Arthur Conan Doyle and the big brass bombardon

While the material in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's autobiographical work Memories and Adventures is not inspiring the extensive commentary that his essays in Through the Magic Door did, I have found a few interesting and/or amusing anecdotes that speak for themselves to highlight. This article contains the latest discovery.

As an older schoolboy, Conan Doyle was sent to a Jesuit school in Austria so that he could learn German. 

This extract from his Memories shows that he also mastered a very different skill during the year that he spent at the school:

“One unlooked for accomplishment I acquired, for the boy who played the big brass bass instrument in the fine school band had not returned, and, as a well-grown lad was needed, I was at once enlisted in the service. I played in public — good music, too, “ Lohengrin,” and “ Tannhauser,”— within a week or two of my first lesson, but they pressed me on for the occasion and the Bombardon, as it was called, only comes in on a measured rhythm with an occasional run, which sounds like a hippopotamus doing a step-dance. So big was the instrument that I remember the other bandsmen putting my sheets and blankets inside it and my surprise when I could not get out a note.”

When I first saw this, I was immediately reminded of the giant musical instruments in J. B. Priestley's Low Notes on a High Level, including “the Great-German-Double-Bombardon - six feet of shining brass with a horn a yard in diameter -”

This is what a bombardon looks like:

This picture of the boys in the band at the Stella Matutina Jesuit School at Feldkirch, Austria in 1876 - Conan Doyle is at the back with his bombardon - came from The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia site:

A few more words about books versus real life

Several reasons for extensive reading have been given on here. For example, what some people get from books seems much better to them than what they can get in real life!

I quoted some wise words on the subject from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in an article about books versus real life: 

“The dead are such good company that one may come to think too little of the living. It is a real and a pressing danger with many of us, that we should never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings to most of the human race.”

I recently came across something that reminded me of these words, but in connection with writing rather than reading. This is an extract from Susan Cheever's biography of Louisa May Alcott:

“For a novelist, the real world falls away and the world of the novel takes on a vividness and fascination that can’t be matched by people or happenings in the pale, ordinary, slow-moving actual world. The characters of the imagination seem to have a mysterious claim on the writer’s time and attention.”

The real world does indeed disappear when we are immersed in a book, whether as reader or writer, and the novelist Elizabeth Goudge said something to the effect that she much preferred her own characters to people in real life. 

For some people, creations of the imagination are more real than the real world.