The mind plays tricks, and these are just my memories, which might not be accurate after over 50 years!

I use to go with dad to Sunday morning rehersals in a room over shops on the corner of Tiviot Dale and Princes Street. It was ‘the Yeomanry Band’ in those days, with high-neck red uniforms, and my dad payed first cornet, second man down. My Grandad Hewitt (James) played tenor horn in the band. He was less than 5ft tall, and had been a bandsman ‘all his life’ and was awarded a lifetime honour by the Brass Band Federation.

Harold Bennett was the conductor. He had lost an eye many years before – I was told it happened when he tried to break up a fight – and he worked at the Co-op on Chestergate as a lift attendant.

Some time after the band amalgamated to become the Stockport Silver Band (new lapelled uniform with shirt and tie), Sunday morning rehersals moved to a pub behind Hollywood Park.

Although I played cornet (taught by Norman Ashcroft, principal cornet player with Fairey Engineering) I never played in a brass band. I joined a church choir in 1958 (singing was my real passion) and stopped going to Sunday rehersals with my dad.

My dad also played 2nd cornet with Fairey Engineering and with Harold Mortimer’s ‘Men O’ Brass’ and he and Norman Ashcroft played trumpet with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra when a piece had more than the usual 3 trumpet parts. Dad retired from banding in the 1970s – his lip had gone, as he called it, and he didn’t want to start moving down the instruments.