And the Band Played On (23 page)

Dear Sir,

I note from a copy of the
Evening World
of January 16th sent by Mr R. Paul, 215 East 122nd Street N.Y. that claims for loss should be presented to you. Herewith I beg to present a claim for $2500 on account of the loss of my Son and two fine violins that he had with him on approval one by G. B. Guadagnini £200 and one by Thomaso Eberle £125.

He was but 21 years of age and had these items on the voyage with him for the purpose of choosing one of them as a life instrument, neither of them was insured unfortunately, and though the Contractors have been sued in the Liverpool Courts for compensation no redress has been obtained. The Mansion House fund have paid £92 declining at the same time any liability, while a personal note to Bruce Ismay of the White Star Line has also failed to obtain any satisfaction.

My Son Jock Law Hume would at this time have been permanently resident here with us and would have been worth at least £100 per annum to us, with this object in view this property was bought 4 years ago jointly by us for £500 on a £400 Bond at 4% £300 of which I am now quite hopelessly faced with alone and as I am now 50 years of age it is most unlikely that I can hope to clear it off without some assistance, the £92 paid being but a small portion. I’ll be obliged if you will kindly file this claim and put it forward with the others against the White Star line. Faithfully Yours

A. Hume (Father)

As insurance frauds go, Andrew Hume’s claim that Jock took with him on the
Titanic
two fine Italian violins invites disbelief as well as admiration for its audacity. Did Andrew Hume seriously think that anyone would believe that a twenty-one-year-old violin player earning £4 a month would have been given not one but two expensive violins to take with him on the voyage? In November 2006, ‘a violin by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, Milan, 1753’ was auctioned in London by Bromptons. The estimate was £150,000 to £200,000; the price realised was £317,250. Eberle violins are similarly prized now, as then, and both would have been beyond the pocket of a Dumfries music teacher.

Andrew’s regular championing of modern violins on the pages of
The Strad
also makes his claim highly suspicious. Jock is far more likely to have gone to sea with one of his father’s violins made ‘from the white’ and initialled A. H., for by 1912 Hume was trying to make a name for himself as a maker of violins.

But lastly, father and son were hardly speaking, if at all, in the last year of Jock’s life. Jock had been living with Mary Costin for the best part of a year and was planning to marry her against her father’s wishes.

The White Star Line declined to pay Andrew Hume one penny, either for the violins or for his son. Commissioner Gilchrist also dismissed his claim. But this did not deter Andrew Hume. He now had another target in his sights: Mary Costin.

17

Johnann Law Hume Costin

18 October, Dumfries

My mother, Johnann Law Hume Costin, was born at 11 a.m. on Friday 18 October 1912 at the Costin family home at 35 Buccleuch Street, Dumfries. By all accounts it was a much more straightforward affair than the birth of John Jacob Astor VI at 840 Fifth Avenue, New York, two months earlier. The midwife who helped bring my mother into the world scrubbed up as soon as she was sure that Mary and the baby were all right and left with the customary 15 shillings, which her mother, Susan Costin, gave her on the way out.

Despite the distress and anxiety that Mary had suffered, she was apparently thrilled with the baby, although there was a heated discussion about names. According to my mother, there had been no prior discussion about what the baby would be called. Mary had got it into her head that she was going to have a boy and had determined to call him John Law Hume Costin, the name intended more as a message to the Humes and the rest of Dumfries than a name for her child.

The arrival of a girl demanded a rapid rethink. Susan suggested by way of a compromise that the baby should be called Susan Kennedy Law Hume Costin, Susan Kennedy being her own maiden name. But Mary would not be budged, there had to be a ‘John’ in it and ‘Johnann’ was the name she insisted upon. As a girl’s Christian name Johnann was not uncommon in Scotland in the nineteenth century, although it was probably a misspelling for Johanna. My mother would later discard it for ‘Johanna’ and, finally, for ‘Jacqueline’.

Mary’s mother, Susan Costin, had taken most of what life had thrown at her with dignity and decorum, and very distressing stuff some of it had been, too. In her thirties she had buried two young daughters and her husband. Now in her early fifties, Susan realised that this had been useful training for the assault course of the past year: burying her son, William; losing a son-in-law whom she loved, for that is what Jock was to her; and comforting her grieving, pregnant and unmarried daughter, Mary.

After every one of life’s catastrophes, Susan Costin had picked herself up, gathered the survivors of her brood under her warm wings and gone about the business of feeding and looking after them, even if it meant going hungry herself. She never blamed God when things went wrong but always thanked him on the rare occasions they went right. The birth of her new granddaughter, Johnann, was one such occasion and the source of great joy to her.

