by Steve Turner
Andrew liked to tell the story that his great-grandfather was a well-known composer and poet—the author of “The Scottish Emigrant’s Farewell” and the Popular music to Robert Burns’s poem “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton.” Jock Hume must have believed this story because Louis Cross, a musician who had worked with him on the Celtic, told a journalist in 1912 that Hume “came of a musical family” and that “his father and his grandfather before him had been violinists and makers of musical instruments. The name is well known in Scotland because of it.” Another version reported that Cross said Hume told him that his ancestors “were minstrels in the olden days.”
“The Scottish Emigrant’s Farewell” was written by a Mr. Hume— Alexander Hume (1811–1859)—but this Hume was not directly related to Andrew or Jock. He was from Edinburgh and only had one son, William Hume, who was born in 1831. Andrew’s father, John, was born the following year to a laborer named Robert Hume and also spent his early life laboring before becoming an attendant in a lunatic asylum in his late thirties. He could also have played the violin, of course, but he wasn’t a household name or a minstrel. The Humes of Dumfries were of more modest stock and, as we shall see, given at times to fantasizing and conveniently forgetting the particulars of stories.
Dumfries is a small town in southwest Scotland close to the border with England, nearer to Carlisle than Glasgow or Edinburgh. Bordered on three sides by mountains and straddling the smooth flowing River Nith, which empties into the Solway Firth, it feels relatively isolated from both countries. In the early years of the twentieth century, it had a population of around fourteen thousand and was best known as the place where Robbie Burns, Scotland’s greatest and best-loved poet, was living when he died at the age of thirty-seven in 1796.
7 & 9 Nith Place, Dumfries, where Jock Hume spent part of his childhood.
Jock Hume was a first son, born on August 9, 1890. He was later joined by three sisters—Nellie, Grace, and Catherine (Kate)—and one brother, Andrew. He started school in 1895 at St. Michael Street School, a few minutes away from the family home, which was over a shop on Nith Place. The head teacher, John Hendrie, encouraged the teaching of music. He arranged for the purchase of a school piano in 1894, hired a teacher named Miss Nellie Lockerbie “to undertake to provide musical training for the children” in 1896, and later established his own violin classes in the school hall. Hendrie would remember the schoolboy Hume as “a merry, bright, laughing boy.”
St. Michael Street School, Dumfries, where Jock Hume enrolled in 1895.
His religious education came from the Congregational Chapel at Waterloo Place where he became a member of the Sabbath School and later signed up with the temperance group the Band of Hope. Every meeting began with a group recital of “The Pledge” that they would eventually sign up to:
I promise hereby grace divine
To drink no spirits, ale, or wine,
Nor will I buy or sell or give
Strong drink to others while I live.
For my own good this pledge I take
But also for my neighbour’s sake
And this my strong resolve shall be
No drink, no drink, no drink for me.
Andrew Hume also tutored Jock on the violin and in his early teens Jock was competent enough to play both at church and at the Theatre Royal on Shakespeare Street, Scotland’s oldest playhouse. He also liked playing football. An anonymous school friend later tried to capture his dynamism: “No one was a greater favourite at school than ‘Johnny,’ as he was always called.” He remembered him as “the happy-faced lad” who was in love with his violin. “In the old days we have heard him, in the old Shakespeare Street Theatre, playing till the curtain should rise on many a mimic tragedy. We thought he would fiddle himself into fame …”
The Theatre Royal, Shakespeare Street, Dumfries, where Hume would play at as a teenager.
When school finished, probably in the summer of 1905, he worked as a clerk for James Geddes, a local solicitor, at 8 English Street in the heart of Dumfries. The job didn’t suit his artistic temperament or his wanderlust, just as banking hadn’t suited Wallace Hartley. Like Hartley, he was a conscientious worker but couldn’t stand the incarceration he felt in a small office space. He wanted to be out and about, with his violin if at all possible.
