This week I am still reeling from the discovery of a story of a day that could have changed everything, and may well have meant that I would not be creating this website here in 2018. The day I refer to being the day that a locomotive rather like this one illustrated above (No. 125…
One of the fantastic things about investigating the lives of Thomas Buch and George Allan is that new mysteries arise almost every week, some of which you think you might be able to trace an answer for and some of which you think you might not. Which category this latest mystery falls into we’re not…
At the end of April I had the good fortune to have a little time away from work, and a little money to afford me to pay a visit to the National Archives in Kew, London. I’d been hoping to do this for a while as I knew they had at least two resources that…
This week, despite receiving a flurry of new pieces of information of interest to the overall story, I have been taken on something of a detour concerning someone other than Thomas Edward Bulch, or George Allan, but without whom it’s possible that their stories may well have turned out very differently. Robert de Lacy (1831-1908)…
For this post I must credit Mr Eric Tomkins, (Thomas Bulch’s grandson) as it’s not something I have written but something he found in a New Zealand newspaper of 1916, but it’s so interesting that I wanted to publish it directly as a blog post. It’s one of those rare things which is a first-hand…
In my last blog entry I talked about the trickier aspects of identifying compositions that were created (or so we thought) by George Allan, on account of Allan being a fairly common name (common enough for there to be more than one composer named so, and several individuals involved in banding) But what of Thomas…
One of the key objectives we’ve set for ourselves, is to build what we hope to be ‘the definitive’ list of names of musical pieces written, or in some cases arranged, by both Thomas Bulch, and George Allan. Sounds easy? Each of the two composers presents their own particular problem in this respect. In this…
….that George Allan has a connection to the 1925 Centenary celebrations of the inaugural rail passenger journey on the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR). There is an article in the British Newspaper Archive from the Shields Daily News of the 20th June 1925 where the timings of the various entertainments for the 1925 S&DR Railway…
When the group met on Monday and we were discussing the possible reasons why composition titles were chosen one of us, Brian to be precise, tabled a theory that perhaps, with George Allan having worked in railway engineering, some of his composition titles were influenced by the names of locomotives. It’s a very tempting theory.…
Look what flopped onto the doormat today via Pennine Music – only a copy of George Allan’s composition “Phantom”. I’ve been excited about this one coming for a while as I originally ordered it back at the end of last year along with “Ovation” – it’s great to finally see it. I wonder what it…
