And the Band Played On (30 page)

Kate’s trial was set for 27 and 28 December before Scotland’s most senior judge, Lord Strathclyde, Lord President of the Court of Session, in the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. The Lord Advocate, Mr Robert Munro KC, MP would lead the prosecution.

24

The Trial of Kate Hume

27 December 1914

John Wilson KC, Kate’s defence counsel, was not a man to be easily shocked. During his years at the Bar in Scotland he had witnessed several hangings, had prosecuted or defended more than 100 hardened criminals and had experienced first-hand the punitive hardships of the Victorian prison system while visiting inmates. As a member of the General Board of Lunacy he had visited numerous lunatic asylums where the living conditions were atrocious. Yet nothing had quite prepared him for his first meeting with Kate Hume in her cell at Calton Jail in Edinburgh on Boxing Day 1914. Since her arrest in September, the teenager had spent more than three months in prison awaiting trial. The intense cold of a Scottish winter and the unsanitary conditions had taken a terrible toll on her health and to the experienced barrister she looked more like a sick woman of forty than a girl of seventeen. She was pale and gaunt and her cheeks and eyes were hollow. Her once-curly hair was dirty and knotted. The long fingers that had played the piano so beautifully were covered with callouses and her fingernails were broken from slopping out and scrubbing. She had a bruise on her cheek where a fellow prisoner in the women’s wing had struck her with a broomstick. Condensation ran down the walls of her bare cell, where the temperature fell below freezing at night.

Built in the early nineteenth century to the design of a grand castle, Calton Jail’s delicate castellation concealed the cruelty and suffering that went on behind its walls. One inmate at the time described Calton as ‘the poorhouse of all prisons, with the cold chill of a grim fortress’. For fifty years it had been the scene of public executions, a crowd of 20,000 turning up in June 1864 when a carter named George Bryce was hanged for murdering a nursemaid. Thereafter, executions continued inside the jail: Patrick Higgins, a labourer from Linlithgow who murdered his two sons by throwing them into a quarry, was hanged there just a year before Kate passed through the gates.

Wilson’s arrival at the jail was delayed by a long line of prisoners in leg irons and manacles being marched along Princes Street through Gorgie to Saughton, where they would work all day on the new prison, the authorities recognising at last that Calton belonged to another age.

Wilson had not wanted to take this brief. The prosecution’s case was so seriously flawed that it was quite shocking, in Wilson’s view, that it had been allowed to go to trial. But it had become clear that the authorities wanted to make an example of Kate Hume and his career might suffer if he refused the brief or challenged the Lord Advocate’s legal arguments. And yet, as he entered her cell, he felt immediately outraged on Kate’s behalf. He promptly sent his clerk out to buy some soup, and a warm blanket for Kate to wrap round herself.

The defence team had made several unsuccessful applications to the court to release Kate on bail on compassionate and health grounds. For some reason the prison governor had taken against Kate, writing in a private note to the court: ‘The prisoner has shewn tendencies of a criminal nature which require to be checked and controlled.’ However, he recommended that Kate should be sent to Borstal if found guilty, which could be taken as an admission that he recognised Calton was no place for a teenager to be held.

Neither Kate’s father nor her stepmother had been to visit her during her thirteen weeks in prison, nor had they written to the authorities making representations on her behalf. The only letter from Andrew Hume among the court papers is an inquiry, dated 11 November 1914, about how long he would be needed at the trial and a request for reimbursement of his expenses. Addressed to The Master of the Court, Parliament House, it says:

I . . . will be obliged if you will kindly inform me as to defraying of fare and other expenses, also the probable period for which I shall be required together with Mrs Hume, in order that I may have my work here arranged for.

It seems extraordinary that Hume was not only willing to give evidence against his own daughter but was not even intending to stay for the full length of her two-day trial.

Wilson was glad that he had immediately rejected the defence solicitor’s suggestion that Kate should plead insanity in order to secure a reduced sentence. Her crime, if indeed it was one, might have been the desperate act of a person temporarily deranged, but Wilson had read nothing in any of the statements to suggest that Kate was mad. Wilson had served on the General Board of Commissioners in Lunacy for Scotland and drafted their 54th Annual Report; he knew only too well that madness had become a convenient way for husbands and fathers to dispose of wives and daughters who, for whatever reason, had become an embarrassment. The male-dominated courts were inclined to do the same. In Scotland there were 19,034 insane people officially known to the General Board of Lunacy, ‘not including those insane persons maintained at home’, an increase of 398 over the previous year. Wilson realised that insanity was a life sentence from which Kate would never escape. He knew that this was also the view of Sir Thomas Clouston MD, who had been called in by the prosecution because of his ‘large experience of mental and nervous diseases that occur during the adolescent period of human life’. He examined Kate on Christmas Eve with Dr George Robertson, superintendent at the Morningside lunatic asylum. Both men wrote their reports on Christmas Day 1914. Clouston found Kate to be ‘a girl of nervous temperament, with an hysterical tendency and wanting in self control’. But both he and Robertson attributed her actions to her unhappy home life. Her mother had died after a long illness when she was eight, her brother when she was fifteen. Clouston wrote:

She seems to have of late been punished, sometimes severely, even within the past two years. She says her father horse-whipped her last year and her stepmother thrashed her with a stick, leaving a mark on her eye . . . she says she got ‘no sympathy’ at home.

