Genealogy page 10

I have already mentioned Grandad and the first cornet. This I used to play in the Boy’s Brigade band. I really wanted to play the drum but so did the other forty boys in the Company and I was small fry. But, I had a cornet and that was a passport into the band. later I started taking lessons from Frank Morrel and Dad & Mam were prevailed upon to purchase for me a better instrument. This was a French cornet which is longer than a normal cornet but not so long as a trumpet. This was a great improvement in that the bell did not keep falling off as had done the one on the cornet. I later presented this cornet to the Company, this after I'd started earning money playing in a dance band and had bought the trumpet I presently own, a Besson New Creation.

I tell people that I degenerated down the musical scale in that early in my learning I was more or less sent to the Bradford Moor Philarmonic Orchestra where an old friend and near neighbor, of Mother’s used to play the Violin. I became both terribly bored and frustrated with this. Bored because the trumpeter in an orchestra rarely has the chance to get his instrument warmed up, he Just has so many bars rest In between the one, two or three bars he is required to play. Frustrated because, whilst my instrument was a Bflat one the music was invariably written for an Instrument pitched in another key, and for the most part a key in which there has never been a trumpet ever produced. As a learner I had quite enough trouble without also coping with the problem of transposing. The opportunity came when the Bradford Military Band were seeking trumpeters. I went for an audition and was accepted as a second trumpet. Here I may have two or three bars rest after playing fifty-six bars instead of the other way round And even better still here the music writer obviously knew that there weren't any trumpets pitched D. No transposing, what a relief. Later, and it was only a matter of a few Months later I Joined the Bradford Victoria silver Prize Banded Junior Band and was put on soprano cornet. The war had broken out by how and the senior band soprano player was engaged in war work In Sheffield, with the result that we rarely saw him. This suited Me down to the ground for I now found myself playing with the junior and senior bands. It was whilst at the ‘VIC’ that I Joined in a dance band.

Frank Morrell, my old teacher, also got me in a group which he operated non-stop dancing on a wednesday night at Bradford Moor. As a

result of that group I met one of Henry Hall, one time B.B.C. dance orchestra leader's tenor saxophonist Jack Halsall. Jack had pulled out of the professional musician Rat-race, following the Hall’s bands successful ??? visit to the USA. on the queen Mary's maiden voyage.

Each member of the band had received a fee of l,000 pounds and when they got back to England, Jack found that he had a little over 3 pounds left and that he had the Most of any of the band. He decided that spending at the rate of six years wages for a tradesman in a little over two months has not the sort of situation he wanted to repeat and so he left the band, took an ordinary job, In fact he was truck driver on about l-l5-0 (one pound 15 shillings) a week plus what he got from his band activity and he said he was able to enjoy that much better. Through Jack I had a memorable evening playing trumpet for the Blue Rockets dance orchestra at the Grosvenor Hotel in Cunningham Lane Bradford. The Blue rockets was the dance band of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps Band and Britain's Nol jazz trumpeter, Nat Gonella, was their trumpeter. On this occasion he had to go to Manchester and they had the need of a fill in. Nat was something of an idol to a young trumpeter as you may well imagine, and when he returned later in the evening and started taking breaks I asked him how he was able to play like that when the notes weren't written there. be pointed to the music and to the guitar chords shown above it and said “You see all those notes don't you” I said I did and he went on to say “as long as you don't hit any of them you are all right'' Pulling by leg of course.

One other highlight of my musical experience was an encounter with the great Buddy Burns, the soprano player in the famous Black Dyke Mills band. Bradford Vic had an important concert in the CWS. Hall to raise money for war bonds. One of the items on the programme was the Intermezzo from Cavalieria Rusticana. This had a beautiful soprano solo in and Tom Atkinson, our bandmaster, not wanting young Rawnsley to stuff it up through nervousness enlisted the services of the great BB. Buddy came to our rehearsal for the concert and took me under his wing, so to speak. I remember him urging me to play one part louder and when I pointed out to him that the marking was pp, meaning very soft, he said that pp, for soprano players, means ‘pretty powerful’. On the night of