It is the stuff of Titanic legend. Perhaps more than any other story from the sinking of that "unsinkable" vessel on 14 April 1912, we all recall the one about the ship's band, whose members played on to the very last -- their bandleader, Wallace Hartley, conducting them in a final rendition of Nearer My God To Thee as the Titanic disappeared beneath the freezing Atlantic waters.

Although doubts have been expressed about what exactly they were playing as the ship went down, the eight musicians on board -- none of whom survived -- are heroes in every account of the Titanic's sinking. The courage of these men, who carried on playing even after the last lifeboat had departed and the captain had given his final order of "Abandon ship, every man for himself!", is etched in every retelling of the events of that awful night. It's there, inevitably, in James Cameron's $200 million film epic, currently packing them in at cinemas around the country, with some of the tunes played by the bandsmen's long-lost instruments providing the musical backdrop to his emotional tour de force between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

Yet what neither Cameron's film nor virtually any of the other accounts of the Titanic's sinking tell us is that when the families of the drowned musicians applied to the White Star Shipping Line, the owners of the Titanic, for compensation after the tragedy, they were turned down flat. The musicians were deemed not to be crew members, according to White Star, since they were not employed directly by the company but through agents. The agents, in turn, denied that they had any responsibility towards the dead men's families -- although they did try to get the family of Jock Hume, the Titanic's violinist, to accept a once-only payoff of five shillings (25p) in settlement of any claim against them. Eventually it took the intervention of charities to ensure that the men's dependents were not left destitute.

Acknowledged crew members fared little better, even though the White Star Line still managed to record profits of £1,082,277 in the year of the sinking. While surviving first-class passengers or their relatives filed large claims for lost valuables and other possessions (the man who owned the car featured in James Cameron's film -- in real-life a new 25 horsepower Renault automobile -- claimed $5,000 for its loss), White Star Line employees and their families found themselves having to fight for every penny. Surviving crew members even had their wages stopped the day after the Titanic went down -- because the company ruled that they no longer had jobs now that the vessel on which they had been employed had sunk.

Cameron's film pulls no punches in depicting the class divisions of Edwardian society as they revealed themselves on the Titanic, nor in demonstrating how the company's lust for profit contributed to the disaster and increased the number of casualties. But the fictional devices around which his Hollywood blockbuster is constructed, particularly the improbable love affair acted out by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, mean necessarily that only part of that side to the story can be told.

In common with the 1958 classic, A Night To Remember, which didn't feel the need to enwrap itself in a fabricated love story, Cameron's film does show clearly how the Titanic's owners ignored safety considerations -- setting off with a fire burning in its coal stores, racing recklessly at full steam through ice-ridden waters, providing lifeboat places for barely half of the 2,228 people on board. It shows, too, how first-class passengers were prioritised at the expense of those in "steerage"; how third class passengers were not even told that the ship was sinking for at least an hour and a half; how gates were locked and armed officers posted to prevent the lower classes from reaching the upper decks until the last lifeboat had been launched; and how the myth of "women and children first" fell apart with male first class passengers being saved while women and children from the lower decks were left to drown.

Yet the film cannot quite convey the full magnitude of those class distinctions and what they meant to people's survival chances. At least 58 male passengers travelling first class on the Titanic were saved, while at least 49 children travelling third class drowned. Overall, almost two-thirds of first class passengers were saved -- together with at least two pet dogs -- but fewer than a quarter of third class passengers and crew. More than half of the women and children travelling third class perished, and more than 80% of the men.

Perhaps cruellest of all was the fact that while second and third class passengers were being prevented from leaving the lower decks, lifeboats were being launched half empty on the decks above. As the lords and ladies of the upper classes complained about the "discomforts" of having to share boats with others who had not paid the $4,350 price of their first class suites, a total of 472 lifeboat places were left unfilled.

In one lifeboat, the upper class occupants argued for the removal of a crew member -- because he was Chinese. In another, Emergency Boat 1, Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon and her secretary were accompanied by only two other passengers as they made their escape from the sinking vessel. The other seven occupants were all crew -- a total of 12 people in a boat that was intended to hold 40.

Even after the Titanic had sunk, the Duff-Gordons' lifeboat was not used to try to save people crying out for help in the icy water. The Duff-Gordons claimed later that the decision not to attempt to rescue survivors was taken by the crew members in their boat; others were to testify that Lord Duff-Gordon paid the men five pounds apiece (the equivalent of three or four weeks' wages) to row away from the scene. Either way, an indication of the Lord and Lady's attitude towards the disaster may be gauged from their attempt to assemble the occupants of their lifeboat for some photographs as a souvenir of their "adventure" when they were picked up by the rescue ship Carpathia.

When the official inquiry into the disaster was held in Britain, the Duff-Gordons ended up as the only passengers to be called to give evidence -- and even that was only to enable them to defend their "good names" against their accusers. The inquiry had no desire to call either the upper class passengers on the Titanic, or its owners, to account. No one was held to have been at fault; the White Star Shipping Line faced no sanctions.

Another inquiry, held in America under the auspices of Senator William Alden Smith, reached broadly similar conclusions. But Smith did at least take evidence from some of the survivors, including three third class passengers. These told of how they had been threatened with criminal charges for "destruction of property" as they broke through locked gates to get to the lifeboat deck, how they had had to fight their way through against crew members under instructions to stop them, and how they had pleaded for at least their womenfolk and children to be allowed through. Survivors from first class, meanwhile, complained bitterly that any members of these "lower orders" had been saved when some first class passengers had not.

Senator Smith was clearly not impressed by British class distinctions; his inquiry was to rule that, in future, rescue operations should be conducted without regard to the class of one's ticket. Yet even he had to submit to class privilege at times. When they arrived in Washington to give evidence to his inquiry, for example, the surviving officers from the Titanic were given rooms in the same hotel as ordinary crew members. One of them lodged an official complaint that officers could not be expected to reside alongside their men.

Smith retorted angrily that the captain of the Titanic was now bunked with his men beneath the waves. To no avail -- the British officers let it be known that they would refuse to give evidence unless the arrangements were changed. The ordinary crewmen had to be moved to another hotel. Even following a disaster that claimed more than 1,500 lives, there were still those for whom the briefest dose of equal treatment was simply too much to bear.