“He was an intelligent, assiduous and courteous lad and was reliable and painstaking in all of his work,” Geddes remembered. “He was of a character that would enable him to carve out a career for himself in any walk of life he was likely to follow. Like many great men, he found that his bent was not for being confined within the four walls of an office, and it was a good thing for him that his father decided that he should devote his talents to music.”
His home life had been unsettled for some time and this may have provided an additional spur for his musical career. His mother, Grace Law Hume, had suffered from depression since the birth of her daughter Kate in 1897, and had become a virtual invalid. In 1906 she died of cancer of the esophagus and Andrew quickly married Alice Mary Alston who found it hard to slip overnight into the motherly role. When speaking about Hume in 1912, his minister Rev. James Strachan implied that he left both the church and home in his midteens.
Unfortunately crew lists from this period are incomplete and those that have survived are split between some British repositories and the Maritime History Archive in Canada. We know the ships on which Hume played, from comments made by colleagues and family after his death, but have to make an educated guess at the order in which he served on them.
It’s likely that his first ship was the Anchor Line ship Columbia because it sailed to New York from Glasgow, which was only eighty miles from Dumfries. The Anchor Line had three ships continuously on the transatlantic run—the Caledonia, California, and Columbia—to ensure an outward and an inward sailing every Saturday. The outgoing ships called in at Moville in County Donegal on the northern tip of Ireland to pick up passengers and mail. The brochure advertised “all the accommodations to appeal to people of refinement” and promised “plenty of space for promenading.” The special music saloon, with its molded ceilings, cylindrical wooden pillars, and comfortable armchairs, looked like the smoking room in a gentlemen’s club.
Once familiar with the life of a ship’s bandsman, he moved to the larger ships sailing out of Liverpool. The first of these was most likely the White Star Line’s Celtic, which crossed to New York. More than twice as big as the Columbia, it had been the first passenger ship to exceed twenty thousand tons. Two of the Celtic’s musicians, viola player Louis Cross and cellist John Carr, later spoke about Hume. Cross, who referred to him as “Happy Jock Hume,” remembered him as “the life of every ship he ever played on and beloved of every one from cabin boys to captains.” Cross considered Hume’s musical ability to be “exceptional” and added: “He studied a great deal, although he could pick up without trouble difficult compositions that would have taken others long to learn.”
Hume loved to combine the folk elements of Scottish music with American and European tunes, moving from table to table in a saloon, playing his favorite reels and jigs. He also showed a good sense of humor. Cross remembered him playing a joke on a woman passenger: “She’d given us a lot of trouble, pretending that she knew a great deal about music. Once she asked us to play a particularly intricate classical piece. Jock whispered instructions, and at the close the woman came up and thanked him. But the piece we’d played was American ragtime played slowly—and the woman didn’t know the difference!”
Cross mentioned that Hume played on the Majestic, a White Star liner that sailed from Liverpool to New York until 1907, when J. Bruce Ismay moved the White Star operations to Southampton. He also was part of the orchestra on the Megantic and as that made its first voyage on June 17, 1909, he could only have been on it for its earliest sailings, possibly on the maiden voyage. The Megantic, also owned by White Star, sailed to Montreal, Canada.
When Hume signed up for the Olympic’s maiden v
oyage in June 1911, he said that his last ship had been the California, an Anchor Line vessel working the Glasgow to New York route. This wasn’t strictly true, because the last ship he’d played on was the Port Royal sailing out of Bristol for Kingston on December 10, 1910, with Wes Woodward, headed for the Constant Spring Hotel. The orchestra appears to have gone out as a ship’s band but returned as passengers. His work on the California must have taken place before this.
Although from time to time he returned to smaller ships, his overall progression was toward the larger, more prestigious steamers. When he was at the Constant Spring Hotel he met Americans who promised to look after him when Stateside, and this must have been an added incentive to keep returning to New York. When the Hawke collided with the Olympic, he thought nothing of it, but allegedly it worried his stepmother, who thought he should call a halt to his seagoing. According to friends, “he just laughed at her fears and took the chance” and signed up for more transatlantic crossings on the Carmania, where he was made bandmaster.
