The Band That Played On (34 page)

While in prison she was examined by two physicians who found her to be alert and intelligent, although perhaps a bit shallow and easily given to fantasy. The death of her mother, the bad relationship with her father and stepmother, the outbreak of war, and her sudden departure from home were all cited as possible reasons why she might have taken refuge in the world of make-believe. Neither doctor believed that she had criminal intent. “The story was a mere childish device to create sensation and draw attention to herself,” concluded Dr. Robertson, physician superintendent at the Royal Asylum, Morningside, and a lecturer in mental diseases. “Having once made up the story, she naturally stuck to it, and possibly was led into what appears to be criminal by the circumstance that she was asked to publish the letters.”

Crucial to this mental confusion, in the opinion of both doctors, was the death of John Law Hume. It wasn’t just the loss of someone she loved, but the sense of self-importance that resulted from the newspapers’ attention. “Her favourite brother was lost in the
Titanic
and that made the first strong impression on her mind in her life,” reported Sir Thomas Clouston, an expert in mental and nervous diseases. “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.” Dr. Robertson concurred: “She at this time tasted the sweets of notoriety arousing through being related to a person connected with a public event. No doubt to a person of her temperament there would be a great temptation to put herself in the same position again.”

At the end of two days the jury delivered a verdict of guilty but with a recommendation of leniency. The judge agreed. Three months in custody was already enough for a seventeen-year-old girl who’d done something foolish as a result of unique pressures. At the end of his summing up he turned to her and said: “Kate Hume, I am very willing to accede to the recommendation of the jury, who have given the most careful and anxious consideration of your case. In consideration of the fact that you have already been three months in prison, and having regard to your precious good character and to your age, I consider that you may be released now on probation.”

Kate married Thomas Terbit in 1919 and had four children. She named her youngest son John Law Hume Terbit. She never told her children about the court case. Andrew Hume left Scotland in 1915 and moved to Peterborough where he lived for four years before going on to an address in Brixton Road, London. In 1920 he moved to 34 Great Portland Street in the West End of London where he carried on making violins until his death from a brain hemorrhage on March 24, 1934, at the age of sixty-nine. His obituary in the
Strad
read: “Mr Hume was born in Edinburgh [
sic
], of Scotch parents, and studied violin making in Germany, where he worked from 1880 to 1888. On his return, he carried on the business of violin maker at Dumfries. Later he moved to London. His instruments gained an award at the Wembley Exhibition of 1924–25.” He left £811 5s. 8d.

Johnann Law Hume Costin, the only authenticated child of a
Titanic
bandsman, had the most extraordinary life of all. Her mother, Mary, died of tuberculosis in 1922, leaving Johnann an orphan at the age of ten. Mary’s mother, Susan, took over her care but two years later she, too, died and Johnann was passed to an uncle. Perhaps uncomfortable with the unusual first name given to her by her mother, she changed it to Jacqueline and later became known as Jackie.

On paper her chances of making anything of her life were slim. She’d lost both her parents and her guardian grandmother by the time she was twelve, was raised in a less-than-rich town, and carried what was then the stigma of having been born illegitimate. Yet, in her midteens she came to London where she worked as a salesgirl in a shop and in 1937 married a distinguished Fleet Street crime reporter named John Ward and had two children, Cherry and Christopher. John Ward died in 1945 and she was left to raise her children alone. In the 1950s she worked in a noneditorial capacity for the
Daily Mirror
, then Britain’s best-selling newspaper, and then got a top job in the British film industry working in publicity for producer Herbert Wilcox and his glamorous actress wife, Anna Neagle. In a short time she had moved from the suburb of Kew to Hampstead, then to Holland Park and finally Knightsbridge.

She became a friend to journalists, directors, producers, and film stars and carried on working in PR well into her seventies. Both of her children in turn became writers. Cherry, who married a French cardiologist, moved to Paris and became a stringer for many Fleet Street papers, including the
Evening News
,
Daily Mail
, and
Daily Mirror
. Christopher was a popular columnist on the
Daily Mirror
for thirteen years, edited the
Daily Express
from 1981 to 1983, and then, in the 1980s, cofounded what became Britain’s leading contract publishers, Redwood Publishing, which specialized in magazines for clients such as American Express, British Rail, Marks and Spencer, Woolworths, and Sky.

Still chairman of Redwood but semiretired, Christopher lives in a spectacular Grade-A-listed early-nineteenth-century mansion surrounded by sixty-eight acres of rolling countryside in the Scottish Borders. He is a successful and wealthy man whose entry in
Debrett’s People of Today
lists his recreations as walking, photography, and shooting. He has been a trustee of the World Wildlife Foundation and was chairman of WWF-UK for six years.

He’s only an hour away from Dumfries by car but his life couldn’t be more different from that of his grandmother Mary Costin or even his grandfather John Law Hume. He’s conscious that he is the result of a tough struggle for survival and with more time on his hands he has started to research his remarkable family, traveling to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to discover his grandfather’s grave, contacting violin experts to see if he can find out the stories behind the Eberle and the Guadagnini that were lost at sea, and sifting through crew records to nail down the ships that his grandfather served on.

Johnann Law Hume Costin, by then better known as Jackie Ward, died in 1996 at the age of eighty-three. She was living in Kensington Church Street, not too far from the Royal Albert Hall where her father was celebrated in music in 1912. “After the worst possible start,” says Christopher with obvious pride, “she made a great success of her life.”

