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:
