With the 100th anniversary of the onset of the First World War fast approaching, 4BR will be looking through documents and historical records to find out how it affected the brass band movement in the UK.

Numbing

It is perhaps the numbing blandness of the statistics that make such a lasting impression — almost casually reported in newspapers at the time.

This one comes from the Manchester Evening News on Saturday 27th November 1914 under the heading ‘Soldier Musicians’.

“Yorkshire bandsmen have set a splendid example to the rest of the country in the matter of recruiting.

Out of 310 brass bands in the county of Yorkshire, over 90 per cent of them have been denuded of members to such an extent as to render many of them practically non-existent.”

Recruitment

The news came just a week after it was reported in ‘The Times’ that the War Office had decided to make ‘a more immediate appeal to the patriotism of the young men of the country’, by means of brass bands leading parades through the streets of major towns and cities in the country.

In the Western Times in the same month it was reported that it was advocated that the Okehampton Town Band be used ‘as the best means for getting men to join the Army’.

It was a terrible sight from our trenches — the whole country was in flames behind the Huns, and we could hear a brass band playing the Austrian National AnthemEssex Newsman

Trench warfare

How ironic then, that just a week before, a letter appeared in the Essex Newsman newspaper from a soldier who had been in the middle of a horrendous trench battle from which he wrote:

“We were relieved after 36 hours of terrible, continual fighting.... many of our brave men ‘laid out’ by shrapnel, Black Marias and bayonet charges.

It was a terrible sight from our trenches — the whole country was in flames behind the Huns, and we could hear a brass band playing the Austrian National Anthem.”

Successful recruitment it seems came at an unimaginable price....