This might explain why Susan took it upon herself, rather than leaving it to Mary, to break the news to Andrew Hume that he had become a grandfather. She can hardly have expected a warm reception but she probably reasoned – quite wrongly, as things turned out – that the birth of the child might lead to some kind of recognition of what had taken place; an acceptance that things were what they were; some compassion and understanding for what Mary had gone through, too; and something they could build on, for the sake of the child and to honour Jock’s memory.

She didn’t expect to be told that her daughter was a whore and to have the door slammed in her face.

Susan Costin was not a woman given to displays of emotion. Brought up towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, she understood the power of the understated: the munificent gaze into the distance to signify amusement, a quizzical knitting of the brow to indicate disapproval. Her children – and her late husband, William – would often gaze anxiously at this strong face to gauge the temperature of the moment.

Susan was a woman who drew strength from adversity, who had a very clear sense of what was right and what was wrong. She had given Andrew Hume the benefit of the doubt for two years but his lack of kindness and respect had made up her mind. Without saying another word to him, she walked down the York stone steps of 42 George Street and carried on walking over the bridge to Maxwelltown until she reached the offices of her employers, Messrs Walker & Sharpe, Writers to the Signet.

18

A Name and a Headstone for Jock

November 1912, Halifax, Nova Scotia

As soon as the White Star Line knew how many bodies had been recovered by the
Mackay-Bennett
, the company purchased a 3,600 sq ft area in Fairview Lawn Cemetery from Halifax council for $846 and engaged a surveyor, F. W. Christie, to design a layout for the 121 plots. Land was also purchased in nearby Mount Olivet Cemetery to bury the nineteen
Titanic
Catholic dead and in Baron de Hirsch Cemetery where the ten Jewish victims were to be interred.

At Fairview, Christie determined that there should be four rows of graves on a curve which, whether intentional or not, resembles the bow of a ship with a gash down its side. The large number of unidentified victims presented a problem requiring an expedient solution, as the bodies were quickly decomposing. A long trench was cut which would accommodate thirty-seven coffins a few feet apart. It is in this row that my grandfather Jock Hume was buried, a few yards away from the ‘unknown child’, the youngest recovered victim of the disaster.

The logistics of sourcing the stone and then producing nearly 150 granite headstones in a short space of time was another problem that had to be overcome. The contract for this work was given by the White Star Line to Frederick Bishop of Halifax Marble Works but the lettering was done by Frank Fitzgerald, who did it in such a way that a name could be added to the headstone at any time in the future.

While Bishop set about this task, numbered wooden crosses served as headstones for the unidentified dead. It seems likely that my grandfather Jock was identified in time for his name to be included on his headstone before Fitzgerald commenced the lettering. By Christmas 1912 all the work was completed with the headstones in place. The White Star Line paid for all the burials and set up a trust fund of $7,500 to care for the
Titanic
graves in all three cemeteries. This proved to be insufficient to maintain the areas and for decades there were arguments about grass cutting and tulip planting. In 1944 Halifax City Council assumed responsibility for Fairview Lawn Cemetery.

It is a beautiful and well-maintained cemetery and it is impossible not to be moved by it. People – not only relatives – come here from all over the world to pay their respects to the 121 brave men, women and children here who were betrayed by the arrogance and recklessness of the White Star Line.

I visited my grandfather’s grave for the first time in the early nineties and went back there in 2010 and again in 2011. A century after the disaster, forty of the dead have still not been identified. To the left of Jock lies body number 257, who, according to the archives was a clean-shaven man, aged about thirty-eight, 5ft 7ins tall and weighing 185lbs with ‘a very large forehead’. He was wearing a green striped shirt, a boiler suit with a double-breasted jacket on top. ‘Possibly an engineer’, says the report. To the right of Jock is number 179, ‘possibly a fireman’ with a small light moustache and weighing 190lbs. His age is estimated at ‘about 26’ but nothing was found on him to indicate his identity and no one has come forward to claim his body.

There are no flowers on these graves but a few yards to the right is a superior granite monolith marking the grave of the youngest child whose body was recovered, the two-year-old boy whose identity has been debated for a century. Most of the
Titanic
dead have few visitors and their graves remain bare, but a constant stream of tourists ensure that the child’s grave is festooned with bouquets, teddy bears and cuddly lambs in the modern manner of expressing grief. The grave of ‘J Dawson’, number 227, a trimmer in the great ship’s boiler room, is similarly feted, many visitors believing him to be Jack Dawson, the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film
Titanic
.

Bruce Ismay’s secretary William Harrison is buried here, as is Ismay’s assistant Ernest Freeman, number 239. Ismay paid for ‘something more substantial’ to mark the men’s graves, no doubt out of a sense of shame and guilt. Freeman’s dedication says: ‘He remained at his post of duty, seeking to save others, regardless of his own life and went down with the ship.’ One wonders if Ismay, when dictating the words to his replacement secretary, realised the irony of the epitaph he had chosen for Freeman whose ‘long and faithful service’ was rewarded in this way.