The Band That Played On (33 page)

Rest in peace.

Leon maintained an active interest in the official inquiry and the battle for compensation. He dutifully collected cuttings that made reference to his son and carried on correspondence with everyone from C. W. & F. N. Black to the French consul in London and with an American company planning a souvenir edition of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and wanting to include photos of the band.

Charlie and Frederick Black continued their business without any obvious repercussions from their involvement with the
Titanic
. In 1916 Charlie even made a trip across the Atlantic, sailing on the
St. Louis
from Liverpool to New York. By this time the brothers had moved home from Heron Road to a house called Ness Acre in the village of Willaston. The company stayed at 14 Castle Street until 1924, when it moved to 37 School Lane where it initially shared premises with the well-known Liverpool musical instrument manufacturers Crane & Sons Ltd.

Entrance to 14 Castle Street, Liverpool, former office of the Black Brothers.

The agency was still a going concern in 1934, when Frederick drew up his will and bequeathed to Charlie his “share of the profits, capital (if any) and goodwill in the firm known as C.W. F. N. [
sic
] Black Music Directors of 37 School Lane, Liverpool,” but appears to have been wound up between 1939 and 1942. There was no mention of the business in the will that Charlie updated in 1946 when he was living at his final home on South Parade, West Kirby, overlooking the River Dee.

The wills of the two brothers offer a rare insight into their connections and interests. Frederick was the first to die, on October 14, 1945, and his will took up less than half a page. He was clearly the junior partner and his final wishes betrayed no outside interests or concern for posterity. The freehold of the house belonged to Charlie. Other than his share of the agency, all he had to leave was five hundred B shares in Central Equipment Ltd. (which he left to a friend named Andrew Orr) and a gross worth of £27,090 6s. 4d.

Charlie died less than a year later, on September 16, 1946, and his detailed will covered eight pages. His home and furniture were to pass to his sister Elizabeth, then living in Llandudno, North Wales, and the value of the rest of his possessions, along with his bank balance of £56,906, was to be put into a trust fund, the income of which would go to Elizabeth. On her death, £1000 would be paid to two cousins and the rest would be divided among a number of charities, including the National Sea Training School, the Children’s Convalescent Home in West Kirby, the Halle Orchestra Pension Fund, and the Liverpool Radium Institute. He seemed particularly keen that he and his brother shouldn’t be forgotten in the musical community and provided £10,000 to the Royal Academy of Music in London to establish the Charles William Black Trust Student Fellowship (which is still awarded), £2,000 to the Musicians Benevolent Fund in memory of Frederick Nixon Black, and £1,500 to the Royal Manchester College of Music for the Frederick Nixon Black Scholarship.

When Elizabeth Alderson Black died on January 14, 1955, she specified that £100 of her money (she left £47,380 gross) should be invested by the Parish Church of Roby, Lancashire, to maintain the graves of her parents, William and Emma, and her sister Florence; and £100 similarly invested by the Parish Church of West Kirby, Cheshire, for the upkeep of the churchyard “and particularly the grave therein of my brothers Frederick Nixon Black and Charles William Black.”

St. Bridget, the Parish Church of West Kirby, is a short walk from the last home lived in by the Black brothers. Charlie and Frederick, along with their sister Elizabeth, lie beneath a plain, horizontal, gray-green stone in the southeast corner of the churchyard. Chiseled into the stone and faint from weathering are simply their names and dates. There is nothing to indicate their connection with the most famous shipwreck in modern history.

J
OCK
H
UME

The most dramatically affected of the musicians’ families was that of the Humes. Not only did Andrew Hume suffer the indignity of being taken to court by his son’s fiancée, but he also lost his home because of the missing violins, which today would be valued collectively at more than £500,000.
¹
Andrew, by now approaching fifty, felt desperate about his financial situation. Within such a short time he had gone from being a hero’s father to a discredited music teacher with no home or savings. Two of his daughters got on so badly with their stepmother that they’d left home—Grace, twenty-three, to become a nurse in Huddersfield and Kate, seventeen, to live in a nearby lodging house. It appeared that things couldn’t get worse. But they did.

Kate was working as a clerk at the office of a local electrical company when, on August 10, 1914, she claimed, a nurse calling herself Miss Mullard came in and asked to speak to her. The woman, whom she had never seen before, said that she had worked with her sister Grace at a military hospital at Vilvorde, near Brussels, and was bringing the sad news that Grace had been murdered by German soldiers who had subsequently burned down the hospital. She gave Kate a handwritten letter supposedly composed by Grace as she died. A separate letter, written by the woman, explained the background.

Miss Mullard’s letter read:

I have been asked by your sister, Nurse Grace Hume, to hand the enclosed letter to you. My name is Nurse Mullard, and I was with your sister when she died. Our camp hospital at Vilvorde was burned to the ground and out of 1517 men and 23 nurses only 19 nurses were saved, but 149 men managed to get clear away.

