by Hugh Hood
Mr. Thompson had at this time a great and overmastering ambition. He wanted to obtain new instruments for the Band and had been after the Brothers to buy them. Our old bugles, dating from before the war, were full of dents which impaired their tone. And the drums, though impressive in appearance, were the type which you tighten by adjusting ropes around the side of the shell. They were old and the ropes would not stay taut, which caused a lot of broken drumheads.
The Brothers were most reluctant to spend the several thousand dollars needful for the new equipment, and were looking around quietly for somebody to donate it to them. The high spot of my first few months with the Band was the evening at practice just before Christmas when Brother Willibald made a great announcement. The well-known public figure Senator Frank J. Mulhearne had agreed to donate half the purchase price if the Band itself would contribute the remainder from the earnings of its engagements. There was much cheering and noise and Mr. Thompson’s face was a picture of joy and delight. Band outfitters’ catalogues were passed around for us to stare at and of course the proposition was accepted by unanimous vote and the Senator’s generous offer taken up.
The new instruments were months and months coming from England. One of the major department stores jobbed the order. I don’t remember whether it was Eaton’s or Simpson’s, but I have the feeling that it was the latter. During January and February of 1939, an individual picture was taken of each bandsman in his uniform with his instrument, and then these pictures were hand tinted and cut out and mounted on little stands, providing an entire miniature band. When the instruments were at last delivered, the department store set up an enormous window display, with a dummy bugler in full Sergeant’s uniform, pyramids of the new drums, great sweeping files of the silver bugles, their bells plated with fine gold, the regimental colours of the Oakdale Cadet Corps and Band, and in the centre the cutout miniature Band in the act of executing a right wheel, so that each bandsman was plainly visible. The display was featured repeatedly in newspaper advertisements and was instrumental in obtaining the publicity which decided the Brothers to accept an engagement at the New York World’s Fair, just about to open for its first season in Flushing Meadows.
The New York trip, which we actually took with huge success, was the second great event of my first year. My father used to go to New York two or three times a year, spending a great deal more than he could afford while there. It made him laugh, he said, to think that I was getting a free trip to the Fair by playing the triangle; by then I was almost old enough to catch the full inner sense of his joke.
“Wait until they hear you play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” said my father jovially. He had heard us practising and knew whereof he spoke. You couldn’t really play a tune on our bugles, even the marvellous new ones — there just weren’t enough notes to go round. We could eke out “God Save the King” because its intervals are easy; anything more recondite taxed our musicality excessively. But Mr. Thompson was determined that we should play the American anthem at the Fair, so he pieced out an arrangement using what notes we could command, and where we couldn’t get the required tone he settled for a loud, positive, self-assertive BLAAATTT from all buglers together, thus:
Da-da-da, da, da, dee,
Dee-dee-dee, da, da, BLAAATTT.
It was a direful strain, and when we executed the number, bang in the middle of the Plaza of Nations at the Fair, there were shocked stares of horror and surprise from our hearers. Next day in two of the New York papers there were heated remonstrances; nobody seemed quite sure whether a joke or slight had been intended — the Americans are notoriously touchy about such things. Anyway wiser heads prevailed. Brother Willibald persuaded Mr. Thompson to drop the offending piece. He did so with reluctance, substituting “There’ll Always Be An England,” a tune just out and by no means as famous as it was shortly to become — for we were in the summer of 1939. We couldn’t play “There’ll Always Be An England” either, without disfiguring it with weird atonal — almost Schoenbergian — effects:
Da, da, da, da, da, da-da,
Da, dee-dee, dee-dee, BLAAATTT.
But this song had no political, national, or warlike overtones as yet, and nobody at the World’s Fair was offended by our rendering, so that the excursion went unmarred by further incident.
