3 - Musical Incorporation: Bands and Choirs

Summary

❧ Introduction

Queen Victoria was crowned in Westminster Abbey on 28 June 1838. Two days later, the Western Times offered a town-by-town and village-byvillage report on how Devon had been celebrating, or planning to celebrate, the event. Part of this liberal newspaper's purpose was to shame those places that had done nothing, for the general idea was that the local community or vicar should arrange an open-air dinner for the poor (seven to eight hundred of them in Dartmouth, for example). At Barnstaple, ‘two bands of music’ attended the charity schools’ procession, and at the workhouse dinner ‘a song composed and sung by W Russell, one of the inmates’, was rendered in honour of the queen. The Brixham Band processed. At Chudleigh, ‘bands from the different parishes as well as our own, playing in solemn but melodious strains to celebrate this glorious festival’ began at two o'clock in the morning, and it was another eleven hours before they led off the procession from the Clifford Arms; a band was still going strong at the banquet, in due course following up the Doxology with ‘Jim Crow’, presumably for people to dance to, American minstrelsy by now permeating the rural west. Chulmleigh's band led the one o'clock parade through the town. In Devonport the dinner was for the schoolchildren, and the Devonport Choral Society sat on a raised platform in the middle of the tables. Exeter sported a band for the morning civic procession to the cathedral, a quartet of glee singers for the official dinner at the New London Inn, and Finnimor's band for the St Mary Steps parish parade with its ‘splendid new banner’. Exmouth had ‘bands parading the town’, Filleigh ‘a band … in attendance’. And so on through the alphabet. The revellers in some of the smaller villages, such as Littlehempston and Holcombe Burnell, for which no band is mentioned but singing or dancing is, may have been accompanied by a lone flute or fiddle. There are upwards of nine hundred Devon place names on the Insight Fleximap for that county; if a third of them were represented by instrumental music, ranging from a single player to a band of (say) eight, averaging out at four, that means that 1,200 musicians were blowing, scraping, or banging in celebration of that day.