I enjoyed looking into Sam Lewins so much that I felt another ‘sidetracked’ piece was in order, about another interesting supporting character in the story of how New Shildon’s bandsmen influenced the Victorian brass scene. This time I want to look a little closer at the man without whom the story could have been so…
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…
It was far from an inevitable outcome, that was for sure. I first understood that “The Typhoon” was going to be a critical part of the story of Thomas Edward Bulch when I read his grandson Eric Stanley Tomkins’s well researched book “Thomas Edward Bulch – Musician – A Family History”. In the book Eric…
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…
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…
This week Brian found something interesting which has us scratching our heads. We’ve known for a good while that George Allan composed a march called “Cyclone”, and that he composed other pieces with a ‘wind’ theme such as “The Gale”. We also know that at least one of Thomas Bulch’s compositions, reputedly his first, was…
We’re very happy to have made a further update to the website already to provide a small potted story of The Wizard (George Allan) and The Typhoon (T. E. Bulch) based upon our initial research. There is so very much much more to tell, so please don’t feel that this is ‘it’ – it’s just…
