And the Band Played On (32 page)

‘If you came to the conclusion that the defendant was in a slightly emotional and hysterical condition at the time, that would not affect the guilt, but it would affect seriously the degree of it, and that might probably lead to no punishment being imposed at all. Here, gentlemen, emerges the stage of the case at which you are able to render me very material service.’

The jury retired to consider their verdict at ten minutes to three, and returned fifteen minutes later. The foreman of the jury said:

‘My Lord, we, the jury, unanimously find the accused guilty of writing the letters as charged, but at the time she did not realise she was committing a crime. We earnestly recommend her to the leniency of the Court.’

Lord Strathclyde said:

‘I am not quite clear what you desire. Do you mean you find the prisoner guilty of the crime and recommend her to leniency? Is that your intention?’

‘That is so,’ replied the foreman. Mr Wilson rose to his feet:

‘I take it, my lord, that the verdict is one of not guilty.’ Lord Strathclyde replied, ‘The jury have explained. The clerk will read the verdict.’

A hush fell over the court as the clerk then read out the jury’s verdict:

‘The jury unanimously find the plaintiff guilty as charged, and earnestly recommend her to the leniency of the Court.’

At this, the judge declared,

‘Kate Hume, I am very willing to accede to the earnest recommendations of the jury. They have given most careful attention to your case, and in consideration of the fact that you have already been upwards of three months in prison, having regard to your previous good character and your youth I consider it expedient – and this is the order of the court – that you be released now.’

There was a roar of approval from the public gallery. Kate burst into tears. She left the court accompanied by a woman warder, her solicitor and Mr Wilson. Her father and stepmother were not in court to hear the jury’s verdict.

25

The Fall and Rise of Andrew Hume

29 December 1914

A wave of public sympathy greeted Kate Hume’s release from prison but Andrew Hume was not in court in Edinburgh to see his daughter freed, neither was he there to steer her through the cheering crowds in the street outside. Andrew had gone to ground with Alice at home in Dumfries, where he now faced personal, professional and financial ruin. His year-long court battle with Mary Costin had exposed him as a liar and a thief who stole from his own granddaughter. Now his own daughter had heaped further shame on him by denouncing him as a tyrannical father who horsewhipped his children.

There had always been something not quite right about Andrew Hume. He was charming, but just when you thought you had engaged his attention he left you feeling he had seen someone more interesting over your shoulder. Although apparently well-off, he would keep tradesmen waiting weeks for payment, disputing bills for months after they had become due. He had a reputation for giving his solemn word then going back on it. He was good-looking, but unashamedly vain, making minor adjustments to his moustache, his hair or his cravat after catching sight of his reflection in shop windows. And while affecting to be a musician with a sensitive soul, the façade often fell to reveal a mean streak and a bad temper.

Friends and neighbours who had comforted Andrew after the death of his wife Grace felt cheated when they discovered he had taken up with his next-door neighbour Alice Alston with such indecent haste. After Jock’s death, they felt deceived again, having given comfort to his father whose persecution of Mary Costin would have distressed his late son.

The adverse publicity had a dramatic effect on Andrew Hume’s business as a music teacher, his main source of income. One by one, with every new revelation, his pupils had drifted away. At first, people made polite excuses for cancelling their music lessons. Soon they didn’t bother to explain why: they just didn’t turn up. Mothers did not want to leave their daughters alone with a man who whipped his own daughters; husbands were disinclined to leave their wives alone with a man so clearly lacking in moral fibre. The Dumfries Academy, sensitive to the feelings of governors and parents alike, informed Andrew that they would no longer be requiring his part-time services. The Provost cancelled a meeting that had been arranged to agree a programme of summer public concerts in Dock Park, due to be conducted by Andrew.

Before Kate’s trial, Andrew had become aware of the social awkwardness his presence was causing, but the coverage of the trial in the local and national press turned him into a pariah overnight. It wasn’t just that friends and neighbours were crossing the street to avoid him – when he walked into a shop, people he had known all his life were abandoning purchases in mid-transaction and walking out. Andrew Hume was a ruined man – in Dumfries, anyway. Short of cash, he started selling off his stock of violins and making plans for the future. In July 1913 he had taken two months off in the middle of his court skirmishes with Mary Costin to travel to Bohemia. He revealed his trip in a letter to
The Strad
magazine then as now ‘the essential magazine that gets you closer to the best players, the finest instruments, and the most famous makers every month.’ The letter was about the effect of different varnishes on the tonal quality of a violin but, as always, Hume couldn’t resist a throwaway brag:

‘The July issue of
The Strad
reached me in Bohemia where I have been on a journey to procure suitable wood for violin making,’ wrote Hume. ‘The
proper
kind is, to my mind, very hard to get and also comes expensive.’

