How I discovered the guilty secret of my Titanic violinist grandfather
CHRISTOPHER WARD always longed to uncover the story of his doomed relative. But when he turned detective, he found MUCH more than he bargained for . . .
THE last survivors had left the Titanic in lifeboats an hour earlier. On the sloping deck, as the water edged ever closer to their feet, eight musicians played on, completing all five verses of Nearer, My God, To Thee. The hymn, they hoped, would offer some comfort to the 1,500 remaining men, women and children who would soon join them in the icy Atlantic.
They could hardly hear their instruments above the sound of the ship’s death throes as tables and chairs smashed through the windows of the saloons, showering them with glass.
Finally, the bandmaster nodded at his colleagues, gave his customary bow and said: ‘Gentlemen, thank you all. A most commendable performance. Good night and good luck.’ Witnesses saw the bandsmen shake hands. Then they plunged into the frozen depths — and certain death.
One of those musicians was my grandfather, Jock Hume, aged just 21. As he played the last notes on his violin, he must have known that he’d never again see his sweetheart, Mary Costin, the girl he’d planned to marry on his return home. Back in Dumfries, she was devastated when she learned that Jock’s name was not on the list of survivors arriving in New York. She was pregnant with his child — my mother.
The story of my young grandfather has long fascinated me and I thought I had found out just about all there was to know about Jock, who had been playing on passenger liners since he was 15. But I was wrong.
Earlier this year, I’d heard that a collector of Titanic memorabilia had acquired a few pages from some old ledgers. These recorded the names of those who had benefited from the Titanic’s hardship fund, set up to help poverty-stricken dependants.
Might they contain the name of my grandmother?
Even as I asked Senan Molony, an author of several Titanic books, I knew it was a long shot.
Most of the Titanic Relief Fund documents had long since been incinerated. Just a few had gone to a dump from which they were later retrieved.
And there was an entry about my grandmother. It showed that in 1915, three years after the tragedy, unmarried Mary Costin was receiving 15s 2d a month for her fatherless infant.
I rang Molony to thank him for sending this poignant detail — and it was then that he dropped the bombshell. ‘I have a page that may be of even more interest to you,’ he said.
It contained a reference to hardship payments to a woman called Ethel McDonald. It read: ‘McDonald, Miss Ethel — The Colonial Bank, Kingston, Jamaica. On the 1st of [the] first month in each quarter, remit draft in favour of Colonial Bank for payment . . .’
Like my grandmother, Ethel had been awarded 15s 2d for her child. And the case file number against her entry, 689, was the same as that allocated to my grandmother.
I knew at once what this meant. Far from being faithful to his beloved Mary, my grandfather Jock — who I knew had visited the Caribbean — had fathered a child in Jamaica with Ethel. A child, moreover, who was my own blood relative: my mother’s halfsibling, a child who’d probably grown up and had offspring of his own.
That meant I might have cousins still living in Jamaica. Suddenly, nothing was more important to me than tracing them.
So I contacted a genealogist called Donald Lindo in Jamaica. I told him the few details I knew: that before taking the job on the Titanic, Jock had spent three months in Kingston, Jamaica, playing in the orchestra at the fashionable Constant Spring Hotel.
He’d arrived there on Christmas Day 1910 and left the following April, so I could give Donald a tight time-frame for a child born to Ethel McDonald.
A week later, he emailed me a copy of the birth certificate for a child called Keith Neville McDonald, born to Ethel on November 2, 1911. She gave her occupation as a barmaid, and the space for the name of the father was blank. ‘You realise, don’t you, that Ethel would have been a person of colour,’ Donald told me. ‘No white woman would have worked as a barmaid in Jamaica in 1911.’
Two days later I flew to Kingston, my mind buzzing with questions.
Had Jock accepted responsibility for the illegitimate child he fathered in Jamaica? This must, surely, have been established in letters he sent to Ethel — otherwise the Titanic Relief Fund would never have authorised payments to her.
Also, did my grandmother Mary know about Jock’s illegitimate Jamaican son, born less than a year before her own daughter?
That might explain the disapproving look on Mary’s face in the only surviving photograph. But this was not the time for speculation.
Genealogist Donald turned out to be a sprightly 82-year-old. We threw ourselves into the search, spending days scrolling through microfilmed birth, death and marriage records, scouring old newspaper files, scanning parish records, even visiting undertakers. But we found nothing.
Ethel’s home had been razed in a fire in 1969. The Society of St Vincent de Paul, a Christian organisation mentioned in the ledger as an intermediary for the payments, had once helped ‘fallen women’ but was now an old people’s home.
After ten days we conceded defeat. It seemed that Ethel and Keith had disappeared off the face of the earth.
