And the Band Played On (35 page)

She never remarried, although she had a long and troubled relationship with a man – a friend of my father’s – with whom she lived briefly during her sixties before they went their separate ways. After her retirement she continued to busy herself with various projects. She was unwell for the last two or three years and had great difficulty coming to terms with old age but she never lost her glamour, her high standards or her sense of humour. Even in her eighties, she received more than 200 Christmas cards, many from new, young friends who replaced the old friends who had died.

Soon after the hardback publication of this book, I spoke at the Borders Book Festival at Melrose. At the end, during questions, a man in the third row put his hand up. He just said, ‘I knew Johnann. I knew your mother, Jackie. I worked with her. She was a wonderful woman’.

27

Our Heart Will Glow With Pride

2010

Early in 2010, when this book was still nothing more than a family ancestry project, I contacted Jock’s old school, St Michael’s, in an attempt to confirm some dates and find out if any records existed of his time there. In this I was unsuccessful, the records having long since been lost or destroyed. But I was lucky in my timing because some months later I was contacted by the head teacher, Mrs Sommerville, who invited me to attend a parents’ evening in April when the children would be unveiling a ‘
Titanic
project’ they had been working on for some time. ‘I think you will enjoy it,’ she said, ‘and the children will be interested to meet the grandson of Jock Hume.’

It was a delightful and moving occasion, full of optimism, energy and creativity. A huge, colourful mural of the
Titanic
, painted to scale, extended the full length of one wall of the classroom. A smaller scale model of the ship, built by the children, stood in front of it. Every inch of the walls was covered by
Titanic
memorabilia created by the children: passenger lists, menus, White Star Line posters, all carefully researched. The children involved in the project, and their teachers, came dressed in period costumes, either as passengers or members of the ship’s crew. Mrs Sommerville made a very good impression as a First Class passenger and one boy played the part of Harold Bride, the young Marconi wireless operator who survived. The enthusiastic curator of the Dalbeattie Museum, Tommy Henderson, provided a wide range of period props – a Morse code key, a
Titanic
lifebelt and copies of original newspapers reporting the disaster.

I didn’t know then about Jock’s headmaster, Mr Hendrie, who had played such an important part in the school’s formative years, involving, challenging, stretching and inspiring the school children in his care, but clearly his presence is still felt there. To enter the school you have to walk past the marble plaque to the left of the door commemorating his two old boys, Jock and Tom, who died on the
Titanic
. Passing it could be a mournful experience, but above it is the uplifting exhortation, ‘Our School Aim is to . . . Reach For the Stars,’ above a painting of two outstretched hands reaching up towards a blue, star-filled sky.

I left the party with a spring in my step. The evening had been a celebration of success and of achievement, a recognition of the courage of two former pupils who went to sea, an encouragement for young people to aspire to brave things, not to be deterred by the fear of catastrophe.

I was reminded of the evening some months later, leafing through 1912 issues of the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard & Advertiser
and coming across
The Last Hymn
– an anonymous appreciation of Jock published the week after the
Titanic
sank. I quoted the first paragraph of the letter in the epigraph to this book but it is worth reading in its entirety because, like that
Titanic
evening at St Michael’s, its message is such an optimistic one. I wondered whether Mr Hendrie himself had written it.

‘No one was a greater favourite at school than ‘Johnny’, as he was always called. Indeed everyone who knew the happy faced lad will have felt a lump in their throat when they read that poor Johnny had, ‘like the Wanderer,’ gone through the darkness to his rest. Yet, withal, pride masters our grief, for the lad died a hero, his beloved violin clasped to his breast, playing in that last requiem for the passing soul of others and for his own.

Johnny loved his violin, and we, who have heard him play, loved both. We expected the lad to do great things with his violin, and we have not been disappointed. 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, and he has done so, but in a grander and more heroic way than ever we dreamed of. Again, and for the last time, he played the curtain up on a tragedy, not the mimic one of the stage, but on a grim, awful tragedy of real life and death.

Johnny has gone and his violin is silenced forever; yet,
while memory keeps its seat, that sad, sweet, solemn strain of the last hymn he helped to play shall be wafted to us across the intervening ocean of time. Our eyes may become misty at the sound of the ghostly strain, and we will grow sad to think so bright, cheery, and clever a young man has gone, but, anon, our hearts will glow with pride when we remember the grand heroic order of his going.’

28

Aftermath

Since publication of the first edition of
And The Band Played On
, several important missing pieces of the family jigsaw have fallen into place. I had no idea, for instance, that Kate Hume’s daughter, Grace, was still alive and living in Glasgow and was shocked to discover she had never been told about her mother’s hoax and subsequent trial in 1914.

From Australia came a revelatory email from Dumfries-born Ann Semple, introducing herself as a granddaughter of Mary Costin and Mary’s husband Walter Thomson whom Mary married six years after Jock’s death. We share the same grandmother in Mary Costin. My mother never knew what happened to Walter Thomson, nor what became of Mary and Walter’s two sons, my mother’s half-brothers. Ann told me that two years after my grandmother Mary Costin’s death in 1922, Walter married a Dumfries waitress, Jessie Robertson, who moved into the family home in St Andrew Street. Walter gave up chauffeuring and became a ‘motor works trimmer’, later finding work at the local pit. He died aged sixty-nine in 1963, surviving Jessie by two years.

