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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A first hand account of Tom Bulch from 1916

Dunedin

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…

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Names #2 – There’s only one Thomas Bulch?

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…

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The Riddle of the Winds.

Riddle of the Winds

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…

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Introducing ‘The Wizard’ and ‘The Typhoon”

SS Gulf of Venice

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…

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And we’re off – on our journey of discovery!

Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Dave Reynolds, the website administrator. How the Friends of the Wizard and Typhoon came into being is a long(ish) story and one certainly too long to recount in a single blog post, however I will attempt to summarise. I’d been intrigued for a few years about George Allan. My…

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