But before returning home, I decided to visit the building that was once the Constant Spring Hotel where Jock had played.
In 1910, the hotel was at the peak of its popularity. Set in 130 acres of parkland, it had a French chef, a concert hall and ‘the finest musical entertainment in the Caribbean’.
But it fell on hard times. Eventually, the Franciscan Sisters of Allegany took it over and established the Immaculate Conception High School — now a top school for girls.
The last guests checked out more than 70 years ago, yet the place remains frozen in its colonial past.
I asked to see the dining room where the orchestra had played each evening, imagining Jock, his violin tucked under his chin, Ethel with a tray of drinks, eyeing him from the other side of the room.
One of the last photographs of Jock shows him as a good- looking young man. He is wearing Bugsy
Did my gran know about Jock’s illegitimate son?
Malone-style spats and a white bib and tucker, and his thumb is tucked into his belt. There is something arrogantly sexual about his pose.
Later, as we walked through the exotic gardens with Sister Clare, I realised the photograph had been taken where I was standing.
As we came to the end of our tour, the theme music of the film Pirates Of The Caribbean burst from a building in which the school’s 90-strong orchestra was rehearsing for a concert. To my delight, I was invited to the rehearsal and asked to address the pupils afterwards.
I told the girls how my grandfather was called Jock Hume and that his skill with the fiddle had brought him here. As they prepared to go home, one of them, a pretty teenager, made her way through the throng to where I was standing.
‘This is such a weird coincidence,’ she said. ‘My name is Hume, too — Gabi Hume. My father often talked about our family’s connection with the Titanic. And, even weirder, your eyes are exactly the same colour as my father’s.’
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. ‘What’s your father’s Christian name?’ I asked.
‘Neville,’ she replied. ‘He’s dead now — he died when I was eight.’ ‘And your grandfather’s?’ ‘I think it was Keith. Yes, Keith Neville Hume.’
Donald and I looked at each other. How could we have overlooked the possibility that Keith McDonald changed his name to Keith Hume, in honour of his dead father? The following day I met Gabi’s mother, Tania. I decided not to reveal what I knew about Jock Hume and the child he had sired in Jamaica — at least, not until I’d heard her side of the story and done some more research.
Tania was a successful businesswoman. She told us that she’d met Gabi’s father, Neville Hume, in 1988 — ‘a disastrous year for Jamaica,’ she recalled, ‘because Hurricane Gilbert had devastated the island.’
On their first date, Neville joked that disasters were nothing new in his family: his grandfather had been a bandsman on the Titanic.
Who had told him this, I asked Tania. ‘His own father, Keith,’ she said. ‘He died in October 1970, years before Neville and I met. He was hit by a car while crossing the road in Kingston. He was 59.’ More goosebumps.
That put Keith Neville Hume’s year of birth at 1911 — the same as Keith Neville McDonald’s. They had to be the same man.
What’s more, Tania told us that Neville played the trumpet, like his father Keith. All her children were musical. The link seemed incontrovertible. But we needed more proof.
So, the next morning, Donald and I returned to the Register Office. There was no record of the birth of a Keith Neville Hume. But in 1935 a man of that name, aged 24, makes the first of several appearances in the register and in the Daily Gleaner newspaper. He had fathered a boy called Neville — Keith McDonald’s own middle name.
All the names and dates tallied. There was no doubt that Keith McDonald and Keith Hume were the same person.
Keith would have known who his father was because of the payments from the Titanic Relief Fund which contributed to his upbringing.
And so I felt I should break the news to Tania and her teenage children — Gabriella, whom I’d met at the school, Vania and William.
All three glowed with pride when I told them about our family connection, but it didn’t come as a total surprise.
Their father, they said, had often told them (incorrectly) that his grandfather had been ‘the bandmaster’ on the Titanic, conducting the orchestra from his violin.
And so it was that my family grew by three charming, clever and beautiful teenagers. I asked them: ‘Since my mother’s half-brother was your grandfather, what relation am I to you?’
They all shouted: ‘You’re our Uncle Christopher!’ and gave me a hug.
As for my own children, not surprisingly they think it’s time for a family holiday in Jamaica so they can meet their new cousins.
My mother is no longer alive and I am relieved she died never knowing Jock’s Jamaican secret, as she might have thought less of the father who never lived to see her.
Ten days after the Titanic sank, Jock’s body was recovered 40 miles away and taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he was buried.
The ship’s band had stayed together. Floating near him were the bandleader Wallace Hartley and cellist John Clarke, who had played in the Constant Spring orchestra with Jock.
What thoughts were passing through Jock’s mind, I wonder, as his short life ebbed away?
And The Band Played On by Christopher Ward is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £8.99. His website is www.titanic-band.com.
‘Your eyes are the same colour as my father’s,’ she said