The Band That Played On (16 page)

The collision with the
Hawke
affected the
Titanic
. Not only was a diversion of effort required, but the only speedy way of repairing the damaged propeller was to replace it with one destined for the
Titanic
. It forced White Star to shift the date of the
Titanic
’s maiden voyage—as announced in September 1911—from March 20, 1912, to April 10, 1912. If the
Hawke
and the
Olympic
had never met, then neither would the iceberg and the
Titanic
.

One of the findings of the court of inquiry into the incident was the likelihood that the displacement of water caused by a ship as huge as the
Olympic
set up a suction that dragged the smaller ship into its wake once it was so close. However, this did not excuse the
Olympic
. If it had adhered to Article 19 of the Regulations for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea it would have given way. “The
Olympic
, though perhaps not the overtaking ship according to the definition laid down, had excess of speed over the
Hawke
and could have reduced speed to keep astern of her in the narrow channel, seeing that she was obliged by the Rule of the Road to keep out of the way. Instead of which she attempted to pass the
Hawke
.” The summary was: “We are of the opinion that from the evidence heard that the
Olympic
alone is to blame.”

Woodward was transferred to the band of the much smaller Cunard steamer
Caronia
, which was doing regular summer crossings from Liverpool to New York, calling in at Queenstown on the outward journey. He left Liverpool on November 4, arriving in New York on November 12, where he spent almost a week before the
Caronia
embarked on the first of its winter cruises for the 1911/1912 season, going directly to Gibraltar on the way out and returning via Liverpool.

The
Caronia
arrived back in New York on Christmas Eve and sailed again on January 6, 1912, for a similar Mediterranean cruise. On February 20 it left New York for Alexandria, Egypt, calling in at Madeira, Monaco, and Naples. Visiting so many countries in such a short time, Woodward put his camera to good use, taking photographs of scenes that seemed exotic to British eyes. “When he was at one of the Mediterranean ports he snapped an Arab in the act of shaving a boy’s head outside a mosque,” reported the
Brighton Advertiser
. “The Mussulman manifested the indignation prompted by the well-known scruples of his co-religionists.”

He told his friends that he enjoyed the “change and variety” that came with life at sea. Along with his friend Jock Hume, however, he planned to leave ship life at the end of the summer of 1912. He had his eye on a position with the Devonshire Park Orchestra in Eastbourne. “He was full of hope and life and spirits,” summarized Emeric Holmes Beaman. “He was looking forward confidently to the future, and yet quite content with the present.”

7
“T
HE
L
IFE OF
E
VERY
S
HIP
H
E
E
VER
P
LAYED
O
N.
”

J
ohn Law Hume, known to his fellow musicians as Jock and to school friends as Johnny, had separated from Wes Woodward after the
Olympic
’s collision with the
Hawke
, but their paths remained remarkably similar. Hume was assigned to the
Caronia
’s sister ship, the
Carmania
, and like Woodward sailed to New York and cruised the Mediterranean. He arrived back in Liverpool three days later than Woodward on April 2, 1912.

Born in Dumfries, Scotland, on August 9, 1890, Jock Hume appears to have been the liveliest, cheekiest member of the band. Few people could speak of him without mentioning his huge grin, his appetite for life, his professional ambition, and his love of practical jokes. A tall, slim boy with fair curling hair, he left home at sixteen and despite his age had been on more ships than any of the other musicians on the
Titanic
. This was not unusual for the time. Boys growing up in towns with limited opportunities to work in industry joined the merchant navy straight from school for the security of employment as well as the promise of adventure.

John Law Hume.

The photograph of him released after the sinking didn’t do his personality justice. It was of a smartly dressed, tight-lipped young man in a high collar trying to give an impression of respectability. In contrast, a photo given to fund-raisers in New York and published in the
New York Times
revealed his true character. Dressed in high waist trousers, a white shirt, white shoes, and a kipper tie, he had an insouciant look on his face. The thumb of his left hand was tucked into his belt and his right elbow rested on a post. He looked a snappy dresser, and proud of it. In an age characterized by formality, particularly when being photographed, Hume was casual. In the middistance, to his right, a young woman reclined on a lawn looking toward the camera. She wasn’t identified but seemed to be an admirer. One friend said of Jock Hume, “A cooler young fellow I never knew.”