I expect to pass through Dumfries about the 15th September but am writing this in case I should not see you. Your sister gave me your address, so, as I know Dumfries well, I shall send it to your office, if I do not see you. As there is a shortage of nurses in at Inverness, 15 of us are to be sent there. Grace requested me to tell you that her last thoughts were of Andrew and you, and that you were not to worry over her as she would be going to meet “her Jock.” These were her words.

She endured great agony in the last hours. One of the soldiers (our men) caught 2 German soldiers cutting off her left breast her right one having already been cut off. They were killed instantly by our soldiers. Grace managed to scrawl this enclosed note before I found her. We can all say that your sister was a heroine. As she was a “loose nurse”—that is, she was out on the fields looking for wounded soldiers—and on one occasion when bringing in a wounded soldier a German attacked her. She threw the soldier’s gun at him and shot him with her rifle. Of course, all nurses here are armed.

I have just received word this moment to pack for Scotland, so will try and get this handed to you as there is no post from here, and we are making the best of a broken down wagon truck for a shelter. Will give you fuller details when I see you. We are all quite safe here now, as there have been reinforcements.

I am, yours sincerely,
J. M. Mullard
Nurse, Royal Irish Troop
(Am not allowed to say which special troop.)

The letter signed by Grace was dated September 6. The writing slanted on the page and the words were spidery. The last sentence appeared unfinished and the signature gave the impression of having been written by someone who was torn away as she wrote.

Dear Kate,

This is to say Goodbye. Have not long to live. Hospital has been set on fire. Germans cruel. A man here has had his head cut off and my right breast taken away. Give my love to Goodbye Grac x

According to Kate, as soon as she read the letter she broke down. Within hours the story had spread through the small town. When a policeman visited Andrew Hume’s home, his wife allegedly muttered that Grace had “got the death she deserved” but Andrew remained suspicious, first because as far as he knew she was still in Huddersfield and, second, she wasn’t qualified to work on a battlefield. To the policeman he said, “Grace couldn’t nurse nobody.”

Journalists from the
Dumfries Standard
interviewed Kate on September 14 and on September 16 a story headlined “Terrible Death of a Dumfries Nurse” appeared in the paper. National newspapers in London subsequently picked up the story. When Grace read news of her own tragic death, she immediately sent her father a telegram that read: “Reports untrue. Safe in Huddersfield.”

On September 17 she wrote to him in more detail:

I am sorry you have been made miserable by the false report. I knew nothing about it until yesterday when I saw placards in town “Terrible Murder of Huddersfield Nurse.” I bought a (Huddersfield)
Post
and saw the report. On arriving home I found a reporter waiting. I gave him details . . . Then I thought I’d better wire you straight away.

You say you heard about it on Saturday. It is an absolute mystery to me. I neither know, nor yet have I heard of such a person as Nurse Mullard. Neither have I been out of Huddersfield since war was declared. I certainly volunteered to go. Will you please forward any particulars regarding this affair? I have been informed this morning that the police may take it up. I hope they will. I should like very much to find out who this Nurse Mullard is . . .

I am again very sorry that you should be put to any trouble and inconvenience at all but I hope you will understand that it is as much a worry and trouble to me as well. The person who concocted the tale evidently knows all about us. I am trusting you will send me these particulars. Yours, Grace.

The tragic story of torture and murder had rapidly become the mystery of a hoax. Suspicion immediately fell on Kate but she persisted with her version of events, giving a detailed description of Nurse Mullard and suggesting that her father faked the letter from Grace. The police obtained copies of Grace’s handwriting and quickly realized that it didn’t match the letter said to have been sent from Belgium. At Kate’s workplace they found notepaper that matched the paper of Grace’s letter.

Kate was arrested for “forgery and uttering” and was taken into custody in Dumfries. Later she was transferred to a jail in Edinburgh where at the end of December she went on trial before the Lord Justice General, Lord Strathclyde. She pleaded not guilty, arguing that when she wrote the letters she was not in control of her emotions. As her counsel explained: “When the alleged offence is said to have been committed, her mind was so unbalanced that she could not, and did not, understand what she was doing and the effect thereof, and was not responsible therefore.”

The question for the court was—if it was a hoax, what could the possible motive be? Grace, dressed in a fashionable fur stole and blue serge jacket, appeared totally composed as she stood in the dock. She said:

I had no intention of causing any sensation or alarming my father, stepmother or anyone else. I do not know why I wrote it, but I fancied what I said would be the way Grace would have written of herself in her last minutes. I could fancy the whole thing as it was written, but I had no idea that anyone would see the letters. I cannot say what made me do it, except the cruelties the Germans were committing. I was seeing and imagining the things I wrote. I cannot think why I wrote the name of Mullard, except that I believed a man of that name went down on the
Titanic
,
²
and perhaps it got into my head, which at the time seemed to be turning around. I firmly believed what was in the letters was true and that Grace had been killed. I had worked myself into that belief. I did not think I was doing anything improper.