Giles Whittome designs some unusual instruments!!

Vickie recently stood in for Richard Marshall of Sonar Brass at a birthday party concert for Giles Whittome in Bassingbourn, and Giles is a maker and collector, as well as a player, of unusual brass instruments. The quintet played its last number on flugophone (a flugel made in saxophone format), a mellophone, Billy Cotton’s old sousaphone, a buccin (a dragon-headed trombone made by Giles) and an 1861 cornopean (the precursor of the cornet) — we claim a first for that instrumentation!

Also in Giles’ collection are a piccolo trumpet in F, with no stays but with snakes wrapped round and through the body, a low F/G trumpet, a four-valve F/Bb trumpet, an echo cornet, a trombugel (a weird mixture of tenor horn, flugel, and valve trombone) a valide (trombone with both valves and slide), a gorgeous Webb slide trumpet with crooks in all different keys, a natural trumpet made entirely by hand by Giles and engraved and silver-plated, a large valve trombone with four rotary valves, a Taylor four-valve Phat Boy copper flugel, a dozen or more various trumpets and cornets, a series of Ab posthorns and one in Bb, a cornetto, several piccolos, a newly-designed and made flumpet with copper bell and more flugelly tone than usual, a bell-forward althorn, a soprano and an alto trombone, and so on.

Vickie is hoping to find time to take the whole quartet down to Bassingbourn to give some of the collection a work-out!