Mistery of Eerie Music Played as Titanic Sank Is Solve

The mystery behind a song played in a lifeboat as the Titanic sank has been solved after it was featured on the Telegraph website. 

By Jasper Copping

2:48PM BST 23 Aug 2013

 

The tune came from a musical toy pig belonging to one of the passengers who played it repeatedly to comfort children in the lifeboat and block out the sounds of the dying in the water around them.

The device had been broken for several decades but was fixed last week by experts at the National Maritime Museum. However, they were unable to identify the song, which was played on the Telegraph website earlier this week.

They have since looked into suggestions from readers and have been able to identify it as La Sorella, by Charles Borel-Clerc and Louis Gallini, which was written about seven years before the Titanic sank, with the loss of around 1,500 lives.

The story of the pig and its song has entered Titanic folklore and is often described as being a Maxixe song, the music played to accompany a South American dance, similar to the tango. 

In fact, La Sorella is also known as La Matchiche – pronounced in the same way – thus explaining why it has been incorrectly described.

Rory McEvoy, a curator at the museum, said: “We would like to thank everyone for their enthusiastic response in naming the Titanic musical toy pig’s tune and are delighted to be able to confirm that the tune is La Sorella, composed in around 1905 by Charles Borel-Clerc. The tune is also known as La Matchiche, which confirms the attribution that came to the Museum with the pig in 2003.”

The pig belonged to Edith Rosenbaum, who survived the sinking. It was passed to the museum in 2003 as part of a collection from Walter Lord and William MacQuitty, respectively the author and film producer of the 1958 film of the sinking, A Night to Remember, on which Rosenbaum was a consultant.

By then, the pig had long since stopped working. However, experts at the museum carried out three dimensional, X-ray scans of the object to find out how the musical box inside worked.

They discovered that its curly tail, which was used to turn the device, had detached and become stuck inside. By analysing the scans, they were able to insert a small brass rod to the device, to turn the mechanism and play the song. They only played it three times, to ensure the device was not damaged, but made a recording of the tune.

The tail has now been reattached and the object is to be put back on display next week. A hairpin was also retrieved from inside, probably inserted in an effort to fix the music box after the tail had fallen off.

Rosenbaum was 32 at the time of the sinking. An American fashion journalist and stylist, she had been reporting on French fashions at Paris’ Easter Sunday races before boarding the ship at Cherbourg, as a first class passenger, along with 19 cases and the pig.

The animal had been given to her by her mother as a good luck mascot, after Rosenbaum survived a car accident the year before in which her fiancé, a German gun manufacturer, had been killed.

After boarding the Titanic, she had written a letter to her secretary in Paris, posted from Queenstown – the ship’s final port of call – in which she praised the vessel, but added: “I cannot get over my feeling of depression and premonition of trouble.” 

She was in her cabin when the ship hit the iceberg and saw it move past, through her porthole. She went on deck before returning to collect the pig, as the passengers were mustered near the lifeboats.

She initially refused to get into a boat, apparently climbing back out of one of them – like many passengers, she was apparently certain the liner would not sink.

A sailor then grabbed the pig – made of wood and papier maché, with an outer layer of actual pig skin – from under her arm and threw it into the lifeboat, telling her: “You don’t want to be saved, well I’ll save your baby”.

She then followed the pig, climbing into Lifeboat 11. She later recalled: “When they threw that pig, I knew it was my mother calling me.”

The passengers on the lifeboat were picked up by the ship Carpathia, after seven hours adrift.

After the sinking, one apparently mistaken passenger complained that another had had a real pig on board the lifeboat. Rosenbaum was said to be initially embarrassed by the disclosure she had taken a toy pig with her. She later filed two of the largest damage claims against the ship’s owners, for loss of her belongings and personal injury.

The writer, who, along with her pig, was depicted in the film A Night to Remember, was later one of the earliest female war correspondents, spending time with troops in the trenches during the First World War. In 1918, she changed her surname to the less Germanic-sounding Russell.

She later lived at the Embassy House Hotel in London, and died in the city in 1975.

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