I never wanted to be an oyster farmer. How I ended up in Whitstable is a long story I won’t go into now. This is just  about my exploits with music.

Unlike most of you, I never had any formal training. That much is obvious! It all started at the age of 8 when Mother decided I was to have piano lessons. That put me off pianos for ten years. The lessons went on for what seemed like an eternity. I asked my Mother why she put me through it, and she told me I only ever had six lessons. How time dragged then.

Some while later a clarinet was bought for me. Mother wasn’t very musical, but was a bit of a snob. The musical talent was on my Father’s side. She didn’t want me getting mixed up with a Band, so spent a lot of money getting a classical musician to teach me, no less than Pat Ryan, lead clarinettist in the Hallé Orchestra, no teacher though. I maybe had one or two lessons, I can’t remember.

Eventually at the age of thirteen, I was parcelled off to boarding school The Headmaster was tone deaf and didn’t know the difference between an octave and a bar. The Headmistress, a spinster with some ability on the violin, laid down the law about music. Saxophones were banned, as was any kind of music with a “beat”. Anything more recent than Mozart was frowned upon with the exception of Gilbert & Sullivan. Clarinet lessons continued but I never learned to read music and it all fizzled out after a few weeks. I had difficulty learning to read anything including the written word so it was not a surprise that I got nowhere with music.

One day I came across an alto saxophone in a junk shop, which I bought for £3. I smuggled this into school, only to discover it was high pitched and out of tune with any other instrument there except a piano accordion owned by a Scotsman nicknamed “Haggis”. We got along fine playing a few popular tunes until the Housemaster heard us and confiscated both instruments. We had a kind of a scratch band that played in the school laundry with the knowledge but not approval of our headmaster and I played clarinet in that. I could never get enough volume out of it to compete with the trumpets and trombones in our trad band. I never did find out how clarinets were played really loud, but suspect it was something to do with proximity to the microphone. Eventually I put it away and bought a trombone.

Most of the time at University I didn’t play at all but occasionally would get the trombone out playing by ear all the time. During College years, I went on one of the Aldermaston Marches. That was great fun. Anybody who could play any instrument however badly was ferried on to play to the marchers as they went by. Humphrey Lyttleton was there but I don’t think he noticed me! The Press asked him to play something and he said, we might as well play “The Saints” because that’s what they will report us as having played!

roofs with a few panes missing and the conductor used to start the evening by breaking up the worst of the chairs and putting them on the fire to keep us warm. We had smart black uniforms and hats, so somehow we got away with the fact that we couldn’t play much. A bit embarrassing when business associates spotted me in the Band. It was a tradition then that the Band marched the Circus into Town. Of course, the trombones had to be in the front line. Turning right into the field was always a fiasco as there was no way of co-ordinating it. On one occasion the circus got ahead of the Band, the elephants relieved themselves on the road, and the rest of us had to march through as if nothing had happened.

This was back in the mid ‘60’s and everybody was playing Trad. There must have been a dozen Bands in Poole and Bournemouth. Didn’t seem to matter how bad you were, you could get some kind of a following. After we and most of the audience had three or four pints, nobody gave a damn. Sometimes we even got paid.

I saw a beautiful tenor sax in a music shop, new but with a bit of lacquer chipped off, going for £129. I was earning £6 a week at the time so it took a bit of paying for but I got it just the same. That’s the Selmer Mark 6 that I still own. Mostly we still played a kind of Trad/Mainstream.

fabulous instrument that somehow seemed to play itself. That became quite a regular thing. Whenever I turned up, he just let me play. I have never been able to recapture that sensation.

Then came the move to Whitstable. I had a little wooden house in the woods that I had bought for £2,000 and soon met up with a few people who formed a little band and we used to practice there. I was on tenor or clarinet and Ted Chappell who you will remember, played then on a very wheezy trombone. One time there were just four of us, sax, trombone, banjo and drums. We were playing at an Ox Roasting for the Cricket Club in Canterbury. They said they couldn’t pay us but gave us a small barrel of beer. It turned out that two of the band weren’t drinking so it was left to Ted and me to do the barrel justice. Somewhere around 8 pints each we set off home in his Renault 4 through the country lanes and never exceeding 20 mph. Somehow we made it.

That all faded and for a little while I played in the Medway Towns with a fantastic trumpeter but the rest were always rowing about what kind of music they wanted to play, but we had some good times. We used to pass the hat round, and one night somebody put a fiver in it. That would be like £50 now. The barmen took it out and said he would give it back to the man the next day when he was sober. I bet he didn’t but there was nothing we could do about it.

I moved over to the Invicta Band and seriously started trying to read music. I am making some progress but still a long way to go. Paul was in that band and he invited me to join the Herne Bay crowd, so I played tenor in that for a long time. Eventually, realising that we were never going to get much of a base section together, I bought a baritone sax and moved over to that. That proved a good move. I was never going to be good enough on the tenor to compete with the others in the Railway Swing Band but there was room for me to play baritone.
So there, at the age of 65, I finally got to where I wanted to be at the outset!

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