RMS Titanic Book Reviews: "It is impossible to stand. The music’s sounds are lost in an increasingly thunderous roar ... "

Collectively, the brave musicians are among the best remembered of the disaster’s details. There are more statues and plaques, more public observances, more memorials to the gallant bandsmen than to any other of the wreck’s groups. And rightly so.

But there are also more pages of legality, of Court documents; more folios involving accusation and litigation concerning the bandsmen than for any group or individual associated with the wreck. There are questions that seek answers regarding their status aboard ship; property and employment rights; of who owned the music sheets they used, even the uniforms they wore. But by far, the most unusual of these actions are a paternity suit and the bitter court struggle of an unwed mother to regain her rights and those of her child’s.

And the Band Played On, a splendid book by the British journalist Christopher Ward, truly takes up where the drama of Titanic’s loss leaves off. Mr. Ward’s excellent research takes the reader to Halifax, where a jumble of unidentified bodies must be given names and a proper burial; it moves on to tell the sad tale of a young girl’s deep love that could not wait for marriage; to civil records that limn Andrew Hume, as dishonest and avaricious a father as might have graced the pages of Charles Dickens; of recognition pitifully sought and cruelly denied; of love and life triumphant over adversity.

To this already-existing mix of heady intrigue is added a gratuitous side show — the dark tale of yet another young girl (sister to the drowned bandsman) who, perhaps in mental compensation for the death of a mother, a grand mother, and, now, a beloved brother, perpetuates a hoax with international implications, is imprisoned and must — yes — go to court, where she is absolved by a sympathetic judge.

That there is so much more to Titanic’s saga than the recounting of a ship destroyed by Nature during her maiden voyage. This book lets us peer beyond the veil of Victorian and Edwardian propriety for a glimpse of the repercussions and implications that, for two families, rippled far beyond the vortex left from the sinking liner.

(Readers of this book might also find of interest RMS Titanic, ‘Dinner is served’ by Yvonne Hume, [ISBN 978184603334845], menus and recipes from the great liner revisited by a great niece of Titanic violinist John Law Hume. It contains a page devoted to her illustrious ancestor as well as some excellent gustatory recollections of Edwardian shipboard adventures.)

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RMS Titanic Book Reviews: "It is impossible to stand. The music’s sounds are lost in an increasingly thunderous roar ... "

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