If we’d been so foolhardy as to use the same arrangement at the Canadian National Exhibition, say, next summer or any time in the next five years, we’d have been execrated and consigned to obloquy by our hearers, for the war was coming on, came on, engulfed us, and the Gracie Fields recording of the tune, unmistakable in its clear, true, unmusical clang, became the anthem of Toronto patriotism and remained so until the advent of the Bomb.
We had to give up playing it.
Mr. Thompson was not, you must understand, a man given to the frivolous adoption of novelties for their own sake:
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,
as Mr. Pope so beautifully says. If anything he erred in the direction of conservatism, and in the end it undid him. He would now and then introduce an outlandish and unplayable tune but he would never consider transforming the group into a brass band, for two reasons. One: he couldn’t so far as I’m aware read music. Two: the Band had always been a drum and bugle corps; it was the best of its kind; he could see no reason for change.
Once or twice in the years at the end, and just after, the second war, he did make certain concessions to modernity. He got the notion somewhere, I believe from an American newsmagazine, that the Band should acquire what he called “bugle bells.” I think he made up that term himself. I’ve never heard anybody else refer to them as “bugle bells.” They’re often called glockenspiels and sometimes bell lyres, but they remained “bugle bells” to Mr. Thompson.
It must have been late in 1944 when he began to talk about them at our post-practice NCO councils. I was by then a lance-corporal in the bugles, having outgrown (or rather outlived, I hadn’t grown more than an inch, I was under five feet until my last year with the Band) the triangle and cymbal section.
“We’ve got to move with the times,” he would say anxiously, casting an uneasy glance upon Brother Linus, who had succeeded Brother Willibald at the latter’s death, “we can’t get them from England on account of the war, but I believe I can get them made up locally.” Ten years before, he had introduced leopard skins for the bass and tenor drummers and still thought of this as a greatly novel coup. He had the reverence for history that I admire, and no itch for the sensational.
He did get the new instruments made up in Toronto, and when we finally introduced them they looked lovely. If you think of a glockenspiel you’ll know what I’m describing, a lyre-shaped, xylophone-type of instrument with a dozen metal bars which the player struck with a knobbed wooden hammer. Ours had a fatal flaw when we first got them. The bars were made of the wrong sort of metal; they gave the correct sequence of notes, but only very softly, having neither ring nor resonance. You couldn’t hear them even when they played solo, and it was over two years before they were finally re-worked into playable condition. Meanwhile they were carried on parade, the way band-singers in the thirties used to hold guitars with rubber strings, for the look of the thing. By the time the bugs were out of our glockenspiels everybody else had them, the war was over, we had failed to move with the times quite fast enough.
I grew through adolescence to young manhood during the last years of the war, being seventeen when it ended, too young to have served and probably just old enough to miss the next one on grounds of age, which won’t make much difference, I’m afraid. While I was growing up, the complexion of the Band altered drastically, somewhat undermining it as an institution. In the late thirties there had been several young men in their twenties in the Band as senior NCOs. During the war they all disappeared, many of them were killed, like Johnny Delancey and Morgan Phelan, and th
e rest were almost middle-aged when they came back and wanted nothing to do with bugles and drums.
A whole new generation of bandsmen grew up, boys my age and younger, during the first half of the forties. None of us had any close touch with British Army traditions; we leaned if anything closer to the style of the University of Michigan Marching Band; there was a movement afoot to step up our marching pace from the conservative British step, but Mr. Thompson wouldn’t hear of it, and he had two powerful supporters, Perce McIlwraith the Bugle-Major, a man almost his own age, and George Delvecchio the Quartermaster-Sergeant, only slightly younger and a family man who had not gone to war. These two chaps were the last of the veterans who had been in on the Band’s first years and who had stayed with it out of loyalty to “Tommy” long after they had grown up. Perce McIlwraith in particular retained the enthusiasm of a child right into his forties. I can see him still — as Bugle-Major he marched at the right of the first rank of buglers — raising his arm at the end of a long drum section to signal us to put our bugles to our lips as one man. He was a tirelessly energetic second-in-command and a man of perfect, admirable, unquestioning loyalty. He used to lecture us at NCO Council when the Drum Major was out of the room.
