And the Band Played On (19 page)

So what happened to Andrew Hume in these missing formative years? It seems likely that from a young age he was introduced to the fiddle and showed a natural talent for playing the violin. It is not too great a leap to believe that this might have taken Andrew to Glasgow, where he became a student of his namesake William Hume, a music teacher and son of the famous Alexander Hume.

William Hume was ‘a composer of much merit . . . a man of varied culture and scholarship and an excellent linguist . . . a man of unblemished character and singular attractiveness’, according to his obituarist. Like his famous father Alexander, William had started out as a cabinet-maker, worked for a while as a merchant and then become a teacher of music. He also made violins. It is possible that Andrew Hume became one of his pupils and that William took his namesake under his wing. If so, William, a linguist and trader in violins, who made frequent visits to Europe, would have encouraged Andrew to do the same.

Many years later, Andrew’s obituary in
The Strad
magazine – the respected and still thriving trade magazine for those who play or trade in stringed instruments – said that Andrew studied violin making in Germany from 1880 to 1888, a period that would have spanned his late teenage years and early twenties. Other references in
The Strad
to Andrew Hume (who is often mistakenly referred to in musical bibliographies as ‘Alexander Hume’) talk of his summer visits to the violin centres of Saxony and Bohemia where he became ‘proficient in the making of violins’. But all this must remain speculation, not least because much of it is based on information provided by Andrew Hume himself – a man, we now know, to whom a lie came more easily than the truth.

All we do know for certain is that in Glasgow on 21 July 1887, aged twenty-three, Andrew married Grace Law, a laundress, describing his own occupation as ‘musician’. His father is described on the wedding certificate as ‘apiarist’, or beekeeper.

Jock’s maternal grandparents, the Laws, seem to have come from similarly modest backgrounds as the Humes. Grace’s father, John Law, was the son of a blacksmith; her mother, Catherine, had been a domestic servant before her marriage. The Laws had four daughters including Grace. In the 1881 census John Law gives his occupation as ‘laundry keeper’; Grace, then fifteen, was working as a laundress and her sister Jane, thirteen, is described as a ‘laundry message girl’. But by the time of the wedding, Grace’s father John Law had died, his last occupation being an iron moulder.

In the summer of 1887, when Andrew Hume arrived back in Dumfries with his bride Grace, Britain was experiencing what later became known as a ‘fiddle craze’. For the ambitious young violinist, about to set himself up in business teaching music, the timing could not have been better. The increasingly prosperous middle class had alighted upon the stringed instrument as the new way to self-advancement, sweeping away the taboos that previously discouraged women from playing the violin or cello. ‘Every girl you meet in the street nowadays carries a fiddle box,’ said a fictional character in a feature in a new magazine called
Strings
, one of six magazines launched around this time to feed this new-found fascination for stringed instruments. The Victorian love affair with the piano was over, at least for the time being.

The fiddle craze was not confined to the middle classes, either. In 1882 the Birmingham and Midland Institute had introduced a ‘penny violin class’ to encourage working-class people to take up music. Similar schemes sprang up in other parts of the country. Stringed instruments were now desirable and affordable, violins being played by ‘the most exalted in the land and the humblest dweller in the cottage’, according to
The Fiddler
magazine, a rival publication to
Strings
. In Scotland, of course, this had always been the case but here, too, the fiddle was enjoying a revival reflecting a growing interest in classical music. New concert halls were opening and Scotland was now producing more violins per capita than any other country in the world.

Andrew Hume was a tall, handsome man with a Victorian authority and persuasive manner that made people like him and encouraged them to trust him. During the next few years, many who had dealings with Andrew Hume – including his wife Grace – would come to regret trusting him as much as they did, but his charm and good looks served him well in establishing himself in business.

