The Nautical Theory

For this blog post, as it’s been a while since I’ve posted on any progress, I’ve included a piece of recent correspondence between Ken Irvin of Ashbourne Band (whom I must again thank) and myself, in part because it illustrates one of the challenges we’re having at the moment in understanding George Allan. Why did…

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Minutes, Manuscript and Munitions

When I think of the Victorian era, which came to a close almost 120 years ago, it’s tempting to consider how our perception of the importance of time has changed.  We currently enjoy an era of near instant gratification where much of the information we need can be summoned to our presence within seconds; where…

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Lessons in Presumption

When you’re researching something from history you need to be a little bit careful. Usually you’re dealing with scraps of information almost as if you’re trying to interpret events from what appear to be punctuation marks in the life of your subject with all of the sentences in between missing. Occasionally whoever created that information…

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Breathing New Air Into Sleeping Giants Of Brass

Over a month has now passed since our first concert of George Allan and Thomas Bulch material. I thought it might be a good idea, now that some of the footage is finally emerging, to reflect on the process and the event itself. The Idea The group that we are, as well as the subject…

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Haigh-ho, let’s go! A publishing mystery.

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…

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What London told us about Tom and George

At the Archives

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…

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Sidetracked #1 – The Remarkable Robert de Lacy

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)…

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Names #1. – It’s All’an the Detail

Parlour

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…

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We’re ‘Chuffed to Bits’ to Learn…..

Railway centenary 1925

….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…

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Of Brass and Steam… a wild theory

Hardwicke

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.…

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