Free And the Band Played On by Christopher Ward Page A

musicians for the winter season from Europe. The musicians, including Jock, travelled to Jamaica on the Port Royal , one of three fast steamers built ten years earlier for the Liverpool shipping company Elder, Dempster & Co. to boost trade and travel between Britain and the Antilles. The shipping company received a £40,000 annual subsidy from the British and Jamaican governments to take tourists out to Jamaica, and return with tropical fruit, mostly bananas. Elder, Dempster & Co. owned an interest in the Constant Spring Hotel, engaging Eugene Smith, a pineapple cultivator from Florida, to grow tropical fruit there.
    Jock and the other musicians boarded the Port Royal at Bristol and were due to dock in Kingston on Christmas Eve but were delayed by heavy storms in the Caribbean, arriving grey and seasick late on Christmas Day 1910. On the Port Royal Jock met cellist John Wesley Woodward for the first time; Woodward joined him on the maiden voyage of the Olympic in May the following year. Little more than a year later they would die together on the Titanic .
    The musicians’ arrival in Jamaica was eagerly awaited by the hotel management and the guests. On Christmas Eve 1910 the manager took a prominent advertisement in the Daily Gleaner to announce the ‘Season Arrangements’:
A first-class Orchestra, consisting of five
professionals has been engaged in England
who will play at all dances.
Select concerts will be given daily from 1 to 3pm and every evening from 7.00 to 11 pm.
The Orchestra is bringing a full programme
of classical and all the latest dance music.
     
    The orchestra proved to be a huge hit, playing at Cinderella dances, fancy dress balls and golf tournaments as well as giving ‘brilliant’ classical concerts. ‘All who have heard this splendid orchestra declare that it has never been surpassed in this country. Its repertoire is not only extensive but leaves nothing to be desired,’ said Lady Olivier, President of the hotel’s golf club. John Woodward was a particular success with his cello, an instrument ‘seldom heard in Jamaica’, and he gave numerous solo performances, all of which were ‘warmly applauded’.
    Two weeks after the Titanic sank, the Daily Gleaner published on its front page an affectionate tribute to Jock and to John Woodward, under the heading ‘Bandsmen who were known here’. The orchestra, it said, was ‘voted the best of its kind that has ever visited Jamaica’. Both musicians were ‘popular with the staff of the hotel as well as those who stayed there’. Cellist John Carr and bass player Louis Cross were at the Constant Spring at the same time, and this was their recollection, too. Jock was befriended by an American family wintering at the hotel. They took a shine to the young Scotsman and asked him to come and visit them next time he came to New York.
    It must have been a wonderful experience for the young man. It was the first time Jock had felt warm Caribbean sunshine on his white Scottish back, the first time he had swum in the sea without bristling with goose pimples as he came out of the water. It was also the first time in six years that he had stood still in one place, working with the same musicians. According to Cross, he liked the continuity and enjoyed playing more classical music. He returned home to Dumfries tanned and rested, promising Mary that he would one day take her to Jamaica. Jock had missed her more than he thought he would and, after six years jumping on and off trains and ships, was looking forward to the day he could afford to settle down to a less frenetic life.
    There are very few photographs of Jock. The most familiar of them is the studio portrait distributed to the press by the White Star Line immediately after his death. Not the most flattering of pictures, it shows the young Jock looking like a cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and a startled rabbit. It was most likely a portrait taken in a studio in Dumfries and it is difficult to put a