And the Band Played On (34 page)

We regret to record the recent death of Mr A. Hume, the well-known maker and repairer of Great Portland Street, London . . . whose instruments gained an award at the Wembley Exhibition of 1924–25.

The Strad
did not say whether they were recording the death of Andrew Hume or
Alexander
Hume.

In March 2010, a violin described in the catalogue as ‘by Alexander Hume, London 1925’ appeared in a sale at Brompton’s, the London auctioneers, with a guide price of £1,500 to £2,000. I was intrigued.
Alexander
Hume? So far as I knew, there was no one by that name making violins in London in 1925. Could Andrew Hume still be fooling the trade with his trickery eighty years after his death?

At the preview a yellowing printed label, glued to the inside of the violin by its maker, was clearly visible. It said:

A Hume, London, Maker 1925.

Highest Awards, London, 1918-24-25.

Now I was certain that this was a violin made by Jock’s father. A double confirmation: the familiar boast, a hallmark of all Andrew Hume’s work, and the anonymity of the initial ‘A’ which allowed him to switch between being Andrew and Alexander whenever it suited him. This was too good an opportunity to miss. The bidding reached £2,000 . . . and suddenly, as the hammer came down, I became the owner of one of my great grandfather’s violins.

I rang David Rattray, Keeper of Instruments at the Royal Academy of Music, who had alerted me to the sale, and asked if he would look at the Hume violin and give me his opinion. It needed some minor repairs which were carried out by Jonathan Woolston, a distinguished violin maker and repairer who also works at the Academy. Afterwards they both examined the violin in the Academy’s workshops, using the kind of instruments seen in CSI forensic crime thrillers on television.

It is very difficult getting experts to commit themselves to opinions, particularly when they know they are likely to appear in print. But I managed to get Rattray and Woolston to agree on two things. My newly acquired Hume violin is a good, if not a great instrument, with a very fine sound. And the person who made it was not the person who varnished it, the construction being superior to the varnishing. The implication was clear. This was a violin bought ‘in the white’, probably in Saxony, and varnished by Hume. An original Hume fake. I felt proud to own it and wished not for the first time in my life, that I had learned to play the violin.

I had the good fortune, soon after publication of the hardback edition of this book, to be invited to talk at a few book festivals. I asked a young postgraduate student at the Academy, Catriona Price, who comes from Orkney, if she would accompany me to some of these author events and play Andrew Hume’s violin. As people arrived, Catriona played Scottish jigs, the sort of music that Jock described as ‘something to cheer them up’ and, at the end, played three verses of ‘Nearer My God To Thee’. No microphone was needed, although some of the venues were quite large. As people settled in their seats, many were tapping their feet; as they left, they were drying their eyes.

This, I thought, was just the kind of violin that Jock would have been proud to have with him on the
Titanic
.

26

The Life and Death of Johnann Costin

1912–1996

My mother said that from the moment she was born she was made to feel different from other children, and that this feeling continued throughout her life. One can understand why. Her father had died a hero’s death; she carried the stigma of illegitimacy in spite of the court’s confirmation of her paternity; and she became a ‘charity’s child’ through the support of the
Titanic
Relief Fund. She was painfully aware, from a very early age, of people pointing her out in the street in Dumfries. ‘That’s the Costin girl,’ they would say. Or sometimes, ‘There’s Jock Hume’s bairn.’

For this reason, her mother Mary Costin always made sure ‘Johnann’ was beautifully dressed, her clothes washed and pressed, her hair brushed and combed. For the first year of her life she was wheeled around Dumfries in a two-tone Marmet pram, the very best there was apart from a Silver Cross. Mary made a fuss of her daughter, in private and in public. Yet the proud mother was also a hard-working single parent, continuing to work at the glove factory to make ends meet. My mother can remember her coming home at night and making starch from potatoes to keep their clothes smart.

