And the Band Played On (10 page)

However, some records do still exist, and it is possible to put together a picture of Jock’s life at sea from manifests that have survived, together with interviews given after his death by fellow musicians and by crew members he worked with. Musicians in ships’ orchestras worked much like airline crews today – never quite sure who they would be travelling round the world with until the last minute. Friendships would be formed, suspended, then resumed the next time they met up to play together. Two American musicians, cellist John Carr and bass player Louis Cross, who met Jock for the first time on the
Cedric
, were part of this camaraderie.

In an interview with the
New York Times
after Jock’s death Louis Cross described Jock as ‘a light hearted, fine tempered young fellow with curly blond hair, a light complexion and a pleasant smile’. He was ‘the life of every ship he ever sailed on and was full of fun,’ said Cross. According to Cross and Carr, Jock played on the White Star liner
Majestic
, the Anchor Line’s
California
, and the White Star liner
Megantic
on its maiden voyage to Montreal. After joining the band of
Titanic
’s sister ship
Olympic
on its maiden voyage to New York in May 1911, Jock rejoined the ship in September when it had to limp back to Southampton after colliding with the warship, HMS
Hawke
, in the Solent. To be chosen to play on the
Titanic
, the world’s biggest and most famous liner on its maiden voyage, was the ultimate accolade for the young musician.

Few trips took Jock away from Dumfries for more than a month, including the time it took to travel to and from the port of embarkation. Before the ship sailed there would be rehearsals because most ships’ orchestras had never played together before, although many of the musicians knew each other. The longest time Jock spent away from home was four months, during the winter of 1910–1911, not long after he had met Mary. He was engaged to play during the winter season at the Constant Spring Hotel in Jamaica, a three-storey luxury hotel at the foot of the Blue Mountains. The Constant Spring, set in the middle of an exquisitely manicured 165-acre estate, was the first hotel in Jamaica to have running water and electric light. It promised its guests a French chef, a concert hall, dancing by moonlight, lavish bedrooms, a hairdressing salon, a huge swimming pool and a nine-hole golf course. It would seem that this booking also came through the Liverpool agency, Blacks, who were engaged by the hotel to recruit musicians for the winter season from Europe. The musicians, including Jock, travelled to Jamaica on the
Port Royal
, one of three fast steamers built ten years earlier for the Liverpool shipping company Elder, Dempster & Co. to boost trade and travel between Britain and the Antilles. The shipping company received a £40,000 annual subsidy from the British and Jamaican governments to take tourists out to Jamaica, and return with tropical fruit, mostly bananas. Elder, Dempster & Co. owned an interest in the Constant Spring Hotel, engaging Eugene Smith, a pineapple cultivator from Florida, to grow tropical fruit there.

Jock and the other musicians boarded the
Port Royal
at Bristol and were due to dock in Kingston on Christmas Eve but were delayed by heavy storms in the Caribbean, arriving grey and seasick late on Christmas Day 1910. On the
Port Royal
Jock met cellist John Wesley Woodward for the first time; Woodward joined him on the maiden voyage of the
Olympic
in May the following year. Little more than a year later they would die together on the
Titanic
.

The musicians’ arrival in Jamaica was eagerly awaited by the hotel management and the guests. On Christmas Eve 1910 the manager took a prominent advertisement in the
Daily Gleaner
to announce the ‘Season Arrangements’:

A first-class Orchestra, consisting of five

professionals has been engaged in England

who will play at all dances.

Select concerts will be given daily from 1 to 3pm
and every evening from 7.00 to 11 pm.

The Orchestra is bringing a full programme

of classical and all the latest dance music.

The orchestra proved to be a huge hit, playing at Cinderella dances, fancy dress balls and golf tournaments as well as giving ‘brilliant’ classical concerts. ‘All who have heard this splendid orchestra declare that it has never been surpassed in this country. Its repertoire is not only extensive but leaves nothing to be desired,’ said Lady Olivier, President of the hotel’s golf club. John Woodward was a particular success with his cello, an instrument ‘seldom heard in Jamaica’, and he gave numerous solo performances, all of which were ‘warmly applauded’.

Two weeks after the
Titanic
sank, the
Daily Gleaner
published on its front page an affectionate tribute to Jock and to John Woodward, under the heading ‘Bandsmen who were known here’. The orchestra, it said, was ‘voted the best of its kind that has ever visited Jamaica’. Both musicians were ‘popular with the staff of the hotel as well as those who stayed there’. Cellist John Carr and bass player Louis Cross were at the Constant Spring at the same time, and this was their recollection, too. Jock was befriended by an American family wintering at the hotel. They took a shine to the young Scotsman and asked him to come and visit them next time he came to New York.

It must have been a wonderful experience for the young man. It was the first time Jock had felt warm Caribbean sunshine on his white Scottish back, the first time he had swum in the sea without bristling with goose pimples as he came out of the water. It was also the first time in six years that he had stood still in one place, working with the same musicians. According to Cross, he liked the continuity and enjoyed playing more classical music. He returned home to Dumfries tanned and rested, promising Mary that he would one day take her to Jamaica. Jock had missed her more than he thought he would and, after six years jumping on and off trains and ships, was looking forward to the day he could afford to settle down to a less frenetic life.

