By Richard Jones – Echo History writer
When the news filtered through to the mainland on the morning of Monday 15th April, 1912 it was very ambiguous.
Reports were coming in that the world’s largest ocean liner, the White Star Liner Titanic, had met with some kind of collision at sea with an iceberg. Some of the earliest front pages announced that the ship was damaged but still afloat, being towed to Halifax (Canada) and that most, if not all, of her passengers and crew were safe.
But just hours later the terrible truth emerged, that not only had the ship gone down in less than three hours, but around 1500 of the people on board had gone down with her.
Overnight she had been propelled into the forefront of everybody’s mind, becoming the most infamous ship in history and the word Titanic is now synonymous with disaster. But now, 113 years this month since the disaster shocked the world, we can look back on how the sinking affected individual towns and cities, from a tiny village in Ireland that lost 11 people from the same family, to the big cities of London, New York, Liverpool and Paris.
But there are also several links to this disaster that brings to the name of this ship to Bridlington in more ways than one.
Long before the ship had even been designed a man named Wallace Hartley had played in the town as violinist, entertaining crowds of holidaymakers during the seasons of 1902 to 1904, with a variety of visits in between.
He was part of the orchestra at the Floral Pavilion as well as having links to the Spa theatre, but for Hartley he was destined for travelling as he found work on board liners such as the Mauretania and later on down the line, Titanic. When the ship was at sea Hartley would play with the band, him being not only violinist but the band leader, hired by a music agency called Blacks so technically they were neither crew nor passengers and they would rely on tips from the passengers to form a wage.
When disaster struck on the night of 14 April 1912 it was Hartley and his band that struck up the tunes to calm the passengers as the ship went down under their feet. It always went down in legend that the last tune played on board the ship was Nearer My God, To Thee as the lifeboats pulled away. None of the band survived.
Hartley’s body was recovered several days later and he was buried in his birthplace of Colne in Lancashire, but the violin made its way back to the person who gifted it to him many years before – his fiancée Maria Robinson who moved to Bridlington where he had played for so many seasons in the past.
She handed the instrument on and died in 1939, being buried in Leeds, the violin being passed around the town for many years until one day somebody came forward with announcing that they would be putting it up for auction. What they didn’t realise was just how valuable it was and, after several years of tests to confirm the authenticity of it, the Hartley violin which has been immortalised in most of the Titanic movies as the ship sinks, was sold for an incredible £1.1million.
But Wallace Hartley and his violin were not the only link to Titanic for Bridlington. During the First World War the ships off the coast had to travel in convoy to protect them from German U-boats which had already claimed countless lives. One of these ships protecting the convoys was the small destroyer HMS Falcon, commanded by Charles Herbert Lightoller, the senior surviving officer of the Titanic.
Already he had become famous for escaping the wreck in 1912, but as the years went by he ended up surviving three times, a sailing vessel in 1899, Titanic in 1912 and then he was on board the White Star liner Oceanic when it grounded in 1914 in the Shetland Islands.
On 1 April 1918 the war had been going on for almost four years and Lightoller was escorting a convoy off the Yorkshire coast in pitch black, the lights all extinguished so that submarines wouldn’t see them. But suddenly the armed trawler HMS John Fitzgerald collided with the Falcon and sliced the ship clean in two.
As the bow section sank, Lightoller and two other officers were stranded on the stern until that too went down forcing them into the water until they were rescued half an hour later. Sadly one man had died in the sinking and his body was later recovered.
Fast forward to the 1990’s and by now there are thousands of shipwrecks off the Yorkshire coast area and local diver Bill Woolford was out hunting for some of them when him and his dive buddies came across one half of the Falcon, with some incredibly well preserved artefacts that he was able to recover and restore back to former glory. One of them, an engine room return telegraph was eventually back to working again still with a ringing bell!
So with two major links to the Titanic, Bridlington has also got it’s fair share of enthusiasts living amongst us, Chris Wardlow from Bempton being one, who donated a ship’s bell to the Belfast museum to use on board the restored White Star tender Nomadic.
You only have to go into the pub Stirling Castle to see the ship adorned on the walls and if you look at the entrance to the Spa theatre there is a plaque to Wallace Hartley honouring him and his time in Bridlington.
A more in depth story of this I wrote RMS Titanic – The Bridlington Connections in 2019 and featured several interesting parts to the town including how the local newspapers reported the disaster at the time. It is amazing just how much there is to know about this one ship and how it can be linked to this one small town in East Yorkshire. It just goes to show just how far reaching this disaster has spread.
For further details contact Mr Jones on via email shipwreckdata@yahoo.co.uk
