fanfare from the barn (2023)

Head north from Sheriff Hutton, take the first left onto Whenby and you seem to be heading for nowhere. You can add a question mark to the sign for Whenby, a place for travelers with nowhere to go and plenty of time to get there. Turn left again onto the road, this time onto an unmarked route, and you really are at the bottom of the beyond. Lush wheat fields grow at the edge of the uneven path.

Follow it slowly to the top of the hill into a courtyard where on the right is an old stable. Step inside and the interior will still look as its builders intended. The pet food shelves are still attached to the wall.

The man, busily working at a bench with a fan and a metal pipe, was a farmer before becoming manager of a garden center in Malton.

The rest of the year he is here in this old barn making some of the finest brass instruments in the world.

Many people watched earlier this week when several of them were on the air. At Wellington Barracks in London, around 150 marching band trumpeters attempted the world record for the longest marching band. Most of them were made at this North Yorkshire farm.

The newest batch was a special supply. They were conveniently packed into sturdy travel bags and sent to the amorphous dance floor of London's Knightsbridge Barracks, to be performed on perhaps the biggest global television stage ever.

It is the Household Cavalry fanfare trumpets that will play the two iconic moments of the summer. Her notes will mark the start of the Diamond Jubilee, when the Queen will board the royal barge along with 1,000 other ships. And they will announce the start of the Olympics in London.

Trumpets were developed by Dr. Richard Smith, who made a prototype based on the trumpet already used by the Household Cavalry, but easier to play. It also had better weight distribution - an important consideration because the trumpets are usually topped by the attached rich embossed flags that make such a beautiful sight when the trumpets rise with a flourish.

The doctor. It took Smith years of negotiations with the Army before they gave the go-ahead for an order for 20 instruments costing around £2,000 each.

"It was a three-year project that was delayed by the Army's inability to decide what it wanted until December, which made it a bit rushed in the end," he says.

He had to go to the Lord Chamberlain's Department to get permission to use the royal cypher on trumpets inscribed "Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee". These were made by the Queen's goldsmith, Thomas Fattorini, and then welded to the bell of each instrument in the cattle shop.

The Life Guards and the Blues and Royals, making up the Household Cavalry, are to have ten of the Trumpets each. That may seem like a lot of money for an instrument that only plays for ten seconds. But the whole world is going to see two trumpeters flanking the Queen and Prince Philip make a fanfare, so you have to have the best.

This trumpeter and the army go back many years. It all started when the Royal Marines came to Dr. Smith for an order for marching band trumpets after his supplier, Bushy and Hawkes, stopped making them. Dr. Smith was the lead brass instrument designer for this company.

But the remarkable history of this small business in a big noisy barn dates back to the days when Dr. Smith was training to be a teacher at St John's College, York, and also when he was invited to play at York Minster on his contrafago.

His instinct was research, and an acoustic physics project sparked his imagination. Part-time he began work on an MPhil researching woodwind instruments, then moved on to a PhD studying brass pipes and found that the bore shape is key to success.

To investigate this, he invented a set to measure the sound wave in a wind instrument as it passes through three microphones. Dr. Smith published a laser hologram in 1978, which was the first image to show how the walls of a brass bell vibrate.

From the university laboratory, Dr. Smith went on to work for Boosey and Hawkes and in 1985 started his own Smith-Watkins company. His partner, Derek Watkins, is seriously ill, but he was one of the best trumpet players in the world.

Why should they start their own business? "I thought I could do better," says Dr. Smith. "I worked from the kitchen table at home in Southgate, London. This spread to a garden shed and then two garden sheds.

He began making plain B-flat trumpets with a replaceable lead pipe—the pipe to which the mouthpiece is connected. Just a change in tube size will change the musical characteristics of an instrument, i.e. response, tone color and intonation. With the horns it manufactures, its range of lead pipes offers 27 different combinations.

Seven years ago he moved back to Yorkshire when his wife Deborah became Professor of Biology at the University of York, a department he now heads. He also has his own emotional reasons for settling here. In the 1950s his grandfather was a Methodist minister in Hovingham, and he also ministered elsewhere in North Yorkshire, including Malton and Robin Hood's Bay. The red brick mansion where he lived in Hovingham still stands next to the village green.

"I always remember coming to see him in Dad's car," says Dr. Smith. "Sheriff Hatton's castle looked pretty scary to me."

The place he bought was a farm called Cornbrough. The backyard enclosure was unbearable, littered and damp. "I got here in December and I was sitting at the counter with a little electric heater blowing behind my back and another one blowing in front of me."

He was a one-man band until he found someone on the same wavelength in nearby Malton. Richard Wright was a French hornmaker at Paxman's, a famous London firm, before he decided to start a new life in the Orkneys as a farmer.

After ten years he thought it was time to move on and came to North Yorkshire where he had also spent a family holiday and got work at a garden center in Malton where he also played French horn with the Scarborough Symphony Orchestra to relax .

It was the tenor horn he played in the Kirkbymoorside brass band that brought Richard Wright into Dr. Smith when his band ordered four horns.

Now Richard works half his time managing the garden center and half his time at the venue. In a sense, it is a productive activity as attuned to the eighteenth century as it is to the twenty-first. No one has found a better way to make the best instruments than the eye and the hand.

A modern cutter is a hydraulic cylinder that pulls raw brass tubing to the desired thickness. But this too has a homely quality, like the farmer on the trail made it. The plumbing for this came from a local farmer who is involved in this field. "Everything we need is right here," smiles Dr. Smith.

“I still have a lot of time to spend in London and so does my wife. When we got back here we thought 'do we really live here or are we still on holiday?' It's a cozy little life, put your feet up, look at the view.

But others must think it's time someone started blowing the trumpet. Organizer of the York Science and Innovation Grand Tour, designed to celebrate York's achievements in science and innovation in the 800th anniversary of the city's founding.

It is an event supported by the council and the two universities in the city, and they managed to get one of Dr. Smith will announce his launch on the steps of York Mansion House next Wednesday.

It offers a free walking tour of 60 exhibits, one of which will be this amazing hologram from 1978 when Dr. Smith used quantum physics to reveal the sound wave patterns in a trumpet.

Good vibes to all.

www.yorkgrandtour.co.uk/