For some time he’d had a steady girlfriend in Dumfries who was two years younger than him. Mary Costin lived with her widowed mother, Susan, and two brothers over a solicitor’s office in Buccleuch Street, less than two hundred yards from the Humes’ new home in George Street. Just as Hume had lost his mother, she’d already lost her father and a sister and would soon lose her oldest brother, William, who died at the age of twenty-four in 1911.
Former Costin home on Buccleuch Street, Dumfries.
It’s very likely that the teenage Mary Costin was the girl in the background of the New York Times photograph. They’d become inseparable and were planning to marry once Jock had saved up enough money from his work on the ships. His plan was to then concentrate on concert work in Scotland.
During the second week of January 1912, Hume came back to Dumfries while the Carmania was docked at Liverpool and he and Mary spent a lot of time together. In March the Carmania sailed from New York to the Mediterranean, a monthlong trip that would take him to Gibraltar, Villefranche, Algiers, Monaco, Naples, and Alexandria. This was the first time he’d been beyond North America and the Caribbean, and his longest sea journey.
He must have been in New York preparing for the Mediterranean trip when Mary discovered that she was pregnant. Presumably she would have sent him a telegram with the news, knowing she wouldn’t see him again until early April. Later, when things became difficult for Andrew Hume, he would deny that his son was responsible for the pregnancy and even refused to confirm they were engaged. Yet Hume had clearly told his friends of his intentions. In April 1912 Louis Cross told the New York Times that he knew of a “sweet young girl” who had been anxiously awaiting Hume’s return on the Titanic. “Jock, “ he said, “ was to have been married the next time he made the trip across the ocean.”
8
“AN INTELLECTUAL
TURN OF MIND.”
Three of the musicians on the Titanic had never played on ships before. Violinist Georges Krins was in the orchestra at the Ritz Hotel in London’s Piccadilly and there’s a chance that Percy Cornelius Taylor may have played there too. They could have been spotted by Black on a London visit or by his southern agent, Enos Green. Bass player John Frederick Preston Clarke, who was from Liverpool, had an uncle who had played alongside Charlie Black in the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. He also apparently played at the Kardomah Café at 37 Castle Street, which was across the road from the Blacks’ office and was a venue they used for auditions.
Percy Cornelius Taylor is the least known of the musicians, as well as the oldest and the only one who was married. There were no obituaries or personal appreciations in Britain’s newspapers for him when he died, and although his name is included on all band memorials, he was never individually honored. This may simply be because he was from London rather than a small, close-knit community where his loss would have been felt more personally or it may be that he didn’t become a professional musician until late in his life and therefore had no longstanding reputation.
When Louis Cross described him in 1912, he even got his name wrong. “Herbert Taylor, the pianist, was considered a master of his instrument,” he was quoted as saying. “He was a man of an intellectual turn of mind, with a thin studious face.” As Taylor hadn’t sailed before, it’s difficult to believe that Cross knew anything about him. The observation could have been something the journalist discovered from another source and then attributed to Cross. Or maybe the journalist made a guess based on his photograph, although it’s difficult to tell from the head shot released after his death whether he was studious, imperious, or just an ordinary Edwardian trying to look appropriately respectable.
He was born at 144 Queens Road in Hackney, East London, on March 20, 1872, the third son of Martin Taylor, a printer’s compositor and bookbinder, and his wife, Emily. The Taylors shared their house with Emily’s widowed mother, Caroline Wheeler. Martin’s father, William, had run a business in Yorkshire employing five people and Emily’s father, Cornelius (the source of Percy’s middle name), was an auctioneer in the city of London. Cornelius Wheeler became a representative of the ward of Aldgate, which meant wielding some political power in the administration of the city. In 1837 he and Caroline were invited by the Lord Mayor to a banquet at the Guildhall “on the occasion of Her Majesty Queen Victoria honouring the Corporation with her presence.” They were seated on a table next to that of the royal household and Caroline would never tire of telling how she sat so close to the teenage Queen Victoria. Sixty years later, in November 1897, Victoria had an anniversary banquet to which Caroline was invited as one of only three of the original invitees still living. This resulted in a flurry of publicity where the elderly Caroline was interviewed and photographed. Taylor, then twenty-five, must have felt proud of his grandmother and her connection with the great queen who ruled over the most populous empire the world had ever known.
