My interest in brass instruments goes back to playing the french horn at school and I was so enthusiastic… I so loved the sound of the horn and wanted to play it, but I eventually learned, oh years after my attempts, that not having any real sense of pitch, the French horn where you have to make the note with your own lips… I was doomed to failure, but I had a lot of pleasure in it, first of all at school, and I enjoyed practicing because I enjoyed the sounds that it made, and I carried on. In the army national service, I didn’t take my horn with me. Once or twice out in Egypt I took a viola, which in a sense is the equivalent and I’ve probably told you the story of “Oh, Mr Brown, I thought you were a camel” as I practiced in the desert. I then took it up again at Cambridge but I was hopeless and everybody knew I was hopeless but they equally knew I enjoyed it and that was the whole thing, so I played in the regular rehearsals. When it came to concerts I accepted that I was demoted to 5th horn – “Anthony you play the bits you can manage”.
My father always boasted how he played in Rugby’s bugle band. My mother loved Gilbert and Sullivan and had a whole lot of 78 gramophone records which she just loved to play, so every year when D’Oyly Carte and subsequently Carl Rosa [?} opera came to Glasgow, with D’Oyly Carte it was all Gilbert and Sullivan with Carl Rosa usually popped in a Gilbert and Sullivan, we would usually go as a family – mother, father and all us children.
We all played the piano. The piano was in the corner of the drawing room, which was a room that was shut off during the war because of heating and so on. The piano was there – baby grand, the one that’s at Gai Drew nowadays, and so in the summer it was all right but in winter it was bitterly cold so I didn’t enjoy practising. Charles on the other hand, with exactly the same facilities, really enjoyed the piano, and he took the piano much more seriously than I did and he had a repertoire of which the main thing was Zodac the Priest, by Handel, that strumming march tune, or was it … anyway he enjoyed it. My sisters, Susan I think practiced a little, Jane not really.
[At Rugby] I learned about what was a great horn player, father and son, Aubrey was the father… ah…his name’s on the tip of my tongue. I think the father had died, and the son played and recorded all of the Mozart Horn concertos. Dennis Brain was THE horn player of the time of my youth.
At home I had a gramophone and a radio. I must have had a radio at Rugby I think. But someone in the same year whose name was Maudley – I can’t remember who or what he was, he was a strange fellow, not academically great and so on, but he was absolutely mad on classical music and said “come and listen to this, or come and listen to that!” And we would go to his study and listen to his music, he was really an enthusiast, and so he had LPs and anyway, eventually it was when I was living in London with Charles Blackwell who was a Kilbrachen friend and he was very well off, he was rich, he inherited from his father who was killed in the war but his mother was an absolute clinging organising woman so Charles was another of my friends like Anthony, Alison’s brother, who got nervous breakdown, definitely, definitely a mother syndrome effect. He had this posh mews house in Chelsea , Lennox Gardens Mews, so I lived there with him when I went to London to work after my apprenticeship. I’d been working for two years at Sterns in Great Western Road and they sent me to run [the office], under the supervision of one of Stern’s directors, James Douglas, who was responsible for the London office. He was getting old and doddery and I was sent down to effectively put in new leadership one might say, but I was brought back to Glasgow after two and a half years, I was supposed to be there for 5 years, and James Douglas hadn’t retired so with hindsight clearly I was put down there for training. Management experience etc. During my time there I walked around the area and came across this antique shop called PCL German. It had musical instruments in it and I was enthused. I kept my French Horn in the office and after hours I would practice it as there was no-one to be disturbed. I enjoyed it so much. After playing in the orchestra at Cambridge I never played with people again.
I used to play along with Dennis Brain [on the gramophone either] in the office or in Cambridge House, where I then lived for the next two years having left Charles Blackwell. I didn’t want to be stuck with Charles Blackwell this time, so I volunteered to go to Cambridge House, which was associated with that Rugby charity in the east end of London….Camberwell. One paid rent which was probably subsistence rent for food, and one volunteered, one had to live there and had to help at one or other of their activities and so I helped at the youth club. I had a regular twice a week helping in the youth club. Here I was involved with the Maryhill Youth Club it was a sort of public school thing that one did then. I don’t know if it happens any longer.
In wandering around on Saturdays I would go to the Western Club – father had pushed me into that as all young gentlemen should. They were associated with the East India Club in London, so one automatically had useage of the East India Club, just off Pall Mall, I can’t remember the particular square it was in, and I often on a Saturday would go shopping or sightseeing in London, then go to the East India club where I would particularly enjoy a pint of draft cider – proper stuff one doesn’t get any longer. Not particularly alcoholic and very good and refreshing and so on. And then resume my day’s expedition. It was probably from there that I was wandering along the Edgware Road and came across this shop PCL German. It was full of those sorts of things – it had lots of musical instruments, but armour I remember. It no longer exists but it is clearly on the internet. He was a famous collector of armour and he bought and sold armour and supplied many museums and big collectors, so I had landed on a quality shop that had this sideline in musical instruments and old instruments and I was so fascinated by them – all horn related and the particular ones I liked were all the Tibetan ones – the instruments I’ve still got in the hall.
He said they came back to Britain at the time of the Younghusband expedition, which I knew but recently reread. In 1903 / 04, nobody had ever got to Tibet, it was a secret society, nobody knew about it, which was why Tibet and the Dali Lama and so on are such an aura in the minds of people who grew up in our age because [it was] one of the mysteries of the world, this Shangri-La etc, and so I was fascinated and bought – I was a very well off young man – unmarried, living for next to nothing in London etc, I wasn’t particularly well paid but without responsibilities I was very well off. So I could afford anything – I was pretty mean and certainly I was saving money, but I could well afford the price of a Tibetan musical instrument at PCL German in the Edgware Road. And so that is where the collection started. And one or two lovely things. THere’s a cast iron horn, or call it a trumpet. It must have been made in the original in ivory of something, but a beautiful bit of cast iron. And that was when I got enthusiastic about getting cows horns and turning them into instruments and would go along to Glasgow meat market to buy or to acquire old horns.
I hadn’t yet realised why I was a total failure on the horn, and I still dreamt of being able to play it well. It was one of my many dreams, un-fruitioned. Never blossomed. And so from there it grew and when I had got Sydenham lane, my first house I bought, I used these things as decoration, and it was then I came across Sotheby’s sales of old instruments, and that was when I started collecting the better quality brass instruments that I have, and they were decorations on the wall. I remember my friends all poking fun at me, part enviously, at me and my …plumbing decorations, I can’t remember, they were very rude about them. They were quite envious that the decorations in my house were totally different from those in anybody else’s.
Anthony 2019
The Royal Collection 