A new biography about Wallace Hartley was published last month, written by Norwegian Christian G Tennyson-Ekeberg.

One of the questions he tried to answer was whether Hartley’s musical quintet played solemn hymns or ragtime when the Titanic sank bow-first into the dark cold waters of the North Atlantic in the early hours of Monday, April 15, 1912, killing more than 1,500 passengers and crew.

The title of his book, Nearer Our God To Thee, suggests which side of the argument Tennyson-Ekeberg comes down on; but, as he says, there were many different arrangements of that hymn Hartley would have known.

After Titanic’s 703 survivors were rescued, some remembered the band playing cheery ragtime tunes to try to keep alarmed passengers from panicking.

Hartley was a professional violinist. He did not come from Yorkshire, as some people think. He was born in Colne, Lancashire, in June 1878.

But his family moved to Huddersfield and then Dewsbury, and being a highly musical fellow he would have been familiar with the various forms of music-making in and around Bradford, Halifax, Leeds and points south.

Atlantic crossings were as commonplace for him. Hartley was a veteran with 80 trips to his name in liners such as the Mauretania and Lusitania.

Even though he was hoping to leave the sea and settle down with a wife and family, the chance to cross the Atlantic on the maiden voyage of the White Star Line’s newest, biggest, fastest ship, was evidently impossible to resist.

The word went round that the ship was unsinkable because of its series of compartmentalised bulkheads below decks. Damage below the waterline could be contained, so it was thought.

But the bulkheads did not go all the way up to the ceiling, as they were designed to do. Modifications to the ship’s interior to accommodate an elaborate central staircase reportedly resulted in a shortening of the bulkheads.

Spillover from one bulkhead to another weighed the ship down and dragged the bows under the sea after the collision with the iceberg. But the really unthinkable aspect of the liner was the fact that only 20 life-saving craft were aboard, sufficient for 1,178 people. Board of Trade regulations were lax.

The vessel carried 2,206 passengers and crew for the five-day voyage from Southampton to New York. Eleven millionaires had each paid £870 for first-class accommodation.

The subsequent inquiry had to rely on conflicting eyewitness accounts.

Some blamed Titanic’s skipper Captain Smith for travelling too fast in spite of radioed warnings of pack ice and icebergs. Others blamed the California, only 20 miles to starboard, for not reacting to Titanic’s SOS calls and distress rockets.

The world in general was just astonished that the unthinkable had happened. The Bradford Daily Telegraph’s six decks of headlines included the declaration: “Worst Disaster in History”.