And the Band Played On (18 page)

He was a busy man, Andrew Hume. Where music was concerned, it seemed there was nothing he could not do. To his peers in the music world none of this was surprising, as Andrew Hume boasted an impeccable pedigree. He was said to have studied music under the great Prosper Philippe Sainton, Professor at the Royal Academy of Music; to have mastered the art of violin making as an apprentice in Saxony’s famous workshops in Erlbach, Schönbach and Markneukirchen; and to have inherited all this musical talent from his grandfather, the revered and much-loved Scottish composer, poet and folk hero Alexander Hume. Alexander Hume was a cult figure in Scotland, a self-taught composer of natural genius who won widespread acclaim after writing ‘The Scottish Emigrant’s Farewell’ and the melody to Robert Burns’ ‘Afton Water’. The son of a wax chandler, Alexander Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1811 and worked as a cabinet-maker all his life, devoting his leisure to singing and writing music and poetry, in all of which he was self-taught. In 1829 he married Ann Lees, with whom he had seven children. The family settled in Glasgow in 1855 where Hume continued to make furniture for a living, while still writing music and poetry and editing
The Lyric Gems of Scotland
. He died a pauper in 1859, ‘the temptations of company and conviviality having proved too strong’. Nor was he very diligent about collecting money owed to him. An obituary in the
New York Times
– for his fame had spread far and wide – reported that he did not receive ‘even the traditional guinea’ for his beautiful setting of ‘Afton Water’.

Andrew Hume basked in the reflected glory of his famous grandfather, who gave him artistic credibility and social status. ‘The musical talent jumped a generation,’ Andrew Hume would tell people, a dismissive reference to his father, a former farm labourer who became an attendant at the Dumfries lunatic asylum. But Alexander Hume was
not
Andrew Hume’s grandfather and Andrew did
not
attend the Royal Academy of Music. He was not a pupil of Prosper Philippe Sainton. Neither did he make all of the violins that bore his name, many of them fine instruments that still fetch good prices at auction today. David Rattray, Instrument Custodian at the Royal Academy of Music, also questions Andrew Hume’s claims to have served an apprenticeship in the workshops of Saxony. ‘He would have had to be a German speaker,’ Rattray told me. ‘An apprenticeship would last anything from six to eight years and at the end of it, you would not end up playing the banjo and teaching music in Dumfries.’

These were among the first of many fictions on which Andrew Hume built his life, spinning a web of deceit so complicated that, like many fantasists, he eventually came to believe his own lies. He was a man who was both proud to have escaped his humble beginnings yet ashamed of his background, and who spent his life concealing it or reinventing it. Central to many of these deceptions was the violin.

Although people associate Scotland with bagpipes, it is the sound of the fiddle that has entertained its people for 500 years; the instrument has given pleasure and shaped the country’s cultural life more than anything else. Unlike bagpipes, the violin is small, light, highly portable and, in the hands of the right fiddler, will provide singing, dancing and laughter wherever it goes. To this day, a fiddler is never without friends or an invitation to travel.

One of the earliest known makers of stringed instruments in Britain was also called Hume. Richard Hume, an Edinburgh ‘viol maker’, sold a set of instruments to James V in 1535 for the considerable sum then of £20. He is no relation of our Humes, although no doubt Andrew Hume would have had us believe otherwise. We have to wait another twenty-six years for the next historical reference to fiddles, when Mary Queen of Scots was ‘fiddled’ into Holyrood Palace by a small company of musicians after landing in Scotland in 1561 to take possession of the crown. ‘The melodye,’ the Queen said, ‘liked her weel’ and according to John Knox she requested that the musicians play on ‘for some nychts after’. Unfortunately, her Scots subjects, keen to impress their new queen, gave their performances at her chamber window, which was on the ground floor. ‘There came under her window’, wrote Brentôme, a chronicler of the period, ‘five or six hundred citizens of the town who gave her a concert of the vilest Fiddles, wretchedly out of tune . . . what a lullaby for the night.’ The next day the Queen ‘expressed her pleasure thereat’ and moved herself and her large retinue to the far side of the palace.

The violin grew rapidly in popularity over the next hundred years, fuelled by the Scots’ enthusiasm for dancing. Many fiddlers with cabinet-making skills discovered it was not difficult to make their own instrument, although a fiddle could be bought for the price of a few rabbits. By the eighteenth century the violin had become an integral part of Scotland’s social and cultural life, every community in Scotland having a fiddler and most homes, however poor or rich, owning a fiddle. The skills of playing – and making – violins were passed down through the generations and shared with friends. The fiddle fed Scotland’s love of heroes, legends and romance, and there was no occasion at which a violin could not be produced and played – including executions.

Sir Walter Scott recorded the hanging of a notorious Robin Hood character, James Macpherson, in 1700. When Macpherson, as famous for fiddling as he was notorious for robbery, came to ‘the fatal tree’ where he was to be hanged, he played ‘Macpherson’s Lament’ on his favourite violin, offering his ‘cherished instrument’ to anyone who would play the tune at his wake. ‘None answering,’ wrote Scott, ‘Macpherson dashed it to pieces over the executioner’s head and recklessly flung himself from the ladder.’ The remains of his fiddle were thrown into his grave, his cousin Donald retrieving the neck and fragments as a memento.

