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…
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…
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…
….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…
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.…
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…
