A Victorian trumpet

A TRUMPET that sounded in the streets of Bourne 140 years ago has been preserved by a Canadian family as a link with the old country.

The instrument was originally owned by Joseph Tye Flatters who emigrated to North America during the 19th century with his wife and young family. He had been working as a photographer in Bourne where he was also a bell ringer at the Abbey Church and a private with the 15th Lincolnshire Rifle Volunteers, a part time military training regiment similar to today’s Territorial Army, and bought the silver trumpet to play with the band. It was inscribed with the name of the unit but he also played it as a member of Bourne Town Band which turned out for anniversaries and special occasions.

In August 1865, he had married Frances Harriet Hester, aged 21, of Hanthorpe village, whose father was a partner in the grocery and drapery business Rodgers and Hester which operated from shop premises in the market place on a site now occupied by the National Westminster Bank, and they had three young children and so faced heavy expenses for the voyage.

Joseph was a crack shot and frequently won the unit’s rifle competitions. On 4th October 1867, he took the first prize of £7 [£350 in today's money] at the annual shoot and also qualified for a share in the £5 awarded for the best drill attendance of the year. This money most certainly helped pay his fare to Canada where he arrived in the summer of 1871 with his wife, sons John and William and daughter Nellie, but the twins that had been born to them in England had died before they emigrated. He also insisted on taking the trumpet with him when he sailed and no doubt entertained passengers with tunes from home while on the Atlantic crossing.

The family settled at Aylmer, Quebec, six miles up the Outaouais or Ottawa River from Ottawa, the Canadian capital, a river that played an important role in the country's fur trade and lumber industry and in opening up the Canadian west. But the new settlers had little money to spend on having their photographs taken and so he sought more remunerative employment and by 1879 was working as a sheriff and court bailiff, covering much of the territory around Aylmer where his many duties included serving subpoenas and collecting debts. He travelled his district on horseback and by buggy, switching to a sleigh when the snows came during the winter months, but soon discovered that his new job could be a very dangerous one indeed.

On one occasion, he went with another bailiff and a military escort to a town called Low, 30 miles away, where residents were refusing to pay their taxes but instead of persuading them to honour their liabilities, an angry crowd took the two law officers prisoner and kept them in a cell at the town jail for two days without food or water.

Another incident occurred during the winter months at Quyon, 26 miles away, while serving a legal notice on a Mr Brady, a member of a notorious family of fighters who gave Sheriff Flatters a terrible beating before putting him in his sleigh, turning the horse around and sending it packing on the road back to Aylmer and after reaching home badly injured, he was quite ill for a long period.

Joseph went on to work for the municipality in various positions including secretary and treasurer, captain of the volunteer fire brigade, town constable and inspector of roads and nuisances. In June 1885, while carrying out his duties as sheriff, he stopped a young lad, Daniel Ardell, aged 14, for questioning in the matter of a stolen watch. The boy had a gun, panicked and shot Joseph in the hip. The bullet lodged deep in the flesh and doctors were unable to extract it and he died two weeks later on 1st July 1885. He was 43 years old and had been in Canada for only 14 years. Ardell was tried and sentenced to 14 years in prison but served only seven and when released and reputedly reformed, he became a preacher and spent the rest of his life in the western provinces of Canada.

The killing left Joseph's widow, Frances, in difficult circumstances and although the two eldest boys, John and William, were already working, she had Nellie and seven other children that had been born in Canada still to support, among them three-months-old Josephine, the latest addition to the family who had arrived on 20th March 1885. But Joseph had been a careful man and he wrote in his diary for the year 1879 that he had taken out an insurance policy on his life for $1,000 and so his family would not have been left penniless and the town council also voted to pay Joseph's widow his entire year's salary of $400 that he would have received.

Frances lived to be 84 and died at Aylmer on 31st August 1928, but not before she had returned to Bourne for a visit in 1906, sailing from Quebec aboard the steamer Empress of Ireland, her first time home since she had left for a life in the unknown 35 years before. Her youngest daughter Josephine was the mother of Mrs Ethel Guertin, now aged 90, who lives in Gatineau, Quebec, and who has told me this stirring tale of her grandfather, one of the early pioneers from Bourne who helped bring stability to a small and then untamed part of the North American wilderness, and of her grandmother who was left with a large family and little else but hope to bring them up but showed true pioneering courage to smooth the path for their survival.

Today, their extended family is a large one and spread throughout North America. Joseph Flatters was father to thirteen children and although three of them died in infancy, eight of the remaining ten bore him 33 grandchildren and, at the latest count, 60 great grandchildren, although family researchers have been unable to track down all of them, living in various parts including Aylmer, Ottawa, Quebec, Halifax, Montreal and Toronto in Canada and Ohio, West Virginia and Texas in the United States.

The trumpet is now in the care of his great grandson, Ethel’s son, Marc Guertin, aged 61, a retired graphic artist, who lives in Ottawa, and is brought out on family occasions to remind them of their ancestry. My picture (above) shows his granddaughter, Zoë Dingwall, aged three, trying to get a tune out of the instrument although its playing days would appear to be long past. “Some of us can raise a few toots out of the instrument”, said Ethel, “but I imagine that it is not really playable although it might be interesting to having an experienced musician try it out. Nevertheless, it is a great souvenir of the old country and a tremendous subject of conversation whenever friends and relatives gather together.”