Our history
The people who started the band
How it began
The band began with a simple question. By 1972, Geoffrey Haydock, who had joined the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra a few years earlier, had around fifteen private clarinet pupils of all ages and nowhere for them to play together. After a chance meeting with Jack Pickup, the County Music Advisor, at a BBC SSO concert in Glasgow Cathedral, Geoffrey asked where he could send his pupils to play. Over two informal evenings at home with his wife Penny, he shared his idea: a wind band meeting on Saturday mornings, with music anyone could pick up. Jack agreed to take it to the council.
At a meeting in Jack’s office in Dumbarton, with Glyn Bragg invited along for his conducting skills, the plan was given the go-ahead, and the council agreed to help with the costs of running it. The first rehearsal in 1973 brought together more than forty players, aged from seven to seventy, and by that summer the Dunbartonshire County Concert Band had around eighty members.
Over the decades, the band has grown and changed. Generations of players have come and gone, conductors and musical directors have each left their mark, and the music has moved with the times, from the early wind band repertoire to today’s mix of classical pieces, film music, musicals and popular favourites. Today the band rehearses at Kessington Hall on Saturday mornings, with players of all ages and a wide range of abilities, and in 2023 it celebrated its 50th anniversary. Through all of it, the idea has stayed the same as it was on that first Saturday morning: ordinary people, whatever their age or experience, making music together.
Our founders
Glyn Bragg
Glyn Bragg, one of the founders of DCB, was appointed our first Honorary President in 2016 in recognition of his long-term commitment and ongoing support of the band, serving until 2023. Glyn has had a distinguished musical career as a professional player, composer, arranger, conductor and BBC producer.
A native of Northumberland, Glyn Bragg’s early enthusiasms were singing in the local church choir and supporting Newcastle United Football Club. Moving to York in 1956 opened up new opportunities for musical development and taking up the trombone and percussion gained him admission to the National Youth Brass Band and National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.
Glyn began his professional career, whilst still at school, with the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra supplemented by working in a music shop, where learning about the world of publishing would prove to be invaluable. Before a music exhibition took him to King’s College, Cambridge, for four years, he enjoyed a summer season playing in the Whitby Spa Orchestra – sixteen weeks at £19 per week – nourishing his lifelong enthusiasm for so-called ‘light” music.
He joined the BBC Scottish Orchestra in Glasgow as Principal Timpanist at the end of 1967 after working as an extra with the BBC Symphony and Concert Orchestras, London Mozart Players and Bath Festival Orchestra. Exposure to concert halls and recording studios was again to become extremely useful when he was appointed Senior Music Producer at Queen Margaret Drive in 1979. He left in 1993 having planned around 750 broadcasts, particularly for his orchestra but also for piping. Three years earlier he had produced concerts by the Scottish National Orchestra and Vienna, Berlin and Israel Philharmonics as part of Glasgow’s stint as European City of Culture.
Music can be multi-faceted and there have been many opportunities to combine business with pleasure. As well as continuing to freelance with the Scottish Opera and Ballet companies, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the RSNO, he ‘fixed’ ad hoc orchestras for his own light music concerts and choral societies around Scotland. This provided welcome employment for local players and singers. Conducting was another outlet and he was equally at home in Glasgow Cathedral and Paisley Abbey with Mozart’s Requiem as he was in the theatre as musical director in Singin’ in the Rain. Teaching percussion, particularly at the RSAMD and in North Ayrshire schools, was especially rewarding. His academic background came to the fore when he was, for twenty years, a part-time tutor in the Senior Studies Institute at the University of Strathclyde.
Glyn’s major interest has long been in arranging music for many different combinations and he was a regular contributor to BBC TV’s Songs of Praise. However, the greatest pleasure has been in having the good fortune to be able to provide a few scores for DCB in the past half-century.
Geoffrey Haydock
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