to keep playing (owing to the Titanic‘s increasingly severe list); but disagreement among the survivors—both those in the water and those out at sea in the lifeboats—about which song was played, combined with the fact that there were several versions of the “Nearer My God to Thee” in existence none of which all band members knew, means we can now confidently dispel it.
What is certain is that, in an effort to calm the passengers and, presumably, give themselves some small measure of comfort, they continued to play into the early hours, long after all hope was lost. The band was composed of Wallace Hartley’s quintet and another piano trio, which combined together first to play in the first class lounge and then to play up on the boat deck. They would have started cheerfully, playing waltzes, lowbrow popular pieces and highbrow classical compositions—a typically Edwardian medley. What they ended with, however, is the subject of much debate.
Colonel Archibald Gracie, who remained on the Titanic until the bitter end, vehemently denied that the band had played “Nearer My God to Thee”, writing that doing so would have been “a tactless warning of imminent death”. Gracie’s book was only published in America. But over in Britain, doubts were already trailing from the pen of the Anglo-Irish playwright and polemicist George Bernard Shaw who saw the band playing a Christian hymn as an essential, Christian component of a tragedy-turned-triumph type myth. In all likelihood—as those in close vicinity of the foundering ship later testified—the final song was the marginally more upbeat “Song d’Automme“.
So why was this idea so widespread? Firstly it had precedent. During the tragic sinking of the Valencia, run aground on a reef in the middle of a terrible storm in 1906, it was reported that before the ship foundered the women stranded aboard stared death in the face and gave a defiant rendition of the hymn. Secondly—and where Bernard Shaw hit the nail on the head—the idea of the band playing “Nearer My God to Thee” as the ship went under, spilling thousands to their deaths the icy ocean, was powerfully symbolic. The song was strong, stubborn challenge to the finality of death. It’s not hard to see why people liked to imagine they had played it.
Regardless, the myth became deeply ingrained. A facsimile of the hymns score was printed on the front of the world’s bestselling newspaper, the Daily Mirror. “Nearer My God to Thee” was splashed across the front of postcards (an Edwardian craze), found its way into poetry, prose and art on both sides of the Atlantic, and provided the soundtrack for funerals—most notably of Wallace Hartley—and memorials: most famously at the enormously attended memorial service at Westminster Chapel on April 26, 1912.