And the Band Played On

And the Band Played On by Christopher Ward Page B

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Authors: Christopher Ward
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from Bordeaux. But there was drinking and dancing, stalls and entertainment. Trading restrictions were lifted for the day and so, too, were other social constraints and inhibitions. Most years, Pinden’s Circus would set up their marquee for the whole week, bringing acrobats, jugglers, fortune-tellers and dancing bears. It was always tremendous fun, with stories that had everyone laughing until Christmas. In 1904 a policeman went to investigate a break-in at a grain merchant on Brewery Street. He made a hasty retreat after discovering an elephant called Jumbo with his trunk in a sack of barley.
    According to my mother, it was at the Rood Fair in 1909 that Jock’s oldest sister, Nellie, introduced Jock to her friend from the glove making factory, Mary Costin, who was eighteen. Jock had recently returned from the maiden voyage of the White Star liner Megantic , which had sailed from Liverpool to Montreal and, not surprisingly, he was rather full of himself. He had taken his fiddle with him to the fair and, there and then, played a little jig for Mary. ‘And that was it, for both of them,’ my great-grandmother, Susan, later told everyone. ‘For both of them it was a thunderbolt. They seemed made for each other.’
    It says a lot for Mary Costin that she was able to capture young Jock’s heart at all, let alone keep his attention for the next two years. He was on a roll at the time, travelling the world on luxury ships, meeting rich and famous people and enjoying a boisterous social life in crew quarters. Emotionally, Jock had already left Dumfries behind him, but at the Rood Fair that day Mary somehow managed to reel him in.
    The only picture of my grandmother Mary Costin that has survived was taken several years later in her mid-twenties, four or five years after his death. She is a good-looking young woman whose appearance is striking, but she has a coolness about her that verges on the intimidating. Maybe this was just what Jock needed to help him keep his feet firmly on the ground. Which makes it even harder to understand why Jock’s father Andrew Hume was so implacably opposed to their relationship.

    John (‘Jock’) Law Hume was born on 9 August 1890 at the family home, 5 Nith Place, Dumfries. ‘Law’ was his mother Grace’s maiden name. Jock was Andrew and Grace Hume’s second child – Nellie, the first of three daughters, having arrived two years earlier. For all his father’s relentless self-promotion as a music teacher and a performer, the Humes were a fairly ordinary family struggling to make ends meet. Andrew was the son of a farm labourer who was now working as an orderly at the Dumfries lunatic asylum; Grace was a former laundress, the daughter of an iron moulder. Today, 5 Nith Place is a kebab takeaway and now, as then, the street is likely to flood when the River Nith bursts its banks. But you would never guess any of these things looking at the studio portrait of Andrew Hume, the dapper dandy with the trim Edwardian moustache, posing with his violin and wearing his tails and white tie.
    Jock’s two younger sisters, Grace and Catherine (Kate), were born in 1892 and 1897, which suggests that there may have been a miscarriage between the birth of the two girls, the Humes’ family planning otherwise falling into the routine of a child every other year. Their last child, Andrew, was clearly an afterthought. He was born in 1901 when Jock was eleven. His mother was unwell even before she became pregnant with him but afterwards she went into a decline, becoming a virtual invalid for the next five years and dying of cancer of the oesophagus in 1906, aged forty.
    It would be nice to imagine the Humes as a Scottish von Trapp family making the hills of Dumfries and Galloway come alive with the sound of music. Certainly there was a lot of ‘doh re mi’ going on in the house: during the day, there was a constant stream of people, young and old, calling at the house for personal tuition in the violin,

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