And the Band Played On (9 page)

Before and after Jock’s death, Andrew Hume took all the credit for his son’s considerable skill at playing the violin. What he hadn’t taught Jock, he said, he had passed on to his son through his genes. Like so many of Andrew Hume’s claims, this was an exaggeration. Jock was a talented violinist and a versatile one but another person played an equally important part in Jock’s musical education: John Hendrie, his headmaster at St Michael’s School.

John Hendrie had been headmaster of St Michael’s for twenty-five years when Jock joined the school in 1895, by which time St Michael’s was known to everyone in Dumfries as ‘Hendrie’s School’, such was his popularity and fame in the town. Hendrie knew how to bring out the best in every pupil and he pushed them to the limits of their ability. He was also an inspiration to his teachers who trusted and respected him. Hendrie’s great passion was music and he made it his mission in life that every child at the school would learn an instrument and be encouraged to play it. He formed a choir and organised school parties to give live concerts. He bought one of the first ‘His Master’s Voice’ 78rpm gramophones and took it to school to introduce the children to new composers and new works. Having lobbied the Dumfries School Board successfully for a piano, he was delighted when the young Jock arrived at school with a violin. St Michael’s had a choir, now it was halfway to having a string quartet, too. Hendrie obviously liked Jock, whom he later described as ‘a merry, bright, laughing boy’ whom he remembered ‘with pleasure’.

The committee minute book of St Michael’s School records a decision made by the Dumfries Burgh School Board on 1 June 1896, the year after Jock started at the school aged five. The appointment of Miss Nellie Lockerbie was recommended ‘to provide musical training for the children in her department . . . at a salary of £70 a year’. The arrival of a second mentor at school must have been a joy for Jock, who found Mr Hendrie’s and Miss Lockerbie’s encouragement altogether more inspiring than the irritable disapproval of his stern music-teacher father. By the time Jock left St Michael’s aged thirteen, they had helped the young prodigy develop into an accomplished musician. Miss Lockerbie’s lessons proved to be such a success that in 1906 Hendrie went back to the school board to request the use of a hall for holding violin classes. His request was approved.

Hendrie would later become a vigorous supporter of the proposal to honour both his old boys, Jock Hume and Thomas Mullin, with a marble plaque at the school as well as a memorial in the park. To this day, children entering and leaving St Michael’s have to pass Hendrie’s affectionate tribute to the two young men who lost their lives on the
Titanic
.

Hendrie was headmaster of St Michael’s for forty-three years before retiring with his gramophone and record collection to his cottage in Cassalands, Dumfries, where he died aged eighty-eight in 1939. His death was announced to the assembled school at prize-giving next day by the then headmaster, Mr L. Grainger. He told the school: ‘You did not know him but your parents and grandparents held him in the greatest respect and the very highest esteem. He made this school famous throughout our countryside . . . he was beloved by the many thousands who passed through his hands, many of whom attained prominent positions.’

During his time at ‘Hendrie’s School’ and throughout his early teens, Jock was a regular member of the Sabbath School at the Waterloo Place Congregational Church, where he joined the Band of Hope, a temperance organisation for working-class children, founded in Leeds in 1847. All members took a pledge of total abstinence and were taught the ‘evils of drink’. Music played an important part in Sabbath School activities and there were regular trips to the seaside. For Jock, the music, rather than temperance, was the main attraction and was what the vicar, the Revd James Strachan, remembered him by: ‘A cooler young fellow I never knew,’ he said. ‘He showed his coolness in the way he lifted his violin to his chin when about to play in public . . . I was not at all astonished that he ended his life so bravely.’

Jock could – and should – have gone on from St Michael’s to the Dumfries Academy to finish his education. But instead, he left St Michael’s, aged thirteen, to work for a local solicitor, James Geddes. It seems an extraordinary decision given his father’s middle-class aspirations, but all the Hume children were to leave school at the same age and it seems likely that Andrew Hume simply adopted his own father’s ‘sink-or-swim’ values. He got the children out to work as early as possible so they could start paying their way and contribute to the household expenses.

Another factor which may have come into play in the decision for Jock to leave school so young was his mother’s ill health. Grace Hume was already bed-bound following the birth of her fifth child, Andrew, and would be dead before Jock’s sixteenth birthday. Her illness must have put a considerable strain on the family finances and it is possible that Jock terminated his education in the family’s best financial interests.

If Geddes employed Jock as a favour to his father, he had a pleasant surprise. He found the boy ‘an assiduous, intelligent and courteous lad . . . reliable and painstaking in all his work and was of a character that would enable him to carve out a career for himself in any walk of life he was likely to follow. I can only speak of his services with the highest praise.’

Despite winning the approbation of his boss, Jock hated being a pen-pusher confined to an office from dawn until dusk. He quit after a year. ‘Like many great men, he found that his bent was not for being confined within the four walls of an office,’ Geddes would tactfully relate after Jock’s death. Jock had ‘achieved a name and a distinction that he would never have had in any other sphere in Dumfries.’

