“I can remember being taken to the Empire in Glasgow to see the Jack Hylton and Harry Roy bands as a little child. Chick Smith was a great lead trumpet with Roy . At three, I followed a marching band for three-quarters of a mile, fascinated by the cornets. I had my first cornet lesson at eight years of age (from Alec Stuart , conductor of the Sauchie Brass Band). At ten, I played third cornet with Alloa Burgh Brass Band. To me, it was thrilling to see and hear how my simply written part fitted into the complexity of “Old Comrades” and Verdi’s “Rigoletto” medley.

My first wages for playing was when two of us eight-year-olds were going for our Wednesday night lesson.

Bobby McGee (who later became a pro trumpet player) said, “I'll bet you won’t play a tune on my Eb horn outside this house.” So after amazing myself that I could actually play “Swanee River ” on this strange instrument, a lady came out and gave us an ap­ple each! Maybe I should have stayed on the Eb horn. However, life would have been very different if I had.

At 11 (1939) it was like Haydn’s Farewell Symphony when each player blew out his candle and left only me sitting there playing with the conductor, Harry Muddiman. Within two months, I was the only member of the Alloa Burgh Band for a whole year receiving gems of wisdom on how to play beauti­ful melodies which he conducted standing in front of me, tap­ping a music stand with the stub of his worn down wooden baton. My dedication to playing at that time was not mine, but I felt very responsible for Mr Muddiman ’s annual stipend of £40. So, I cajoled and urged my school pals and others to come to the band room for free lessons and instruments. They came along and within a month or two; there were 12 of us, playing Mr Muddiman ’s simplified arrangements. “Now,” I thought, “I can tiptoe away and he won’t lose his job.” Two months later, I met him in the street and told him I was giving up. He said, “If you do, you will be very sorry later in life – come to my house tonight – I have something I’ve been saving for you.”

So, at the end of a one-hour lesson on an almost new cornet with valves working smoothly, I found it very easy to agree and say “yes” when he said, “I want you to promise me you will practise every day.” That night and that promise were to prove to be a knife-edge, pivotal turning point in my life. So, after leaving school at 14 and playing lots of gigs near home while working through the day, my father bought me a trum­pet and I replied to an ad in the Melody Maker and was of­fered a job with a juvenile touring band, which then got a contract to play in the Pavilion, Exmouth. Six months later, I went to Nottingham Victoria Ballroom for ten months, then home to Scotland after I took ill.

I led a Dixieland band for three months and then went on to Fountainbridge Palais, Edinburgh, with the Bertini band for four months. I decided I should learn a trade so that I could tell the bandleader what to do with his job if I did not like it. So I quit and went home and, on my grandfather’s recom­mendation, applied for and started an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, while playing gigs. At 18, I led a band for a year and a half and played for six months in the band at the Stir­ling Plaza . I decided to overhaul my playing and find the right girl to marry. I met her at 21. We got married three years later at 24. More gigs and back to the Alloa Brass Band as principal cor­net. At the same time, I got a job with my dream band, which was Jim Brown & His Music; we played second band in two excit­ing concerts: one with Count Basie at the Usher Hall, Edin­burgh , and the other was Jazz at the Phil in Glasgow . After leaving, I played some pit orchestra work, “Kismet”, “The King and I” and “Brigadoon”. More work with the Stirling Plaza band, including a TV “Come Dancing” show.

The opportunity arose to work at a college near St Albans in which I was given the job of organising, leading and teaching a sports band in a gymnasium. This quickly developed into a stage band for dances, concerts and shows and often meant writing arrangements for special occasions, as each dance needed to have 20–30 minutes of entertainment.

As if that was not enough, I was also asked to start a school band, so I gave the children four hours of rehearsal per week, wrote, and arranged quite a lot of the music for them. We did a very successful concert every year and only one child gave up in seven years. In 1970, I passed the Trumpet Teaching and Special Harmony Diploma exams, granting associateship of the Royal College of Music. The school closed in 1973 and the college closed in 1974 for lack of finances.

The exodus from the music department of the college left a vacuum of choir directors for the local church. My offer of help was readily accepted and the job reached a peak in 1980 when, at an annual Festival, I conducted 3,000 people as well as a choir of 90 with a small orchestra. Since then I have been or­ganising the music, at five sites in the UK for annual church fes­tivals with the help of my wife Shirley; in 1998 we produced a CD with the Kingsfold Choral Society, called “Majesty – His Story”. We marked the new millennium with two performances in churches of a programme called “The Master’s Plan – Millennial Peace” and, over the past two years, I have been busy writing “The Job Story” – a musical collage for choir, piano and soloists, lasting 1 hour and 20 minutes. Two performances are scheduled for later this year.

To me, the trumpet has always been an instrument that has to be played daily. Like many other things in life, you get out of it only what you put in. Louis Armstrong said, “You have to love every note you play,” which is also one of my life’s ambitions.

Duncan McLean