Her favourite brother was lost in the
Titanic
and that made the first strong impression on her mind in her life. She used to dream about him. There was a lawsuit about his affairs too, which went on for long and kept up her distress. Two tablets were put up to his memory, at the unveiling of which she was present and was much upset.

The two next events that deeply affected her were her leaving home for the first time, after a quarrel, and the present war . . . she has been growing fast of late years, having gained half an inch in height since she has been in prison, and is now five feet, seven inches.

Dr Robertson agreed: ‘She has had an unhappy home life. Her mother is dead and she has not got on with her stepmother. I could not certify her to be of unsound mind.’

Wilson, who had got to know Clouston on the General Board for Lunacy, had discussed the case with him. Kate’s breaking point seemed to be the argument with her stepmother about helping around the house and keeping her room tidier. As the children’s challenges to Andrew Hume’s authority grew, so did the severity and frequency of his punishments. But this was the first time he had used a whip on her and the first time he had beaten her in the presence of her stepmother. Kate had been determined not to cry. When her father released her she stood up without looking at him, straightened her skirt and, holding her head high, walked towards the door of the morning room where Alice was standing. Words were exchanged between stepdaughter and stepmother. Alice, who had just returned from a walk and was carrying a silver-topped cane, struck out at Kate, bruising her cheek and cutting her just above the eye. Kate had run up the stairs to her bedroom, thrown some things into a suitcase and left. She had no plan in mind, except never to return home. She walked to Irish Street, about ten minutes away, where Mrs McMinn, the mother of her old school friend Robina, kept a boarding house. ‘You can stay here as long as you like, my dear,’ said Mrs McMinn who knew about Kate’s difficulties at home.

Kate had ‘spoken bitterly’ of the assault the next day to PC Robert Beattie, a familiar and friendly presence on St Andrew Street where Kate worked, but he told her that the police didn’t like to get involved in family matters. Beattie would give evidence at Kate’s trial to that effect, substantiating her allegations of brutal treatment by her father and stepmother.

Kate’s story was further reinforced by a pre-trial report by the Procurator Fiscal in Dumfries who had interviewed her sister Grace, who told him of her own unhappy experiences with her father and stepmother when she had come home for a two-week holiday earlier in the year, in July. ‘Her stepmother complained of her lazy and careless habits and the inconvenience thereby caused in the household arrangements. As a result, Grace left her father’s house and took lodgings in town for the next ten days. Her father and mother have had no correspondence with her since.’

It was Kate’s good fortune that John Wilson was assigned to her case. As a defence counsel he had a track record of success due to his ‘marked ability, forcefulness and courage’ in presenting a case to the jury. His ‘wide knowledge of law and his great capacity for work’ had also won respect and admiration among his colleagues at the Bar, according to the
Scotsman
. But perhaps more important in preparing the defence case for Kate was his essential ‘goodness of heart’, remarked upon in an appreciation by his friend and colleague Lord Sands, which was published nearly twenty years later after Wilson’s death. ‘He would take endless trouble to help anyone who happened to be in a difficulty. I knew of many acts of personal kindness on his part when he went out of his way to help a lame dog,’ wrote Lord Sands.

On Boxing Day 1914, the defence case for Kate Hume was already taking shape in Wilson’s legal mind. He accepted that it was highly likely that Kate would be found guilty but he was determined to present her to the jury in a way that would make them sympathetic to her. She might be the prisoner in the dock, but Wilson would switch the spotlight onto her father and stepmother through his cross-examination. By the end of the trial the jury would come to think that Andrew and Alice Hume should have been the ones on trial for their unkindness.

Two days later, at 8 a.m. on 28 December, the teenager was taken from her cell in handcuffs and driven in a horse-drawn prison van to the High Court in Edinburgh, where, flanked by two police officers, she stood in the dock as the charges were read out before an all-male jury. The public gallery was packed with spectators and the atmosphere tense. She pleaded not guilty. The trial would last two days.

Kate, who wore a blue overcoat and a fur-trimmed velour hat, sat with her head bowed. A photograph published in the
Scotsman
showed her with a handkerchief pressed to her nose. She cut ‘a pathetic figure’, according to the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
’s reporter. Having been taken in by the hoax, Mr Dickie had a few scores to settle. The
Standard
’s five-page report, published on the following Wednesday, was written and presented in a way intended to cause the maximum embarrassment to the Hume family. It also served to distract readers from the growing number of Scottish casualties in the war.

More than twenty witnesses were called, Kate’s father and stepmother giving evidence for the prosecution. First to take the stand was Kate’s father, Andrew. He confirmed the prosecution’s account of events. Kate’s defence counsel, John Wilson, then stood up to strip away the deceit and conceit. These exchanges are taken from newspaper reports of Kate’s trial:

John Wilson, QC: ‘Mr Hume, as regards Kate’s own mother, that was your first wife, you said she had been an invalid for several years?

Andrew Hume: ‘Yes, about eight years. She was in bed most of the time.’

‘For some years before her death did you notice periods of marked depression on your wife’s part?’

‘I did, sir, very much. I don’t know what caused it.’