He was from a musical family, although not as musical as he would sometimes suggest. His father, Andrew, was a music teacher and accomplished violin and bow maker who had studied under Prosper Sainton, a French violinist and professor at London’s Royal Academy of Music. By 1894 Andrew was sufficiently well thought of to be given a small entry in David Baptie’s encyclopedic work
Musical Scotland
. In 1915 he told a reporter from
Strad
magazine that he’d started making violins thirty years ago and that he’d learned the craft by visiting the workshops of Erlbach, Schönbach, and Markneukirtchen in the Saxony region of Germany, visits that he was still making each year.

Andrew liked to tell the story that his great-grandfather was a well-known composer and poet—the author of “The Scottish Emigrant’s Farewell” and the Popular music to Robert Burns’s poem “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton.” Jock Hume must have believed this story because Louis Cross, a musician who had worked with him on the
Celtic
, told a journalist in 1912 that Hume “came of a musical family” and that “his father and his grandfather before him had been violinists and makers of musical instruments. The name is well known in Scotland because of it.” Another version reported that Cross said Hume told him that his ancestors “were minstrels in the olden days.”

“The Scottish Emigrant’s Farewell” was written by a Mr. Hume— Alexander Hume (1811–1859)—but this Hume was not directly related to Andrew or Jock. He was from Edinburgh and only had one son, William Hume, who was born in 1831. Andrew’s father, John, was born the following year to a laborer named Robert Hume and also spent his early life laboring before becoming an attendant in a lunatic asylum in his late thirties. He could also have played the violin, of course, but he wasn’t a household name or a minstrel. The Humes of Dumfries were of more modest stock and, as we shall see, given at times to fantasizing and conveniently forgetting the particulars of stories.

Dumfries is a small town in southwest Scotland close to the border with England, nearer to Carlisle than Glasgow or Edinburgh. Bordered on three sides by mountains and straddling the smooth flowing River Nith, which empties into the Solway Firth, it feels relatively isolated from both countries. In the early years of the twentieth century, it had a population of around fourteen thousand and was best known as the place where Robbie Burns, Scotland’s greatest and best-loved poet, was living when he died at the age of thirty-seven in 1796.

7 & 9 Nith Place, Dumfries, where Jock Hume spent part of his childhood.

Jock Hume was a first son, born on August 9, 1890. He was later joined by three sisters—Nellie, Grace, and Catherine (Kate)—and one brother, Andrew. He started school in 1895 at St. Michael Street School, a few minutes away from the family home, which was over a shop on Nith Place. The head teacher, John Hendrie, encouraged the teaching of music. He arranged for the purchase of a school piano in 1894, hired a teacher named Miss Nellie Lockerbie “to undertake to provide musical training for the children” in 1896, and later established his own violin classes in the school hall. Hendrie would remember the schoolboy Hume as “a merry, bright, laughing boy.”

St. Michael Street School, Dumfries, where Jock Hume enrolled in 1895.

His religious education came from the Congregational Chapel at Waterloo Place where he became a member of the Sabbath School and later signed up with the temperance group the Band of Hope. Every meeting began with a group recital of “The Pledge” that they would eventually sign up to:

I promise hereby grace divine

To drink no spirits, ale, or wine,

Nor will I buy or sell or give

Strong drink to others while I live.

For my own good this pledge I take

But also for my neighbour’s sake

And this my strong resolve shall be

No drink, no drink, no drink for me.

Andrew Hume also tutored Jock on the violin and in his early teens Jock was competent enough to play both at church and at the Theatre Royal on Shakespeare Street, Scotland’s oldest playhouse. He also liked playing football. An anonymous school friend later tried to capture his dynamism: “No one was a greater favourite at school than ‘Johnny,’ as he was always called.” He remembered him as “the happy-faced lad” who was in love with his violin. “In the old days we have heard him, in the old Shakespeare Street Theatre, playing till the curtain should rise on many a mimic tragedy. We thought he would fiddle himself into fame . . .”

The Theatre Royal, Shakespeare Street, Dumfries, where Hume would play at as a teenager.

When school finished, probably in the summer of 1905, he worked as a clerk for James Geddes, a local solicitor, at 8 English Street in the heart of Dumfries. The job didn’t suit his artistic temperament or his wanderlust, just as banking hadn’t suited Wallace Hartley. Like Hartley, he was a conscientious worker but couldn’t stand the incarceration he felt in a small office space. He wanted to be out and about, with his violin if at all possible.