The young Humes’ first home in Dumfries was a modest rented two-room apartment in a sandstone terraced house in Academy Street, conveniently close to the prestigious Dumfries Academy, where Andrew was to find part-time work as a tutor. Andrew wasted no time in establishing himself as a teacher of music in the town, placing a single-column classified advertisement in the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
headed: VIOLIN, BANJO AND GUITAR LESSONS. This immediately brought several responses from prospective students young and old, many of them female, as the fiddle craze had already reached Dumfries. Grace brought an all-important seal of trust and respectability to Andrew’s new business as no young woman – wife or daughter – would have exposed herself to the potential scandal of spending time alone with a good-looking young stranger in his own home. Not only did Grace open the door to his students, keep his appointments book and take messages, she made sure he had a clean shirt and starched collar every day.

The advertisement also drew a number of enquiries from agents and impresarios with offers of work as a performer. One of these was from the musical director at the Theatre Royal in Shakespeare Street, whose fame far outshone its size. Robert Burns had written prologues for the theatre and J. M. Barrie, who was educated at Dumfries Academy, had performed there. Barrie later devoted a whole chapter to it, entitled ‘The Smallest Theatre’, in his amusing memoir,
The Greenwood Hat
, describing the remarkable feat of putting on four Shakespeare plays in a night, using the same actors. ‘I loved that little theatre,’ he wrote. ‘I had the good fortune to frequent it in what was one of its great years [probably 1877]. I always tried to get the end seat in the front row of the pit, which was also the front row of the house, as there were no stalls.’ Andrew would play there regularly for the next fifteen years, as would his son Jock who played solos on stage before curtain-up and during the intervals.

Andrew also secured an appointment to see the head-teacher at the Academy to enquire if there were opportunities for part-time music teaching. There were. And he made himself known to Mr Hannary, the proprietor of the violin shop in the High Street, offering to carry out repairs to customers’ violins on his behalf. There was plenty of work there, too.

Andrew Hume had a promising and profitable career ahead of him as a performer as well as a teacher. Still in his mid-twenties he was already a violinist of considerable talent, as well as being a pianist, guitarist and banjo player. Andrew Hume could have been forgiven at this point for a moment’s self-congratulation. He had come a long way from the ploughed fields of his forefathers and achieved everything through his own hard work and talent. Yet he obviously felt ashamed of his family, in particular his father, an attendant in the Dumfries lunatic asylum who was escorting small groups of ‘safe’ patients on monthly visits to the Theatre Royal. Andrew found this excruciatingly embarrassing when he performed there. The Humes were not the family Andrew would have chosen for himself.

It seems that Andrew Hume felt more comfortable being someone else – Alexander Hume’s grandson, for instance – just as he felt more comfortable telling lies than the truth. Being known as Alexander Hume’s grandson might have brought him credibility but it was a reckless lie considering that both his parents were alive and living in Dumfries and his eight brothers and sisters also lived in the area. But Andrew’s stock-in-trade was reckless lies. Later, as we will see, he repeated the lie on oath in a court of law. We know that he lied to his children, because Jock later told fellow musicians on board ships that he was from ‘a famous family’ and his great grandfather had written ‘The Scottish Emigrant’s Farewell’. Did Andrew also lie to Grace, or did she know the truth about him?

The Humes’ first child, Nellie, was born in November 1888, a respectable fifteen months after their marriage. Her arrival made it impossible for Andrew to continue to give music lessons from home but as he was now earning enough from lessons and performances to afford a larger apartment they moved to 5 Nith Place where Jock was born on 9 August 1890.

It was around this time that Andrew spotted another business opportunity. A College of Violinists had been established in London at the height of the ‘fiddle craze’ in response to the growing demand for violin lessons, offering students courses with the opportunity of gaining a diploma. To student violinists, the diplomas became an important endorsement of their skill, giving them an advantage when applying for positions. But the college could take only so many students at one time and they had applications from more students than they could satisfy. Andrew recognised that the violin lessons could just as easily be given anywhere in the country – Dumfries, for instance – provided they met the college’s high standards and followed the prescribed syllabus for the examination.

Hume wrote to the college, asking to see their syllabus and requesting an opportunity to meet the board of the college to present his credentials. His suggestion was seized upon and the following week he set off for London. He returned to Dumfries the following day with a significant advantage over his competitors, the six or eight other music teachers in the town who placed classified advertisements in the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
every week.