There are very few photographs of Jock. The most familiar of them is the studio portrait distributed to the press by the White Star Line immediately after his death. Not the most flattering of pictures, it shows the young Jock looking like a cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and a startled rabbit. It was most likely a portrait taken in a studio in Dumfries and it is difficult to put a date on it. In July 1912 the
New York Times
published an article about a fundraising event for the families of the
Titanic
musicians with a photograph of ‘John’ Law Hume alongside it. Here we see an amused, confident and good-looking young man leaning against a post, a thumb tucked nonchalantly into his belt. He is wearing Bugsy Malone-style gangster spats and a white bib and tucker. Behind him, lying on the grass, is a girl watching him intently. There is no indication of when the photograph was taken, or where, but I believe it was taken at the Constant Spring Hotel some time during his stay there.

The orchestra left Kingston for Southampton on 8 April 1911 on the SS
Oruba
, their fellow passengers including four members of the England Cricket Team returning home after a disappointing tour of the West Indies in which two of their last four matches were rained off. The
Oruba
arrived back at Southampton on 1 May. Telegrams from C. W. & F. N. Black were handed to Jock and to John Woodward as they were disembarking, informing them that they were booked for the maiden voyage of the
Olympic
to New York in May.

Jock spent very little time in Dumfries in the last sixteen months of his life. This may have encouraged Andrew Hume to believe that his son was losing interest in Mary. In fact, the reverse was the case. Like many young men planning to settle down he was working hard to save as much money as possible to find a place of their own to live.

Jock had shared some of these thoughts with Louis Cross, in particular his intention to concentrate eventually on classical music. After Jock’s death, Cross talked with affection about his young Scottish friend to a reporter from the
New York Times
. ‘He was a young man of exceptional musical ability . . . he could pick up, without trouble, difficult compositions which would have taken others long to learn.’ Cross added: ‘If he had lived I believe he would not long have remained a member of a ship’s orchestra. Over in Dumfries I happen to know there’s a sweet young girl hoping against hope . . . Jock was to have been married the next time that he made the trip across the ocean.’

If Jock Hume’s childhood was a troubled one, Mary Costin’s was no less so. Working-class life in Scotland had always been a constant struggle against poverty, sickness and death and the Costins had known more hardship than most. Both parents came from poor families, going back as far as parish records allow into the mid-1700s. Mary’s father, William, was the son of a ploughman; her mother Susan, the daughter of a fish dealer, Menzies Kennedy. The couple had six children, two daughters dying in infancy. Ten years into the marriage, William, a van driver, died from a cerebral haemorrhage, leaving Susan with Mary and her three brothers – William, John and Menzies – to bring up on her own. A strong and formidable-looking woman, judging from the only photograph of her, Susan Costin had drawn strength and compassion from a lifetime of adversity. She was also extraordinarily kind, welcoming Jock into their lives as if he were her own son.

After the father’s death, the Costins could no longer afford to live in the family home in Bank Street so Susan found a job as an office caretaker for a firm of solicitors and moved to cheaper accommodation in Buccleuch Street. William, the oldest child, left school the following year aged fourteen and went out to work as a fishmonger’s assistant to supplement the family income.

A century later, the wide social divide that defined the different lives of the Costins and the Humes is still plain to see from the stark contrast of their respective homes. No. 35 Buccleuch Street, the pinched two-bedroom terrace house where the Costin family lived, is today an estate agent’s shop with a two-bedroom flat upstairs. Just a few hundred yards away in a more fashionable street stands the substantial Georgian town house at 42 George Street, home of the Humes. A polished brass plate next to the imposing entrance announces that this is now home to ‘Mr R Rodger & Partners, Chartered Surveyors and Valuers’.

The 1911 Census in Scotland required householders for the first time to list the number of rooms ‘with one or more windows’, providing some insight into the conditions in which people lived. In George Street the Humes, with four people living at home, list eight rooms with windows; the Costins with six people under the same roof, have two.

As a young woman, Susan Costin had been taken by her stocking-maker grandfather to the mills where he worked. The family had always managed to survive hard times by weaving at home and Susan had encouraged her daughter Mary to do the same to make a modest income in her spare time while still at school. The wool trade had been Dumfries’s main trade since the Middle Ages – a traveller in 1527 described ‘Dunfrese’ as ‘famous in fine claith’. Two hundred years later, another traveller passing through Dumfries reported that ‘gloves they make better and cheaper here than in England, sending great quantities thither’. That was ceasing to be the case at the beginning of the twentieth century, until the economics of hosiery production in Dumfries were suddenly revolutionised by the introduction of the Lamb flat-bed knitting machine. Invented in 1863 by the American, Isaac Lamb, the hand-powered machine made possible the rapid production of tube and rib-knitted fabric using cheap, untrained female labour. James McGeorge, the entrepreneurial son of a failed hosiery manufacturer in Dumfries, had heard about the machine and travelled to Ghent to see it in action. McGeorge installed more than 100 of the machines at various production centres in Dumfries and Dalbeattie, 800 workers being employed at the Nithsdale Mills, a large Victorian factory, producing ‘woollen gloves, knicker stockings and ties of silk and cotton’. It was here that Mary would work for seven years after leaving school at the age of thirteen.