“I don’t know if you realize how much ‘Tommy’ Thompson has done for you fellows. Who got us the Lindsay parade, the trip to New York, the new bugles? By God, there isn’t a better man alive than ‘Tommy,’ and see you remember it.” I think that even then poor Perce had an inkling that an older order was passing away. He must have been close to fifty when he left the Band. His company transferred Perce to Windsor, and it nearly broke his heart.
As second-in-command, Perce McIlwraith was senior NCO and presided, ex officio, over our NCO Council, the strategic and disciplinary assembly of the Band. Before I became an NCO I often came before this body on various minor charges. I fell in with a crowd of older boys who congregated in the last rank of the bugles and horsed around during practice. Evil communications corrupt good manners. Mr. Thompson never appeared to notice our carryings-on but he knew perfectly how to squelch them; he gave us responsibility and finally gave most of us a stripe, that first treasured stripe, the lance-corporal’s.
After I became an NCO I grew sober and mature at practice — we all did — we were all hoping for another promotion and then a third, if you made corporal you would likely make Sergeant before you left the Band. A Sergeant had the right to wear a broad red sash over his right shoulder and down across the chest, it was the ultimate accolade, only one or two men in the Band’s history had risen higher. I finally obtained the long-coveted Sergeancy in my last year in high school, in January 1945. I remember it vividly because the promotion came through suddenly and unexpectedly just before the annual Battalion Ball, the major dance of the year at Oakdale. As it happened, there wasn’t an extra sash in the stores at the time, and I had to travel halfway across the city to borrow one from an unfortunate Sergeant-Drummer who was down with mumps and would therefore not appear at the dance. I had had mumps and wasn’t worried about the communicability of the disease. My date caught them instead, most likely off the sash.
That was my last Battalion Ball and my penultimate stage with the Band. I graduated from high school in June 1945, in that uneasy period between VE and VJ Day, just before they dropped the first bomb, and at the annual Cadet Inspection of that year I was awarded the Most Efficient Band NCO Medal, which I wore on my chest for the first time on our VE Day parade, a riotous occasion.
The end of the war punctuated my love affair with the Band because I had to go to work. I meant to go to college of course, and eventually did so two years later; but I was short of money and there could be no question of my father’s sending me as he was then at the absolute nadir of his financial career. Like a good many of those who achieved a Sergeancy, I decided to stay on, partly in the desperate ambition of earning an even higher grade, Quartermaster-Sergeant perhaps or even, if anything untoward should happen to Perce McIlwraith, Bugle-Major. It was an unrealistic and adolescent ambition because nothing was going to happen to Perce; several years elapsed before his company transferred him out of town, and by then the Band had so evolved that my love affair with it was long long gone.
I tried to keep up to practices even though I had a full-time job in the Civil Service; but there was a lot of reorganization going on at Oakdale and little by little I fell out of touch. For the first time, in the winter of 1945–46, Mr. Thompson introduced a wholly new kind of march, a complicated species developed during the second war, featuring rudimentary harmonics. The bugle section was split into four, two sections of open bugles, and two of crook. Each section had — and this was genuinely revolutionary and a great credit to Mr. Thompson — an independent musical line to play which required much greater prowess on the bugle than we had been accustomed to display. We regularly had to produce the sixth note on the instrument, and sometimes even the seventh, a thing extremely difficult to do. And we had to learn not to listen to what the other sections were playing and stick to our own line.
Our first march of this type was called “Field of Glory.” It took us all winter to master it — it was like a symphony to us — and we meant to create a sensation with it, but there were two defects in the production. Everybody else in town, even Boy Scout bands, had the same number. And no matter what band played it, not matter how carefully rehearsed, it sounded crazily incoherent as though we had our signals crossed and were playing two quite different marches at the same time. For some reason, the harmonics simply wouldn’t blend into a meaningful whole.