16
“I S
HOULD
C
LING
TO
M
Y
O
LD
V
IOLIN.
”

A
s I neared the end of writing this book, I was talking with a contact who had helped me with information about Wallace Hartley. Suddenly she said, “Have you heard about Wallace’s violin?” Of course I knew about the violin inasmuch as it was one of the great mysteries surrounding his death and the discovery of his body by the
Mackay-Bennett
. Press reports immediately after the discovery made specific mention of the fact that he had been found with his violin case strapped to his chest. It may have been these that led Thomas Worthington to say at his funeral that Hartley had in effect said: “I should cling to me my old violin which has given so much pleasure to many, and often to me, and instead of playing to please or amuse or pass time I should play to inspire.” The reports also said that the violin, its case, and other material, were being sent to White Star for forwarding to England.

But nothing ever arrived, or at least nothing that was reported on. Unusually, the violin wasn’t mentioned on the official list of effects that Albion Hartley signed for. Nor were its case and the other loose items. In her 2002 book
A Hymn for Eternity
, Yvonne Carroll wrote: “Wallace Hartley’s violin was found strapped to his body but disappeared before his body was sent back to England.” The suspicion was that somone had spirited it away shortly after it was brought to land.

Maybe it was because of this loss that Arthur Catton Lancaster, a musical instrument maker from Colne, who had played alongside Hartley in the Colne Orchestra, decided to make a violin in honor of his friend. Lancaster had played at the funeral and lived close to the old Hartley home on Albert Road. He engraved the words “Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee” on the tailpiece of the tribute instrument, had a color image of the
Titanic
painted on the back, and had a small varnished photograph of Hartley fixed beneath it. The intention was that it would be competed for each year by violinists in the Colne Orchestra and kept by the winner.

The painting of the
Titanic
and photo of Wallace Hartley on the back of the tribute violin made by Arthur Lancaster.

The violin was mentioned in
Strad
magazine at the time, and then in the second edition of Rev. William Meredith-Morris’s classic book
British Violin Makers
(1920) where it was described as having “a large and telling tone.” Lancaster was praised in general for his beautiful workmanship. At some time after the 1920s the violin was no longer with the Colne Orchestra, its whereabouts unknown. In 1955 it was bought and repaired by Eric Voigt of Manchester and eventually sold on. Then, in 1974, an anonymous benefactor appeared at a rehearsal of the East Lancashire Youth Orchestra one Saturday morning and handed over the violin as a gift, requesting that it be played once a year in honor of Wallace Hartley.

The East Lancashire Youth Orchestra became the Burnley Youth Orchestra and the violin was traditionally kept by the leader but throughout the years had been badly treated. In 2010 the Lancashire Sinfonietta took the instrument to David Vernon Violins of Manchester, where it was completely restored by Paul Parsons.

I thought this was the violin that my contact was referring to, but it wasn’t. I was shown a collection of color images, some of them featuring a violin in a large brown leather bag, others of sheet music, black-and-white photos, and scribbled notes in what looked like a diary. I assumed it was all part of a single collection. “What is it?” I asked. My contact replied: “This is supposed to be the violin and case that Wallace Hartley was found with after the
Titanic
went down.”

As far as the band on the
Titanic
was concerned, this was the Holy Grail. As far as the
Titanic
in general went, it must rate pretty close, next to having a chunk of the ship raised or discovering a safe full of unposted letters written on board. If this was what it purported to be, it contained the answers to many questions that had perplexed
Titanic
historians during the past century. If this was the actual violin that once played “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as the
Titanic
went down, it must be valued at millions of dollars. It’s hard to think of another musical instrument that would raise as much money.

Questions began tumbling through my mind. Was it genuine? How was it possible to know whether it was real or not? Who had been holding on to it? Who had taken the photographs and why? The answer to the last question was easy. They had been made by someone intending to put the instrument up for auction. The photos had existed for at least five years and had been shown to a select few people who it was thought could assist with the authentication.

Although I was looking at photographic evidence rather than the physical collection of objects, everything about what was in the pictures struck me as being the real deal. If this wasn’t genuine, it was a highly elaborate and well-researched fraud. Regardless of the objects’ immediate source, all the evidence pointed to their having once belonged to Maria Robinson, Hartley’s fiancée. On the July 14 to 26 pages of a 1912 diary was what looked like the draft of a letter written to a Mr. F. Walters or Walthers at the Office of the Provincial Secretary, Nova Scotia. It read: “I would be most grateful if you could convey my heartfelt thanks to all who have made possible the return of my late fiancé’s violin. May I also take this opportunity to express my appreciation to you personally for your gracious intervention on my behalf.” Beneath this was the remark, “A. H. informed,” surely a reference to Albion Hartley.

If this was a draft of a letter, it indicated that Maria had made a direct appeal to Nova Scotia’s provincial secretary for the return of the violin and that by July 1912 it had been received by her without the event ever being publicized. All queries about effects were dealt with by the deputy provincial secretary, who was named Frederick F. Mathers. Either I had misread Maria’s handwriting or she had made a small spelling error.

The question of why she wanted to have the violin rather than allowing it to go to his family was answered when I looked at its details. The tailpiece, a V-shaped piece of silver stretching from the bottom of the strings to the lower edge of the violin’s body, had been carefully inscribed with a message. “For Wallace on the occasion of our engagement from Maria.” It not only made sense that Maria would have wanted to cherish it and felt she almost had a right to claim it, but also offered a possible explanation as to why Hartley strapped it to his chest, next to his heart, and went into the water with it rather than jettisoning it to allow him more freedom of movement.