The Band That Played On

by Steve Turner

  The tragic story of torture and murder had rapidly become the mystery of a hoax. Suspicion immediately fell on Kate but she persisted with her version of events, giving a detailed description of Nurse Mullard and suggesting that her father faked the letter from Grace. The police obtained copies of Grace’s handwriting and quickly realized that it didn’t match the letter said to have been sent from Belgium. At Kate’s workplace they found notepaper that matched the paper of Grace’s letter.

  Kate was arrested for “forgery and uttering” and was taken into custody in Dumfries. Later she was transferred to a jail in Edinburgh where at the end of December she went on trial before the Lord Justice General, Lord Strathclyde. She pleaded not guilty, arguing that when she wrote the letters she was not in control of her emotions. As her counsel explained: “When the alleged offence is said to have been committed, her mind was so unbalanced that she could not, and did not, understand what she was doing and the effect thereof, and was not responsible therefore.”

  The question for the court was—if it was a hoax, what could the possible motive be? Grace, dressed in a fashionable fur stole and blue serge jacket, appeared totally composed as she stood in the dock. She said:

  I had no intention of causing any sensation or alarming my father, stepmother or anyone else. I do not know why I wrote it, but I fancied what I said would be the way Grace would have written of herself in her last minutes. I could fancy the whole thing as it was written, but I had no idea that anyone would see the letters. I cannot say what made me do it, except the cruelties the Germans were committing. I was seeing and imagining the things I wrote. I cannot think why I wrote the name of Mullard, except that I believed a man of that name went down on the Titanic,2 and perhaps it got into my head, which at the time seemed to be turning around. I firmly believed what was in the letters was true and that Grace had been killed. I had worked myself into that belief. I did not think I was doing anything improper.

  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. “Af
ter the worst possible start,” says Christopher with obvious pride, “she made a great success of her life.”

  16

  “I SHOULD CLING

  TO MY OLD VIOLIN.”

  As 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.

  The violin itself had been photographed deep inside the case, which was not a normal violin case but a thick brown leather bag that looked more like an old-fashioned family doctor’s bag. It had a handle but it also had two straps, possibly two inches wide, that could easily have been put over his shoulders. On the side it was initialed in black letters W. H. H. The violin looked golden brown and was in good condition apart from some minor erosion on the tailpiece. It had perhaps been restored because included in the belongings was a copy of a 1903 book, The Repairing and Restoration of Violins by Horace Petherick, which had been signed to “Miss Robinson” by one “J. Griffin” on December 8, 1915.

  The other material had been kept either in or with the case. Some of it, like the sheet music to a song called “The Ship That Will Never Return” by F. V. St. Clair1 and the violin book given to Maria in 1915, obviously weren’t part of Hartley’s collection, but other material could have been. There was some sheet music dated April 1911 from the Will Rositer Band and Orchestra Club and, most significantly, sheet music to “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

  What was interesting about this sheet music for “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was that the music was not Arthur Sullivan’s “Propior Deo,” Lowell Mason’s “Bethany” (or “Bethel”), or even the Church of England’s “Horbury,”, but a 1902 tune by Lewis Carey that was performed by the Australian contralto Ada Crossley, who would later appear at the memorial concert for the Titanic musicians held at the Royal Albert Hall. She first appeared in London in 1895, played five times before
Queen Victoria, and toured in America. This version of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was one of her signature tunes.

  It raised the question as to whether this was the version, or a version, that the band played on August 15, 1912. Was Carey’s music, made popular by Ada Crossley, the setting that most people at the time were familiar with because it had been taken around the world? If it was the one played, could this explain why so many people from different countries and church affiliations instantly recognized it? If it was added to the music case after Hartley’s death, it still could be because Maria knew that he played this tune.

  Other material appeared to be family memorabilia with no obvious connection to Hartley: a postcard to a Miss Laura Crocker in Upper Clapton, a First World War medal given to a Thomas Robinson, a Bible containing the family tree of a William Davies who married Eleanor Young on the island of St. Helena in 1849. There was no sign of music composed by Hartley, which was rumored to have been in the case when he died.

  Through making inquiries I was able to establish that this violin did exist. The photos weren’t the result of digital manipulation. However, everyone connected with it was bound to a vow of confidentiality. This was partly because the instrument was still being subjected to historical and scientific tests and partly because the optimum sale date would be the Titanic’s centenary year. Tens of thousands of UK pounds had already been spent attempting to verify its authenticity as the actual violin used by Wallace Hartley on his final voyage. All that I could deduce for certain was that it had come down through the family of Maria Robinson and that the present owner was a man.

  If this object was what it appeared to be, it made an extraordinary story. If it wasn’t what it appeared to be, it was still an extraordinary story, but this time one either of forgery or incorrect attribution. It could, for example, have belonged to Hartley but not have been taken on the Titanic or have been commissioned by Maria after his death to replace a real one that was lost. I took the photo of the violin to David Rattray, who is a luthier, instrument custodian at the Royal Academy of Music, and author of Masterpieces of Italian Violin Making. His guess was that the violin was of German origin, probably from the late eighteenth century, and that in 1910 it could have been bought for £30 to £40.