A Scottish emigrant to New Zealand was more fortunate a century later when he was sentenced to death for sheep stealing. The condemned man, Sandy, was known to be an excellent fiddler and the judges, who were also Scottish, asked if he would be willing to play them a farewell tune. Sandy ‘rattled off his favourite strathspeys and reels with unusual vigour’ whereupon the judiciary, who had been tapping their feet, ‘took to the floor’, granting Sandy a reprieve on the grounds that it would be a pity to ‘dae awa’ with a fiddler of such distinction.

Scotland’s ‘ploughman poet’ Robert Burns embraced the fiddle in much of his writing, penning a poem for his fiddler friend Major Logan, which ended:

Hale be your heart, hale be your fiddle,

Lang may your elbow jink and diddle.

Burns travelled several hundred miles to pay his respects to the most celebrated Scottish fiddler of his generation, Neil Gow, who was born at Inver, Perthshire in 1727, praising Gow’s ‘kind openheartedness’ in his journal. Gow, like many fiddlers, was mostly self-taught. He had an unusually powerful bow arm, which had allowed him to develop a particular upstroke of the bow that ‘put new life and mettle into the heels of dancers . . . rousing the spirits of the most inanimate’. Once, when chased by a bull across a field, Gow stopped the bull dead in its tracks by pulling out his violin and playing a couple of sharp upstrokes. For nearly half a century Gow was in constant demand at the grandest dances throughout Scotland.

The mid-eighteenth century brought the dawning of a golden age in cultural life in Scotland, in part due to the popularity of the fiddle, which had triggered an explosion of interest in music generally, with fiddlers writing their own music and playing it on instruments they had made themselves. Centres of violin making sprang up in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, many of the makers being proficient violinists themselves. Schools of music opened across the country and for the first time European performers started taking an interest in Scotland. This soon became a two-way traffic as Scottish violin makers travelled to Europe.

Over the next century, Edinburgh and Glasgow grew in importance as European centres of musical excellence, Edinburgh boasting more than twenty violin workshops, six along the Royal Mile alone. By the time Andrew Hume was born in 1864, Dumfriesshire had also acquired a reputation for the musical talent of its people. ‘Annandale could boast of musicians who had earned celebrity far beyond the borders of the country and whose manipulation of the violin had charmed the highest circles in the land,’ wrote Alexander Murdoch, a celebrated Edinburgh violin maker himself, whose entertaining book,
The Fiddle In Scotland
, was published in 1888. According to Murdoch, the most famous of these was a man called Johnstone from Turnmuir near Lockerbie, who was brought up as a ploughman on his father’s farm. ‘So great was his thirst for excellence that, when at the plough, if some new musical grace struck his imagination he would leave his horses standing in the field, hasten home to his fiddle and perfect the piece before he returned,’ wrote Murdoch. Turnmuir, as Johnstone was known, became ‘the most noble master of the violin that has at any time appeared in these parts’. He later travelled with his violin around Britain, enjoying great success in Liverpool where he was hailed as ‘the Scottish Paganini’. For the young Andrew Hume, who was taught about Turnmuir at school, this local hero’s escape from the plough became an inspiration and a hope. From the plough to the podium was not an impossible step to take, as the great Robert Burns, who lived in Dumfries, had first demonstrated, and as Turnmuir himself had also shown. Now Andrew Hume would prove it himself.

Andrew Hume was born on 7 May 1864 in Lochfoot, Lochrutton, near Dumfries, a tiny hamlet surrounded by gentle, rolling hills next to a small loch. He was the fifth of nine children born to John Hume, a farm labourer, and his wife Ellen, née Halliday, daughter of a local farm labourer. Andrew’s grandfather was Robert Hume, also a farm labourer, who lived just a few miles away at Kippford, near Dalbeattie. For four generations, this area south-west of Dumfries near to the river Urr was the home of the Hume family and, until Andrew broke the mould by becoming a musician, the Humes had always eked out a living by working on the land. Most of the family are buried in the local churchyard, beside the Haugh of Urr kirk, Kirkcudbright.

The family tree starts with a colourful character called Ebenezer Hume, born in 1768. He was also a farm worker albeit a multi-skilled one: in parish records his occupation is described as ‘lay church minister, mason, joiner, millwright, carter, spinner, weaver, tailor, water pump maker and farmer’. Lochrutton, where Andrew Hume was born, was as small and poor as a farming community could get in 1864. It is not much different today. The Humes’ address was simply ‘No 5’. Twenty years of hard times had left everyone with ‘yin’ – nothing: ‘yin to saw, yin to gnaw, and yin to pay the laird with,’ as one contemporary writer put it. All the Hume children slept in one bedroom and went to the local school, where the teacher would have taught them the three Rs. Most if not all would have been the children of farm labourers and would have been excused school for days when the turnips were ready for harvesting.

Poor though they were, such communities were made up of God-fearing and literate families, most homes having a well-stocked bookcase with volumes of history and biography passed down through the children. The Humes would almost certainly have walked up the hill every Sunday to Lochrutton Church, a bleak but beautiful church where fifteen gravestones bear the name Halliday, their mother’s maiden name. Someone in the community would have been playing or making fiddles, or both.

By 1871, Andrew’s father John had abandoned life on the land for a job working at the Dumfries lunatic asylum as an attendant. The census that year finds the family living in Cherrytrees Hamlet, Dumfries, the oldest boy Ebenezer, fourteen, already working as a cropper in the nearby tweed mills. Andrew is seven and John and Ellen’s ninth child, Lily, is not yet on her way. It is at this point that we lose sight of Andrew Hume for sixteen years. Many of the 1881 Dumfries census records have been lost or destroyed, the Humes’ lives vanishing along with the registers. The trail runs cold.