Although Taylor is usually associated with his birthplace of Hackney, East London, or his final residence of Clapham, South West London, the largest part of his life was spent in Peckham, South East London. In 1876, when Taylor was four, he lived with his family in a three-bedroom terraced house on Lausanne Road and the next year moved around the corner to Selsdon Road. He started school at Hollydale Road Infants School, a ten-minute walk away.
In February 1880 he graduated to the school for older boys, Hollydale Road School, by which time the family was living in an end of terrace house close to the railway line in Brabourn Grove. He left the school in 1886, the year his only sister, Emily, was born, and four years later his father, Martin, died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of fifty-two. According to the census of 1891, the remaining family had moved to a bigger house on the corner of Brabourn Grove and Hollydale Road where part of the ground floor was used as a grocery store run by Emily. At nineteen Taylor was working as a clerk.
His life becomes difficult to track from this point. Somehow he evaded the 1901 census and so the next official record comes from 1906 when he married at the age of thirty-four. On his wedding certificate he described himself as an accountant. The only clue to any musical prowess was the fact that he was a choir member of St. Antholin, a Peckham church where his brother Frederick was the organist. Another brother, George, apparently played in local dance bands.
By the time Taylor got married, he had left Peckham and was living in a second-floor flat at the recently completed Glenshaw Mansions on Brixton Road in Brixton. He lived at flat 13, two doors away from Sydney Chaplin and his soon-to-be-famous brother, Charlie, who were then performing in local venues such as the Canterbury Music Hall and the South London Palace of Varieties. At flat 37 was music hall entertainer Jock Lorimer, whose son Maxwell, born there in March 1908, would become the great British comedian Max Wall. Percy’s bride, Clara Alice Davis, the daughter of a gas superintendent from Dulwich, had her own stage aspirations.
Taylor could have met Clara through his brother George who married her sister, Minnie, in
September 1901. Clara was still single then, but two years later married an auctioneer from Somerset named Ralph Davis. He was only twenty-one and she was thirty-one, although when it came to filling in the wedding certificate she knocked four years off her age.
Poor Ralph didn’t last long. In 1905 he died while being operated on. The cause of death was given as “cardiac failure when under the influence of chloroform for operation and suffering from fatty disease of the heart.” The verdict at the inquest was “misadventure.” He and Clara had been married for less than two years, leaving her a widow at thirty-three.
It was fourteen months later, on May 25, 1906, that Percy Taylor and the newly widowed Clara made their vows at Christ Church, North Brixton, in the presence of his brother Frederick, his sister Emily, and Clara’s parents. On August 10 he composed his will, bequeathing all his possessions including loose cash, credit in the London and County Bank, and two insurance policies to his “dear wife Clara Alice Taylor.”
Clara had made no entry in the “profession” box on either of her wedding certificates so far, suggesting that her father supported her before marriage and her husbands afterward. The story passed down the family is that it was an unhappy marriage and Taylor took the Titanic job in the hopes of picking up work in New York and leaving his past behind.
If this were true, it would make sense of the only facts available. Taylor doesn’t appear in the 1911 census, even at the address in Vauxhall (9 Fentiman Road) that he gave to the White Star Line. Neither was Clara at this address. She was back at home in Dulwich living with her parents. In the box for “profession” she put “actress.” An album of family photographs left behind by Taylor’s mother, Emily, when she died in 1927, has photos of Percy and even of Clara’s sister Minnie but none of Clara or Clara and Percy together. The Daily Telegraph, which played a leading role in raising money for the dependents of those who died on the Titanic, later made the cryptic comment: “It may take the public by surprise to know that there was only one actual bandsman’s widow, a lady who, no doubt, has benefited beyond her expectations.” This was possibly written in the knowledge that they were living apart at the time of his death.