All this is reflected in the portrait of the young Johnann taken when she was about two years old: the string of pearls round her neck, the carefully tied silk bow, the hands clasped together – a picture of sweetness and innocence. The next photograph of her, taken with her mother two years later, shows her in a smock with her new boots carefully tied. Again, there is a bow in her hair. But the face now is anxious, uncertain, slightly fearful even.

While Mary continued to work, Johnann was looked after by her grandmother, Susan, at the family home at 35 Buccleuch Street, attending the George Street primary school round the corner. For Susan, the arrival of a new granddaughter must have gone some way towards making up for the loss of her oldest son, William, in 1911.

It was not an unusual arrangement then, or now, for a grandmother to assume the role of mother in her daughter’s absence. But it seems that between 1912 and 1915 there was a gradual transfer of responsibilities from mother to grandmother, at the end of which Susan became the parent, at least in Johnann’s eyes. ‘I was brought up by Grandmother,’ my mother always said. If it wasn’t true in the early years, it certainly became true later. My mother adored her grandmother.

The outbreak of the First World War had an immediate and dramatic impact on the Costins, as it did on most families. Both Mary’s brothers, John and Menzies, signed up, Menzies joining the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Mary, too, joined the war effort. She left her job at the glove factory and went to work at the Arrol-Johnston works at Heathhall, just outside Dumfries. The company had been founded in 1894 to make steam trams but had moved into motor-car manufacture at the beginning of the twentieth century. With a war on, it switched its production to building aero engines and artillery shells and took on more than 1,000 extra employees. Mary worked there until the end of the war.

At some time during the war Mary met a soldier home on leave, Walter Thomson, the son of a gamekeeper in the Scottish Borders who had died some years earlier from gunshot wounds. Walter was two years her junior. A month after the end of the war, on 12 December 1918, Walter and Mary, who was now twenty-seven, married in Dumfries. Walter’s address is recorded on the register as ‘c/o BEF France’ (British Expeditionary Force), indicating that he was still a serving soldier, although he gave his occupation as ‘chauffeur’.

My mother, who would then have been six years old, had no recollection of the wedding taking place; perhaps she did not attend. In any case, it seems that she had no place in her mother’s life from then on. Early in 1919 Mary and Walter took a small apartment in nearby St Andrew Street, leaving Johnann with her grandmother. Later that year, Mary gave birth to their first child, Walter, and in September 1921 she had a second son, Kennedy. It is hard to understand why Mary abandoned her daughter, especially after she had fought so many battles over her, but she did. My mother saw nothing of her half-brothers and very little of her mother. It seems a heartless thing for Mary to have done, although it is possible she intended one day to merge her two families. We will never know because on 6 November 1922 Mary died from tuberculosis. She was thirty-one.

If Mary’s death was a tragedy for Johnann, orphaned at the age of ten, it must have been painful, too, for Mary’s mother Susan, who was burying the fourth of her six children. At the same time she was nursing her older son, John, who had returned wounded from the war, shell-shocked and with severe breathing difficulties as a result of being gassed. Johnann continued to live with her grandmother, but not for long: fourteen months later, on 10 January 1924, her beloved granny Susan died of pernicious anaemia, aged sixty-two. Johnann was just twelve years old. Three years later her beloved uncle John died.

My mother’s account of what happened to her after Susan’s death was consistent, although she never elaborated upon the details, drawing a veil over her early teenage years. She said that her uncle Menzies (Mary’s brother) and his wife became her guardians; there were unspecified suggestions of abuse; she lived for some time on the Isle of Skye; at fifteen, she ran away to London and worked in a hat shop in Sloane Street. Her stepfather, Walter Thomson, and her two young half-brothers played no further part in her life.

