In my last blog post I explained how as the banding community is currently stood down whilst the virus pandemic has created mayhem I had looked to other ways to explore the sheet music in our collection and, on the advice of Mr Tim, our local music shop owner, turned to music software for help…
It’s hard to believe that the last time that we heard anything new in person from our collection of George Allan and Tom Bulch music was back in August 2018 when we had our first concert at Ushaw College. A second concert we had planned, in partnership, was to have happened in April this year…
There can be no doubt that these are unprecedented times for us all, wherever we happen to be. The breakout of a global pandemic has wreaked havoc on our day to day lives and brought suffering and uncertainty to so many. As with many countries around the world, the British Government has ordered a lockdown…
What’s this? Two posts in one day you say. Just happens to be a rather bountiful day and this is another research discovery I couldn’t let go without documenting. As you’ll know if you have been following the Long Story, Thomas Bulch didn’t leave Shildon alone for Australia. He had three travelling companions with him,…
Most recently I’ve been writing up the story of Tom Bulch and George Allan during the Great War years and have finally reached the end of the war and the return of George Allan’s son Willoughby and Tom Bulch’s son Jack (his other son Thomas Edward Jnr was killed in 1916). I learned that Jack…
This will be my third, and probably final, piece explaining another explainable misunderstanding in the musical identity of Thomas Edward Bulch, who as we, and others, have said elsewhere DID frequently compose under pseudonyms, but not necessarily all of the ones that have been associated with him. It is my belief now that Thomas Edward…
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…
T E Bulch was not Charles Le Thiere. As with Carl Volti, Charles Le Thiere is a composer’s pseudonym, but on this occasion we find it was for a Mr. Thomas Wilby Tomkins. This was initially revealed to me via a Wikipedia entry, but as Wikipedia also claims T. E Bulch to be Charles Le…
One of the fascinating things about researching a subject in significant depth is that you sometimes happen across something that may well not have been apparent previously. When this happens you need to make sure to a reasonable degree of comfort that you are correct, and then comes the uncomfortable job of challenging ‘common knowledge’…