Business was booming for Andrew Hume. Bookings were pouring in for tuition and performances. In Dumfries he was asked to conduct concerts in Dock Park on Sunday afternoons. There were new opportunities to appear in summer season musical extravaganzas. The difficulty was fitting in all these opportunities around family life: in August 1892, Grace gave birth to their third child, Grace. Around this time, Andrew received some good news: he was to be included in the prestigious volume
Musical Scotland
– a Who’s Who of Scottish musicians from 1400 to the present time. His entry read:

HUME, ANDREW, born Dumfries 7th May 1864. Violinist, bassoonist, banjo player and composer. Pupil of M Sainton. Established in his native city as professor of the above instruments and teacher of music.

Andrew’s entry in the directory came immediately after entries for Alexander Hume and his son William, a most convenient juxtaposition, particularly as his own entry was followed by another Hume, Richard, the famous viol maker who sold fiddles to King James in 1530. People assumed that the four Humes were related, one big family of famous fiddlers. Andrew also included in the entry that he had been a pupil of Prosper Sainton, an endorsement of his untruthful claim to have studied at the Royal Academy of Music. If Sainton, who had died two years earlier, had once given Andrew a lesson it certainly was not at the Royal Academy of Music where there is no record of him in their well-kept archives.

By now, Hume had established himself in Dumfries as a ‘man of position’. At least, this is how his solicitor described him when on 1 November 1892 Hume was arrested for ‘foul-hooking salmon’ in the River Nith and escorted home, dripping wet, by two constables. Grace was not pleased. When the case came up in the Dumfries Sheriff Court two weeks later his solicitor asked the Sheriff to take into consideration his client’s ‘position in the town’ in determining his sentence. It was the first of many appearances Andrew Hume would make in this court over the years and now, as in later arraignments, he lied, telling such whoppers on this occasion that it caused laughter in court. The headline to the long report of the case in the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
was ‘Extraordinary Conflict of Evidence’.

It was, as they say, an open-and-shut case. Andrew and a friend, John Bell, a labourer, went down to the river with rods and lines and baited hooks attached. Superintendent Pool saw Hume fishing in the Nith at the far end of the island in the centre of the river. This wasn’t the first time the appropriately named Pool had seen Hume poaching but this time he decided to do something about it. He watched Hume cast his hooks across the stream time and again. He saw him hook a salmon. He observed him haul the salmon on the line to the Dumfries side of the river where he handed his rod to Bell while Hume gaffed the fish. A large crowd had gathered and witnesses corroborated Pool’s evidence. The fish, hooked and gaffed, was recovered. A fair cop, you might think.

Yet Andrew Hume pleaded not guilty. He wriggled like a fish caught on the end of a line, desperate to get off the hook. He said he hadn’t done it. He said the superintendent could not have seen them because some clothes that were hanging on railings obscured his view. Then he said he believed they were entitled to be fishing there with baited barbs. Far from taking Hume’s ‘position in the town’ into consideration, the Sheriff fined Hume £3 – three times more than his poacher companion Bell – for ‘aggravating the offence’ by lying.

Despite these embarrassing revelations, opportunities continued to come Andrew’s way. In 1896, amid much razzamatazz, a new pier was opened in Morecambe, Lancashire, a popular seaside destination, second only to Blackpool. Edward de Jong, famous throughout Britain for his ‘Popular Concerts’, headed the entertainment bill for the summer season and invited Andrew to lead his forty-strong orchestra. De Jong’s twice-daily concerts were musical extravaganzas that embraced opera singing, orchestral pieces and other exotic entertainments. These included the Condos, a family of Japanese acrobats, can-can dancers from Paris festooned with ostrich feathers and glittering spangles, and ‘Madame Paula’. According to the Morecambe Chronicle, ‘Madame Paula, “the queen of alligators, crocodiles and serpents” went through a daring performance with these animals . . . the spice of risk had a powerful effect upon the audience’. The
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
announcement of Andrew’s appointment prompted a clutch of letters of congratulations next day.