In vain did Mr. Thompson introduce variations on the idea; in vain did we practise and practise. It was a question of a search for a new musical form that didn’t exist. I didn’t understand then, but I do now, that Mr. Thompson was in the position of Haydn in 1792, confronted with the Opus 1 of the young Beethoven, those revolutionary trios. He knew blindly and obscurely that there were new forms to be created and explored, that the old forms had been worked up to their zenith by himself and Mozart (I mean Haydn, not Mr. Thompson) but he had grown too old to discover the new forms. Mr. Thompson might, with the aging Haydn, have written hin ist alle meine kraft at the last page of his latest efforts.
I left the Band in the spring of 1947, having decided that it was time to put away childish things, and having saved a certain amount of money, I started to college that fall. From first to last my love affair with the Band had lasted thirteen years, and I guess that was time enough.
I moved away from the immediate neighbourhood of Oakdale, and became involved with the usual collegiate misadventures. I took a flat on Sussex Avenue near the corner of Huron, so as to be near the centres of undergraduate activity. I began to drink beer and get around to the pubs with the boys, and I thought my twenty-first birthday the happiest day of my life. I acquired a card-sized birth certificate and started to tell the waiters in beverage rooms not to bug me about my age. I looked sixteen then but in the interval I’ve aged. Nobody asks me to prove my age nowadays, and I wish to God they would, such is the perversity of man.
Sometimes on a fine night in the spring or fall, I’d be sitting by the kitchen window in our flat on Sussex, drinking an ale with my roommates, and way, way off across town, softly at first as they marked down from the upper campus, and then with perfect clarity, I would hear the Band practising, and if I had had enough to drink, and sometimes even if I hadn’t, I’d feel a wave of longing and nostalgia. I would want to sober up, hustle uptown on the Avenue Road bus, and take my old place in the last rank of the bugles. But I couldn’t have done it; my lip had gone soft and I wouldn’t be able to hit the sixth note.
I couldn’t escape the Band though. Now and then I’d see them on the street during a parade, or in a newsreel of a Royal visit, or at a football game. Around the University there were always people from Oakdale with a similar sentimental attachment. Through one of them who’d been in a later class than mine I hear
d about the later stages of the Band’s history, sometime around the summer of 1951. There had been at lot of palace rivalry within the group, between the Brothers and Mr. Thompson. The out of town engagements with the large fees had stopped coming, the Band wasn’t the draw or the novelty that it had been fifteen years before. Perhaps attachment to the Crown and the British connection had generally been enfeebled, I don’t know, but there was feeling among the Brothers that the Band ought to break new ground, that it should somehow look different.
Then around 1953 I heard that Mr. Thompson was out. I wish I could narrate that final interview. But maybe there wasn’t any such scene, maybe he quit. But I don’t see how he could have quit, it wasn’t in him to do it. He couldn’t have done it.
They replaced him by Warren Haggerty, an Oakdale grad, a former Sergeant-Drummer and ex-Air Force officer, a real punk. He lasted two years. After that they appointed a boy younger than I, who’d been in first year high school when I was doing Senior Matric, and was therefore five years my junior. I couldn’t see then, and I don’t now, how little Norm Hutchings could have the effrontery to stand up there in Mr. Thompson’s place, but he was too young to have appreciated “Tommy” Thompson, he was a creature of the Haggerty regime and can’t have known what he was doing.
They did a lot of things to the Band, to revive it as a Toronto institution. They discarded the bugles and drums that Senator Mulhearne had donated, and, my God, they’d only seen ten years’ service, they might as well have been brand-new. Nowadays they have a slew of bastard trumpets; “valve bugles” they’re called, soprano, tenor and, baritone, and they try to play things like “The Tennessee Waltz” and “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” and even “Rock Around the Clock” and they violate the integrity of the organization, the way Andre Previn plays jazz piano. I hope that Mr. Thompson can’t hear the practices but I’m afraid that he can.
