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:

Defence Against the Dark Arts Part XVI: J. B. Priestley's Low Notes on a High Level

The novelist J. B. Priestley has been mentioned both as a reader of and contributor to the Everyman Library and as the author of Angel Pavement, the likely inspiration for Stella Gibbons's novel My American. 

One of his minor works is a little book called Low Notes on a High Level, which was first published in 1954. 

Priestley called Low Notes a 'frolic'. It is very light; it is amusing and original. 

The plot is preposterous; it features some huge, bizarre, imaginary musical instruments that can play very low bass notes. Also included are some colourful characters, a fictional Scandinavian country, classical music on the radio and a pirate broadcasting station run by a freedom-loving rebel. 

Unlike some of the other featured books, Low Notes does not contain much quotable material. The story needs to be read as a whole: most extracts would not do justice to the book as they wouldn't mean very much or seem very amusing without the surrounding context.

Satire in Low Notes on a High Level
Priestley was a strong critic of many aspects of contemporary society. In Low Notes he took the opportunity to satirise practices of the day that he disapproved of and people he had a low opinion of. 

Much of Priestley's criticism of certain organisations and the people associated with them was inspired by his experience of working for the BBC as a radio presenter during the Second World War.

He disliked politicians, pretentiousness and bureaucracy; he rather despised conformists, people who are types rather than individuals and herd members who don't think for themselves - like these two committed consumers for example:

“If the Coronation had lasted for twenty-two hours on TV, they would never have taken their eyes off the screen, even at the risk of going blind and dotty. Always they did as they were told, Enid asking for Shifto the magic washing powder, Bernard demanding Filter-Dung the new cigarette.”