The likely reason for Hume’s trip was to buy violins ‘in the white’. Most of these instruments, crafted from the finest wood by some of the world’s best violin makers, would have come with their front, back and sides pre-assembled and glued. The profit on reselling them would come from Andrew’s considerable skill in varnishing them. Other instruments would come pre-cut but unassembled, requiring gluing and shaping as well as varnishing. Andrew Hume was very good at doing this, recreating classic violin designs, ageing them, and adding his own initials

His favoured medium for advertising his finished products was
The Strad
. His frequent letters to the editor, and the classified advertisements that he placed in almost every issue, provide a fascinating insight into the next twenty years of Andrew’s professional life and are, indeed, the only proper record of it. They reveal his highs and his lows, his successes and his failures, his lies and his deceits. An advertisement that appeared in
The Strad
shortly before Christmas 1913, for instance, reveals as much about the irrepressible Andrew as it does about the violins he was selling:

GREAT VIOLIN BARGAINS

A few of my earlier make at £5. 5s. each have

been sold as per advt in October Strad.

One purchaser writes: “Violin safely to hand! I have seen and tried a great many violins during the past twenty years as a professional player and this is assuredly the very best toned instrument I ever drew a bow across. I enclose a further cheque for another of the same. Tone, wood, varnish, etc., are equally magnificent and with this one I envy nobody their ‘Strads’.” Be in time while they last as they cannot stay long here.

A. HUME, 42 George Street, Dumfries.

It would seem that Andrew and Alice were making plans to leave Dumfries even before Kate’s trial, as Andrew carried on selling his stock throughout 1914, having apparently given up teaching and playing. After Kate’s arrest in September, Andrew dropped the price of his violins to £5 and also advertised for sale ‘30,000 sets of Orchestral Music, with or without piano, from 2d per set. Also 2,000 sets for Military Band (State wants)’.

At around this time, Andrew Hume set in motion a carefully orchestrated plan to reinvent himself as a master maker of violins. Part of this process was a long interview that he gave to
The Strad
, and which appeared in their April 1915 issue under the appropriate heading: ‘Fiddles by Living Makers: Alexander Hume’. It is a flattering account of ‘Alexander’ Hume’s life and work in Dumfries, the years he spent learning his craft in the workshops of Erlbach, Schönbach and Marneukirchen, his ability to replicate an Amati violin and his skill as a bow maker. But the significance of the article only becomes clear in the following month’s issue of
The Strad
, which published a short correction stating that the interview with Alexander Hume was in fact an interview with
Andrew
Hume. This time the author, Towry Piper, was no junior reporter on the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
. Piper was a fifty-six-year-old former solicitor and one-time pupil of Carl Jung who had joined the staff of
The Strad
some years earlier to pursue his passion for violins. Piper was at the time writing a book that was published the following year,
Violin Tone and Violin Makers
, and had taken the trouble to travel from London to Dumfries to find out more about Andrew, whom he described a ‘brither Scot’. Referring to Andrew Hume as ‘Alexander’ was no slip of the pen. It is clear that Andrew deliberately misled Piper about his name because, just as Andrew had once pretended Alexander Hume was his grandfather, he was now laying another false trail by adopting the name Alexander for himself. The
Strad
article was sowing the seeds for a future fraud.

Around the time that the
Strad
article appeared, the Humes – Andrew, Alice and young Andrew – left Dumfries for good and the house in George Street was repossessed. For a while during my research I lost track of them completely. Neither the Ewart Library in Dumfries nor the archives of the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
could offer a clue as to the whereabouts of this once-celebrated family. A blog on an ancestry website suggested that he had fled to America to start a new life but I could find no trace of him on shipping lists of emigrants. Another ancestry site suggested that he had died of a broken heart but I could find no record of his death. The trail had gone cold when suddenly Andrew Hume reappeared in
The Strad
magazine, still trying to offload the 30,000 sets of orchestral music. He was in Peterborough.

VIOLINS, VIOLAS, CELLOS, &c.

Also Large Lot of ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

The professionals’ ideal Instruments may now be had at most reasonable prices:

cash or exchange, as may be agreed upon.

A good stock on hand, ancient and modern, cheap.

Prompt and Expert attention to all orders.

A. HUME,

Professional Player and Maker,

39 Granville Street, Peterborough.

Why Peterborough? Why Andrew and Alice chose to go there rather than London, where they eventually ended up, remains a mystery. Granville Street is a pleasant street of terraced houses near King’s School, which is possibly why Andrew chose it as the base for his business, just as he chose a house near the Academy when he moved to Dumfries. Andrew and Alice – still with Jock’s young brother Andrew Jnr, now fourteen, in tow – rented a house less a mile away at 9 Parliament Street. It was from here, on 12 April 1916, that Andrew Hume wrote again to the Public Trustee of the
Titanic
Relief Fund.

re Titanic Case No. 689

The Public Trustee

Sir

In view of the grossly inhumane treatment dispensed in the above case, partly due to the action of an unscrupulous agent who in order to save himself has now absconded, and which, in the period that has elapsed since the disaster has resulted in the complete breakdown of my wife’s health, my youngest daughter also having been placed under restraint for one year through acute mental hysteria. My house is now being compulsorily sold up by my late agents, my social and business life having been also ruined, I am compelled to seek employment elsewhere as a musician.