The Band That Played On by Steve Turner Read Free Book Online Page B

lean face, dark-brown eyes, long hair, blackish, with a rich brown lustre—not overlong, but I never saw it short.”
    By the time Charlie Black invited him to lead the band on the Titanic, he had been at sea for almost three years working his way up from second violin on the Lucania to bandmaster of the Mauretania . Each Atlantic crossing at this time took between five and six days. There would then be four days at the port for refueling, maintenance, replenishment of essential goods, and the taking on of cargo and passengers. It was during these times that Hartley came to know and love New York with its vibrancy, optimism, and range of new entertainment.
    When Katherine Hurd arrived there with her husband, Carlos, in April 1912 to board the Carpathia , these were her initial impressions as conveyed in a letter to her mother: “New York is tremendous—something like I expected it to be only a thousand times more so. And with all its size it is so beautifully clean.” Although New York was large and bustling, it was still far from the densely packed city bristling with skyscrapers that we bring to mind today.
    Often described as a Yorkshireman because his last address was in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, Hartley was born and spent his formative years in Colne, Lancashire, five and a half miles north of Burnley. It was close to the Yorkshire border but the historic rivalry between the two counties, which had started on battlefields and continued on cricket pitches, meant that you belonged to one county or the other regardless of geographical proximity.
    Hartley’s roots on both sides of the family were deep in the Lancashire soil. His father, Albion Hartley, was born in Colne, as were Albion’s parents, Henry and Mary. Albion married Elizabeth Foulds, also from Colne, whose parents had grown up in the area. All of them worked with cotton, the town’s primary industry. Henry Hartley had been a cotton weaver and Mary a dressmaker. Elizabeth was a worsted weaver (a person who worked with worsted wool), and Albion started as a cotton-sizer (a worker who applied a gluelike substance to prepared cotton to make it easier to work with) and eventually became a mill manager.
    Cotton and the industrial revolution had turned Colne from a small hilltop village into a typical mill town of industrial buildings and back-to-back workers’ houses. An 1872 gazetteer summed the town up in numbers: three churches, five dissenting chapels, a mechanic’s institute, two endowed schools, a post office, a bank, and two inns. There were 1,357 houses and a population of 6,315. Twenty years later the population had tripled.
    John Wesley, the great British preacher, visited Colne several times in the latter half of the eighteenth century and knew of its tough and violent reputation. Although still a minister of the Church of England, Wesley believed in evangelizing in the open air and he relentlessly traveled across Britain on horseback, preaching the gospel to those who would never enter a place of worship. His approach outraged traditional churchmen who believed it degraded preaching and removed the mystery and splendor from religion. George White, the vicar of Colne, was a vociferous opponent of Wesley and would organize drunken mobs to attack him when he visited the area. One of Wesley’s helpers was even thrown to his death off a bridge.
    Wesley never left the Church of England, but his followers did. The breakaway denomination became known as Methodism and had a particular appeal to ordinary working people who found the established church out of touch with their needs—too much a church for the well-off and powerful. When Methodism gripped a community it had observable social effects because Wesley taught that followers of Christ should be thrifty, charitable, sober, honest, and concerned with developing their minds and bodies as well as their souls. The result was an increase in schools, music groups, orchestras, and benevolent societies, and a