And the Band Played On (8 page)

The entrance to the building was up five broad granite steps through two large wrought-iron gates. A porter’s lodge lay to the right, a man in White Star Line uniform positioned to intervene at the first sign of trouble. Inside the large entrance area, two large trestle tables had been hastily erected, one clearly marked ‘Passengers’, the other ‘Crew’. Although strictly ‘crew’ the
Titanic
musicians had been travelling as passengers on a Second Class ticket number 250654. Andrew therefore queued to make enquiries at both desks. At neither desk was he able to get any information about Jock or the band, other than assurances that as soon as there was any news, the White Star Line would be in touch.

Today, two oval plaques, erected by the City of Liverpool on either side of the entrance, are the only reminders to passers-by of the building’s history. One says, ‘Headquarters of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (White Star Line). Founded by T. H. Ismay 1869’. The other says, ‘Former White Star Building 1896–98, R. Norman Shaw, architect’.

There is no mention of the
Titanic
, which brought shame and infamy to the Ismays and the White Star Line and eventually led to their ruin.

From the White Star building, Andrew walked down the Strand to Brunswick Street, where he turned right and walked up to Castle Street. When he reached number 14 he climbed the spiral wrought-iron staircase through the atrium of the building until he reached the third floor, where an engraved glass panelled door announced the firm of C. W. & F. N. Black, Musical Agents.

Two years earlier, the two brothers, Charles and Frederick Black, had approached all the shipping lines with a proposal that they should be given an exclusive contract to supply and employ musicians for ships’ orchestras, relieving the shipping industry of the burden of negotiating individually with musicians whose ability they could not possibly be in a position to judge.

The Blacks promised to give the shipping lines ‘a better deal’, which they did immediately by cutting the wages of sea-going musicians, from the £6 10s per month they were currently being paid by the ships’ owners to £4 per month. At the same time, they withdrew the monthly ‘uniform allowance’ of 10s per month, making the musicians themselves responsible for their bandsmen’s tunics and the brass buttons that had to be changed every time they worked on a different ship, and deducting the cost of their sheet music from their wages. The Amalgamated Musicians Union protested about these enforced terms but their members soon discovered they had little option but to accept them. After deductions bandsmen received little more than a shilling a day while at sea.

Jock, along with the other seven musicians in the
Titanic
’s band, was therefore employed by Blacks and not by the White Star Line. Later, this catch-22 loophole would be exploited by both companies to side step their responsibilities.

As a musician, Andrew Hume was not well disposed to Charles and Frederick Black, both of whom he knew well. But he recognised that they enjoyed a close relationship with the White Star Line and might be more forthcoming about news of his son. They were.

Before heading back to Dumfries from Lime Street, Andrew Hume had just enough time to send a telegram home. It said simply:

5

Jock and Mary

A thunderbolt at the Rood Fair

At the beginning of the last century, when Jock and Mary were still at school, Dumfries was enjoying something of a renaissance. Education had become both compulsory and free, with rarely more than fifteen to a class. The philanthropist Andrew Carnegie had funded the building of a large and handsome public library, the Ewart. The town’s Theatre Royal, Scotland’s oldest working theatre, where Robert Burns and J. M. Barrie had regularly performed, embraced the new world of cinema by screening silent films. A bridge was built linking the two communities of Dumfries and Maxwelltown for the first time. Although motor cars were seldom seen on the town’s cobbled streets, an iron foundry began manufacturing vehicles and a dog-cart builder seized the opportunity to build car bodies. The town’s main industry – wool – found profitable new markets overseas.

Opportunities for travel were broadening everyone’s horizons. Railway branch lines had been extended, putting the whole of Britain within reach of Dumfries in a day. By sea, coasters laden with Dumfries sandstone or wool provided a quick and easy link to the major ports of Liverpool and Glasgow – and from there to the rest of the world, as Jock would soon discover. By 1910, the major shipping lines were dominating advertisement pages in the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
, offering affordable passages to almost every destination in the world: the United States, Canada, South America, South Africa, Egypt and Australia.

Yet Dumfries, with wool and clog-making still its main exports, kept one foot firmly in the past, holding on to its traditional values and customs. Religion remained a powerful influence on people’s lives, with twenty churches serving eight denominations. Superstitions, some dating back to the Middle Ages, continued to hold people in fear – a bird down the chimney signalling an imminent death in the family. Many children still ran around in bare feet, although all but the poorest now had shoes. Centuries-old traditions carried on as before, particularly the regular fairs held at fixed points in the calendar. These included the ‘hiring’ fairs held twice a year, at which farm workers offered themselves for employment, and the frequent horse and cattle sales, staged weekly on the broad stretch of land overlooking the River Nith at Whitesands, to which gypsies would journey 100 miles or more to sell or buy ponies.