Whatever the reason – whether he went to Geddes willingly or under duress – Jock didn’t waste the year. Freed from the nightly obligations of school homework Jock had found he was able to earn extra money in the evenings and at weekends doing what he loved most of all: playing the violin. Like his father, he was a versatile performer who had developed an extensive repertoire, able to switch from ‘popular’ music, such as ragtime or folk music, to ‘salon’ music, such as waltzes and popular classical numbers. With his considerable skill with the fiddle came an irresistible boyish charm and a friendly banter.

Before long, Jock was making regular appearances at the Theatre Royal in Shakespeare Street as a ‘warm-up’ act before curtain-up and during the intervals. He also discovered just how much in demand a young man with a fiddle could be. He started getting invitations to play at dances and at weddings and other events.

There are conflicting accounts in the family as to how and why Jock came to spend much of the next six years – including the last days of his life – at sea. Mary Costin’s understanding was that Jock wanted to go ‘as far away as possible’ from Dumfries because the atmosphere at home had become so oppressive. At fourteen, Jock’s relationship with his father was disintegrating. They argued over music, money and Jock’s growing need for independence, the disagreements becoming increasingly explosive.

Nellie, Grace and Kate were also at war with their father who, they felt, had treated their mother less than kindly during her long illness. The early appearance on the scene of Alice Alston, whom Andrew Hume would marry fourteen months after Grace’s death, was the final straw.

A more charitable interpretation of Jock’s decision to go to sea is that it was his father’s idea – or, at least, an idea that Andrew didn’t oppose. This seems more likely as, at Jock’s age, it was probably what Andrew would have wished to do himself. Andrew was well networked into the music industry, with connections to agents and impresarios, and would have been able to make the necessary introductions. What is without doubt is that Andrew saw his talented son as a future stream of income for the family and, indeed, was depending on Jock to help pay the mortgage on the new family home in George Street.

By the time Jock died, aged twenty-one, his fiddle had taken him halfway round the world a dozen times. He had sailed to New York and back at least five times and played on liners to South America, Jamaica and Montreal. Just months before his death on the
Titanic
, Jock was sailing around the Mediterranean playing in the orchestra on the Cunard liner
Carmania
. The previous year he had worked on the maiden voyage to New York of the
Titanic
’s sister ship,
Olympic
. Almost as remarkable was Jock’s apparently effortless commuting from Dumfries to the ports of Southampton, Bristol or Liverpool, where most of his voyages began and ended. But this was not unusual: Wallace Hartley, bandleader on the
Titanic
, claimed to have made more than eighty transatlantic crossings in less than three years working for Cunard. Passenger ships were not like today’s cruise liners. They were a fast and efficient way – the only way – of travelling between Europe and America, with fast turnaround times after reaching port.

In 1905, the year when Jock first went to sea aged fourteen, there was less for a teenager to lose and everything to gain by being adventurous. And the only passport he needed was his fiddle. Dumfries was still an active port and it was possible to work a free passage on a coaster to Liverpool or Glasgow, both of them less than a day or two away by sea. There were rail links, anyway, from Dumfries to both cities. Most of the shipping lines had offices in Glasgow and Liverpool and all it would have taken to find work was an introduction, an audition – and the courage to be there.

‘Jock Hume was a free soul in an era of Victorian/Edwardian suppression,’ John Eaton, co-author of the definitive book,
Titanic Triumph and Tragedy,
told me during an exchange of emails about my grandfather. ‘Jock has long been a favourite of mine.’ On the
Titanic
’s embarkation list Jock’s age is given as twenty-eight. For some time I took this to be a clerical error, since there is no doubt that Jock was twenty-one when he boarded the ship. But if he had lied about his age when he first went to sea – saying he was twenty-one when he was still fourteen – his exaggerated age would eventually have become a matter of record, the White Star Line and the musical agency Blacks both believing Jock to have been twenty-eight when he boarded the
Titanic
.

It seems likely that Jock started work playing on smaller ships owned by minor shipping companies, slowly working his way up to the flagship liners of the Cunard and White Star lines as his reputation grew. But matching precise dates with destinations and the names of ships that Jock sailed on proved to be a difficult and largely unrewarding task.

My mother remembered as a child seeing her mother with a cardboard box full of Jock’s letters and postcards sent from abroad, the cards showing pictures of ports he visited and the ships he sailed with. But none of these survived, my mother’s uncle, Menzies Costin, burning them on a bonfire at the back of the house in Buccleuch Street after Mary’s death.

Accessing the information through public archives is fraught with difficulties. In 1966 the Public Record Office in London discarded part of its archive of British shipping records from 1861 to 1913. The decision met with considerable opposition from archivists and maritime historians as the records were considered to be a valuable source of information on the shipping industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eventually some of the records were transferred to the Maritime History Archive at St John’s in Newfoundland, with a number of crew lists and agreements remaining at the National Archive in Britain. Many were lost or mislaid along the way. A further complication is that musicians would sometimes travel as ‘crew’ and at other times as passengers, for which there were different manifests. On the
Titanic
, for instance, all eight members of the band travelled as passengers.