Mary and Walter’s older son was crushed to death by a truck aged nineteen while working in a quarry in Dumfries. The younger son, Kennedy, born a year before Mary died, married a Dumfries girl, Annie Campbell, with whom he had eight children – one of them Ann. She married a local man, Doug Semple, and the couple emigrated to Australia in 1981. Ann said she had no knowledge of her grandfather Walter’s first marriage to my grandmother Mary but rejected the idea that Walter would have influenced Mary in leaving my mother ‘Johnann’ behind. She remembers her grandfather as a man who enjoyed his children and grandchildren. It is an interesting postscript to Mary Costin’s story and one that still troubles me. Would Mary have included ‘Johnann’ in her new life with Walter if she had lived?

More troubling still has been my growing realisation that my mother, far from leaving the Humes and the Costins behind when she fled Dumfries, was living in close proximity to them in London from her twenties onwards, but preferred not to seek them out. Her grandfather Andrew Hume had a violin shop in Great Portland Street until his death in 1934; her uncle Menzies lived and worked in the south-east of England for much of his life and died when my mother was forty-three. Menzies had a wife and a son. Yet my mother made no attempt to find or contact any of them, nor her stepfather and half-brother in Dumfries. For the first time I appreciated the deep pain and abandonment she must have felt all her life.

I still wait in hope for someone to come forward with information about Jock’s father, Andrew Hume, as I still do not know where Andrew obtained his musical education nor how he made the huge leap from farm labourer’s son to talented musician. A distant Hume relative wrote to me about a Hume uncle who had a music shop in Glasgow, and this may provide the answer.

In June 2011 I flew back to Halifax to take part in a documentary being filmed for the Discovery Channel about the
Titanic
legacy. For me it was an emotional journey that took me step by step from the Flagship Pier, where the
Mackay-Bennett
docked and unloaded the bodies, then up the hill to the temporary mortuary in Agricola Street. From there we went to Fairview Lawn Cemetery where, once again, I stood at my grandfather’s grave. This time I took some flowers for Tom Mullin, too.

Later that week we filmed in the archives where, for the first time, I was able to hold (wearing white gloves) the original documents describing the
Titanic
dead, before moving on to St George’s Church, where mourners had spilled into the street at the funeral of the unknown child. We climbed to the highest point of the Citadel from where the
Mackay-Bennett
was first sighted. At the Maritime Museum the curator, Dan Conlin, told me that every 15 April he and some friends go to Fairview Lawn to pay their respects, accompanied by a violinist who plays ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ at Jock’s graveside.

Filming continued later in the summer in Dumfries – at Jock’s house, then Mary’s and inside the Sheriff Court where the Humes and the Costins fought their bitter battles. The proximity of all these locations and their respective schools made me question, not for the first time, just how long Jock and Mary had known each other. It would have been impossible for their paths not to have crossed regularly from the age of five onwards. In Dock Park, overlooking the River Nith, I considered the irony of Jock and Tom’s memorial standing so close to the now-derelict bandstand where Andrew Hume conducted the orchestra on Sunday afternoons.

It is one hundred years since Jock, his violin slung over his shoulder, strode proudly to Dumfries railway station on his way to Southampton to board the
Titanic
. A century later, the story of the
Titanic
has lost none of its fascination, although by the end of this centenary year I suspect there will be little left to be said, or known, about the great ship and the catastrophe that sent it to the bottom of the Atlantic. But my own journey continues and I hope that people will continue to provide me with missing pieces of the jigsaw to complete the picture of Jock’s brief but brave young life – and its aftermath.

Christopher Ward

[email protected]

Epilogue

Madeleine Astor
inherited the income from a $5 million trust fund set up by her husband, Colonel J. J. Astor, and was given lifelong use of the Astor residence in Manhattan as long as she did not remarry. In June 1916 Madeleine married her childhood friend and banker, William Dick, part owner of the
Brooklyn Times
. She moved out of the Astor residence but held on to a large part of her inheritance. She had two children with Dick but they divorced in 1933. Four months later she married a twenty-six-year-old Italian boxer, Enzo Fiermonte, but they divorced five years later. She died aged forty-six.

John Jacob Astor VI
, Colonel Astor and Madeleine’s posthumous
Titanic
son inherited $3 million on his birth in 1912 and a further $5 million on his twenty-first birthday. He had a troubled life, marrying four times. He died in Miami Beach, Florida in 1992, aged seventy-nine.

Menzies Costin
and Esmé divorced. In 1944 she married Alexander Zaves in Manchester. Menzies, who served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders during the First World War, signed up and fought again in the Second World War. He subsequently became a butler at St Donat’s Castle in Wales, where he died of a heart attack aged fifty-nine in 1955. His son John was listed on his death certificate as the informant. I have no further information regarding Menzies’ life or of John or any other children.

William Dickie
survived the ‘mutilated nurse’ scandal, continuing as editor of the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
. But he suffered a series of personal tragedies that undoubtedly accelerated his death at the age of sixty-two, less than five years later. His elder son, Lieutenant William Dickie of the KOSB, was killed at Beaumont Hamel on the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916. His commanding officer wrote to Mr and Mrs Dickie: ‘Although wounded, he continued to lead his platoon until shot dead. All ranks mourn the loss of a gallant officer and wish me to convey their deepest sympathy.’ At his memorial service in Dumfries, fellow officers who served with the young Oxford graduate in Gallipoli and on the Somme spoke of his courage under fire and great personal kindness to his wounded soldiers.