The most important event of them all was the Rood Fair, held on the last Wednesday in September. The Rood Fair started in the sixteenth century as an agricultural show at which livestock and produce were sold and exchanged. By the beginning of the twentieth century it had also become Dumfries’s major social event of the year and been designated a public holiday. People young and old came from miles around, everyone dressing up for the occasion. You could still buy a sheep, a sack of seed potatoes or a bottle of wine shipped from Bordeaux. But there was drinking and dancing, stalls and entertainment. Trading restrictions were lifted for the day and so, too, were other social constraints and inhibitions. Most years, Pinden’s Circus would set up their marquee for the whole week, bringing acrobats, jugglers, fortune-tellers and dancing bears. It was always tremendous fun, with stories that had everyone laughing until Christmas. In 1904 a policeman went to investigate a break-in at a grain merchant on Brewery Street. He made a hasty retreat after discovering an elephant called Jumbo with his trunk in a sack of barley.

According to my mother, it was at the Rood Fair in 1909 that Jock’s oldest sister, Nellie, introduced Jock to her friend from the glove making factory, Mary Costin, who was eighteen. Jock had recently returned from the maiden voyage of the White Star liner
Megantic
, which had sailed from Liverpool to Montreal and, not surprisingly, he was rather full of himself. He had taken his fiddle with him to the fair and, there and then, played a little jig for Mary. ‘And that was it, for both of them,’ my great-grandmother, Susan, later told everyone. ‘For both of them it was a thunderbolt. They seemed made for each other.’

It says a lot for Mary Costin that she was able to capture young Jock’s heart at all, let alone keep his attention for the next two years. He was on a roll at the time, travelling the world on luxury ships, meeting rich and famous people and enjoying a boisterous social life in crew quarters. Emotionally, Jock had already left Dumfries behind him, but at the Rood Fair that day Mary somehow managed to reel him in.

The only picture of my grandmother Mary Costin that has survived was taken several years later in her mid-twenties, four or five years after his death. She is a good-looking young woman whose appearance is striking, but she has a coolness about her that verges on the intimidating. Maybe this was just what Jock needed to help him keep his feet firmly on the ground. Which makes it even harder to understand why Jock’s father Andrew Hume was so implacably opposed to their relationship.

John (‘Jock’) Law Hume was born on 9 August 1890 at the family home, 5 Nith Place, Dumfries. ‘Law’ was his mother Grace’s maiden name. Jock was Andrew and Grace Hume’s second child – Nellie, the first of three daughters, having arrived two years earlier. For all his father’s relentless self-promotion as a music teacher and a performer, the Humes were a fairly ordinary family struggling to make ends meet. Andrew was the son of a farm labourer who was now working as an orderly at the Dumfries lunatic asylum; Grace was a former laundress, the daughter of an iron moulder. Today, 5 Nith Place is a kebab takeaway and now, as then, the street is likely to flood when the River Nith bursts its banks. But you would never guess any of these things looking at the studio portrait of Andrew Hume, the dapper dandy with the trim Edwardian moustache, posing with his violin and wearing his tails and white tie.

Jock’s two younger sisters, Grace and Catherine (Kate), were born in 1892 and 1897, which suggests that there may have been a miscarriage between the birth of the two girls, the Humes’ family planning otherwise falling into the routine of a child every other year. Their last child, Andrew, was clearly an afterthought. He was born in 1901 when Jock was eleven. His mother was unwell even before she became pregnant with him but afterwards she went into a decline, becoming a virtual invalid for the next five years and dying of cancer of the oesophagus in 1906, aged forty.

It would be nice to imagine the Humes as a Scottish von Trapp family making the hills of Dumfries and Galloway come alive with the sound of music. Certainly there was a lot of ‘doh re mi’ going on in the house: during the day, there was a constant stream of people, young and old, calling at the house for personal tuition in the violin, guitar, banjo or piano. Later, after school, it would be Andrew’s own children practising their scales, Kate and Andrew growing up to be talented musicians like their father and their brother Jock. But there was no happy laughter. Andrew Hume was a bully who ruled the family home through an unlovely combination of irritation with his wife and children when he was at home and neglect during his frequent absences on business.

It was particularly difficult for the two older children, Jock and Nellie, who hated their father for not being there and then hated him even more when he came back and made their mother cry. They became the buffers between their father and the rest of the family. The Humes needed a governess with a heart of gold but after Grace’s death, instead of Julie Andrews, they got a stereotype wicked stepmother in the form of Alice Mary Alston who ran the children’s outfitters next door.