Maurice Gee, Trombone, Tuba

My earliest memory of my dad is of him standing on his head in a corner at the above-mentioned house, presumably around Christmas 1945. Standing on your head helped the blood circulate, he claimed. That was the Christmas he performed a set of magic tricks for our extended family, many of whom - my mother, my brother, my cousin, a couple of aunts - had spent some or all of the war years at the house.

After the war, our segment of the family moved south, to Middlesex, first to a prefab, then to a semi-detached council house in Sudbury Town. In the Sudbury house, Maurice would practice up in the main front bedroom, where he had a habit of emptying his trombone’s spit-reservoir on the carpet. He claimed that it was good for the fibres.

As Mantovani was known by his friends as Monty, Maurice was generally called Mas by his musician friends (pronounced ‘mass’) because of his forenames, Maurice Alfred Samuel. The first time I saw him working was in fact with Mantovani. That was in 1949, at Butlin’s Holiday Camp in Filey, North Yorkshire, (see the photo below, Ed.) where the band (as it was at the time) had been booked for the summer season. During that summer, my mother took my brother and me there for a holiday. I wasn’t yet six years old, but I remember Dad - ever the showman - standing centre-stage and playing his trombone with a glove puppet while Monty looked on, smiling indulgently. 

In later years, Maurice toured and recorded extensively with Mantovani, in Britain and overseas. (I seem to recall him telling me that he performed a solo on a recording of The Laughing Violin - a trombone solo on a piece about a violin?! - but have no memory of ever hearing the track.) His favourite kind of music was not orchestral but Big Band - not surprising for a brass-player. The Billy Cotton Band Show was regular Sunday lunchtime listening in our house, whether the rest of the family liked it or not.

Like most London-based musicians, he knew a great many showbiz people. He had stories about many of them, and collected their autographs and signed photographs for us. Most of the phone calls to the house were from Monty or musician pals such as Stan Newsome, or booking agents for other bands and venues. As a freelance musician he did a lot of theatre work. He also played at Wembley’s Empire Pool, not far from where we lived, at major ice shows and pantomimes. The family got in free, of course. I particularly remember The Roy Rogers Extravaganza at the Pool, from which, when the season was over, Dad brought home several items of cowboy gear.

In the late fifties, early sixties, Mantovani’s Orchestra had a popular weekly show on Sunday afternoon television. While my personal taste was for rock ’n’ roll (Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis et al) I would join the rest of the family round the TV every week for the odd glimpse of Dad. He would always sit in the same position, to the far right from the viewer’s perspective, with one foot in the aisle. He suffered from gout for many years and liked to give his left foot room to move.

Maurice liked the company of musicians, and he liked pubs (he was a staunch member of Camra, the real ale society). He also had an eye for the ladies, so it’s no wonder that he and my mother quarrelled furiously for many years. When I was about fourteen he decided that he’d had enough and packed his bags. He continued to play with Mantovani in the years that followed, but we saw him rarely; spoke to him almost as rarely on the phone. I made the effort to meet him now and then during my late teens, when I was working as a photographer in London. Once, he invited me to meet him in a pub, where he shouted at the landlord to ‘Turn that bloody jukebox down!’ (the landlord, knowing him well, obliged). Another time I attended one of the weekly music sessions he organised in a spacious room above another pub. This was a popular venue for musicians who liked to jam. Many of them were strangers to one another, who simply wandered in, sat down, played along for a while, and left. It was a lively, entertaining evening for all concerned, musicians and onlookers alike.

A story Maurice told me long after he and my mother divorced. I’m guessing that it was his fondness for real ale that caused him to wake one morning beside a railway line with no memory or how he got there. Standing over him was a police woman. You would think that finding an unknown man in such a situation would not endear him to a member of the constabulary, but there must have been something about him even in that state, for she eventually married him.

The time came when Maurice felt that he could no longer play his trombone as well as he once had. His ‘lip’ had gone, he said. But as he still needed to earn a living, he bought a motorbike (he never drove a car) and took to giving music tuition in schools in and outside of London. Given his energy and enthusiasm, it’s possible that he was an inspirational tutor, yet in the years he spent with his family he never taught any of his four children the slightest thing about music, let alone how to play an instrument. Curiously, however, my surviving brother (Maurice’s youngest) has taught himself to play the piano, my son plays guitar and drums, and I write songs and other kinds of music with the aid of a computer. None of us works with music in any professional capacity, but we’re all quietly passionate about what we do. I imagine we get it from somewhere.

Maurice Gee died in London, in 1983.

Copyright © 2008, Michael Lawrence, All rights reserved

Michael is the author of more than thirty books for children and young adults. Visit him at: www.wordybug.com