Free And the Band Played On by Christopher Ward Page B

date on it. In July 1912 the New York Times published an article about a fundraising event for the families of the Titanic musicians with a photograph of ‘John’ Law Hume alongside it. Here we see an amused, confident and good-looking young man leaning against a post, a thumb tucked nonchalantly into his belt. He is wearing Bugsy Malone-style gangster spats and a white bib and tucker. Behind him, lying on the grass, is a girl watching him intently. There is no indication of when the photograph was taken, or where, but I believe it was taken at the Constant Spring Hotel some time during his stay there.
    The orchestra left Kingston for Southampton on 8 April 1911 on the SS Oruba , their fellow passengers including four members of the England Cricket Team returning home after a disappointing tour of the West Indies in which two of their last four matches were rained off. The Oruba arrived back at Southampton on 1 May. Telegrams from C. W. & F. N. Black were handed to Jock and to John Woodward as they were disembarking, informing them that they were booked for the maiden voyage of the Olympic to New York in May.
    Jock spent very little time in Dumfries in the last sixteen months of his life. This may have encouraged Andrew Hume to believe that his son was losing interest in Mary. In fact, the reverse was the case. Like many young men planning to settle down he was working hard to save as much money as possible to find a place of their own to live.
    Jock had shared some of these thoughts with Louis Cross, in particular his intention to concentrate eventually on classical music. After Jock’s death, Cross talked with affection about his young Scottish friend to a reporter from the New York Times . ‘He was a young man of exceptional musical ability . . . he could pick up, without trouble, difficult compositions which would have taken others long to learn.’ Cross added: ‘If he had lived I believe he would not long have remained a member of a ship’s orchestra. Over in Dumfries I happen to know there’s a sweet young girl hoping against hope . . . Jock was to have been married the next time that he made the trip across the ocean.’

    If Jock Hume’s childhood was a troubled one, Mary Costin’s was no less so. Working-class life in Scotland had always been a constant struggle against poverty, sickness and death and the Costins had known more hardship than most. Both parents came from poor families, going back as far as parish records allow into the mid-1700s. Mary’s father, William, was the son of a ploughman; her mother Susan, the daughter of a fish dealer, Menzies Kennedy. The couple had six children, two daughters dying in infancy. Ten years into the marriage, William, a van driver, died from a cerebral haemorrhage, leaving Susan with Mary and her three brothers – William, John and Menzies – to bring up on her own. A strong and formidable-looking woman, judging from the only photograph of her, Susan Costin had drawn strength and compassion from a lifetime of adversity. She was also extraordinarily kind, welcoming Jock into their lives as if he were her own son.
    After the father’s death, the Costins could no longer afford to live in the family home in Bank Street so Susan found a job as an office caretaker for a firm of solicitors and moved to cheaper accommodation in Buccleuch Street. William, the oldest child, left school the following year aged fourteen and went out to work as a fishmonger’s assistant to supplement the family income.
    A century later, the wide social divide that defined the different lives of the Costins and the Humes is still plain to see from the stark contrast of their respective homes. No. 35 Buccleuch Street, the pinched two-bedroom terrace house where the Costin family lived, is today an estate agent’s shop with a two-bedroom flat upstairs. Just a few hundred yards away in a more fashionable street stands the substantial Georgian town house at 42 George Street, home of the Humes. A