Free And the Band Played On by Christopher Ward

lines as his reputation grew. But matching precise dates with destinations and the names of ships that Jock sailed on proved to be a difficult and largely unrewarding task.
    My mother remembered as a child seeing her mother with a cardboard box full of Jock’s letters and postcards sent from abroad, the cards showing pictures of ports he visited and the ships he sailed with. But none of these survived, my mother’s uncle, Menzies Costin, burning them on a bonfire at the back of the house in Buccleuch Street after Mary’s death.
    Accessing the information through public archives is fraught with difficulties. In 1966 the Public Record Office in London discarded part of its archive of British shipping records from 1861 to 1913. The decision met with considerable opposition from archivists and maritime historians as the records were considered to be a valuable source of information on the shipping industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eventually some of the records were transferred to the Maritime History Archive at St John’s in Newfoundland, with a number of crew lists and agreements remaining at the National Archive in Britain. Many were lost or mislaid along the way. A further complication is that musicians would sometimes travel as ‘crew’ and at other times as passengers, for which there were different manifests. On the Titanic , for instance, all eight members of the band travelled as passengers.
    However, some records do still exist, and it is possible to put together a picture of Jock’s life at sea from manifests that have survived, together with interviews given after his death by fellow musicians and by crew members he worked with. Musicians in ships’ orchestras worked much like airline crews today – never quite sure who they would be travelling round the world with until the last minute. Friendships would be formed, suspended, then resumed the next time they met up to play together. Two American musicians, cellist John Carr and bass player Louis Cross, who met Jock for the first time on the Cedric , were part of this camaraderie.
    In an interview with the New York Times after Jock’s death Louis Cross described Jock as ‘a light hearted, fine tempered young fellow with curly blond hair, a light complexion and a pleasant smile’. He was ‘the life of every ship he ever sailed on and was full of fun,’ said Cross. According to Cross and Carr, Jock played on the White Star liner Majestic , the Anchor Line’s California , and the White Star liner Megantic on its maiden voyage to Montreal. After joining the band of Titanic ’s sister ship Olympic on its maiden voyage to New York in May 1911, Jock rejoined the ship in September when it had to limp back to Southampton after colliding with the warship, HMS Hawke , in the Solent. To be chosen to play on the Titanic , the world’s biggest and most famous liner on its maiden voyage, was the ultimate accolade for the young musician.
    Few trips took Jock away from Dumfries for more than a month, including the time it took to travel to and from the port of embarkation. Before the ship sailed there would be rehearsals because most ships’ orchestras had never played together before, although many of the musicians knew each other. The longest time Jock spent away from home was four months, during the winter of 1910–1911, not long after he had met Mary. He was engaged to play during the winter season at the Constant Spring Hotel in Jamaica, a three-storey luxury hotel at the foot of the Blue Mountains. The Constant Spring, set in the middle of an exquisitely manicured 165-acre estate, was the first hotel in Jamaica to have running water and electric light. It promised its guests a French chef, a concert hall, dancing by moonlight, lavish bedrooms, a hairdressing salon, a huge swimming pool and a nine-hole golf course. It would seem that this booking also came through the Liverpool agency, Blacks, who were engaged by the hotel to recruit