But my research uncovered painful and uncomfortable facts about my mother’s early teenage years which are at variance with this account. Her uncle Menzies was not married when her grandmother Susan died and it is therefore unlikely that Johnann would have been entrusted to his care. Menzies, according to the address that appears on his mother’s death certificate, had already moved out of the family home in Buccleuch Street. He was living round the corner with Mary’s husband, Walter Thomson, and their two children. Menzies did not marry until two years later, by which time he had left Dumfries and was living in London and working as a male nurse at Brentwood Mental Hospital. On 19 January 1926, aged twenty-nine, Menzies married a spinster nine years his senior, Esmé Mary Carroll-Dempster, who lived in Holland Park.

So what
did
happen to Johnann after Susan’s death in 1924? The Dumfries housing records show that Menzies took over the lease of 35 Buccleuch Street after his mother’s death and continued to be the tenant for several years, even though he didn’t live there. His older brother John remained in the house, increasingly incapacitated from his war injuries, and died there aged thirty-seven two years later, on 13 September 1927. His death was notified by Grace Kennedy, who is described on the certificate as ‘aunt in law’. My mother must have been in Dumfries at the time because she recalled the death of her uncle John, of whom she always spoke kindly. She would have been nearly fifteen, around the time that financial support from the Titanic Relief Fund would have ceased. Was my mother being looked after by Grace? Had she been taken into care? Was she in domestic service, as many young girls were at that time? It is a secret my mother took with her to the grave.

What does seem likely is that Johnann joined Menzies and Esmé in London when she was fourteen or fifteen and if there was abuse, it probably occurred then. Twenty years later, after my father’s death, my mother moved us from Ruislip to a basement flat in Holland Park a few hundred yards away from where Menzies and Esmé lived. I felt goose pimples rise on my arm when I discovered last year the proximity of the two homes. It was too much of a coincidence.

In 1935, when she was twenty-three, Johnann, now ‘Jackie’ Costin, met my father John Ward, a crime reporter on the
London Evening News
. They married two years later at Kew Church. My mother’s name appears on the certificate as ‘Jacqueline Law Hume Costin’, and her occupation as ‘sales assistant’. She gave birth to my sister, Cherry, the following year, and then to me during the war, in 1942. I was christened in the bombed-out ruins of St Brides Church, Fleet Street, a fine beginning for a career in newspapers. My mother’s brief run of good luck – the war aside – then ran out. In 1944, my father, who was in the RAF, became seriously ill with a brain tumour and died the following year, making my mother the third generation of Costin women to bring up a young family on her own.

She did it well. Like her mother and grandmother, she understood that her first priority was to get a job. She was lucky here: she was taken on by two rising stars of the British film industry, Herbert Wilcox and Anna Neagle, to manage their publicity. My sister and I went to boarding schools but our school holidays were always glamorous ones. Other children went to Brighton or Blackpool if they were lucky. Our mother took us to the Cannes Film Festival, where we stayed at the Carlton and breakfasted with Elizabeth Taylor. As for all single parents, child-minding arrangements in the school holidays frequently collapsed so we would be left to amuse ourselves all day at Shepperton or Elstree studios, wandering between film sets and trying not to get in the way. Once, aged about ten, I sat down next to Richard Harris in the canteen. He looked blankly at me, probably trying to remember if there was a part in the film for a small boy and said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ Our lives were filled with celebrities – Errol (Flynn), Larry (Olivier), Mitch (Robert Mitchum), Orson (Welles) – all of whom were incredibly tolerant about the two young waifs trailing behind their glamorous mother in her Hardy Amies suits, high-heeled Rayne shoes, leaving a scent of Miss Dior wherever she went. Our mother was as glamorous as the stars she represented. By the time my sister and I left school, our best subjects were room service and a profound understanding of how the concierge system works in five-star hotels. Too bad they weren’t A Level options.

In her late forties my mother made a career switch and joined the British Tourist Authority, for whom she ran the information centre in St James’s Street, managing a staff of about fifteen. No visitor who entered the building left without an answer to their question. I doubt if my mother would have considered the job if it hadn’t been in Mayfair, close to her favourite restaurant, the Mirabelle. She lied about her age when she joined, so retired aged sixty-five, five years after the official retirement age.