Particularly distraught was 63-year-old Bertha Kearns of Middlesex, who claimed that the auctioneers had the bugle’s provenance all wrong. Approbation for the transaction was not, however, universal. While it provided a nostalgic diversion for the press, the sale of the bugle offered financial gain for the seller, social credit to the buyers, and cultural capital to the museum. There were many who profited from the auction at Sotheby’s. 1).īugle carried by Trumpeter William Brittain, Museum of the Queen’s Royal Lancers © Rachel Bates. 2 Thanks to their largesse, the bugle holds pride of place at the Royal Lancers Museum in Nottingham even at the present time (Fig. When it learned of the plans for the object, even the often sceptical Guardian reflected, ‘there is nothing, but nothing, to compare with the pure unselfish generosity of the men of show business.’ As promised, Harvey and Sullivan ultimately saw that the bugle was deposited ‘where it belonged’. It brought moral and patriotic capital to Harvey and Sullivan, and to the entertainment industry as a whole. It enriched the man who sold the bugle, which had come into his possession as a family inheritance bought for two pounds back in 1901. The occasion appeared to profit a great many, and not just the papers that capitalized upon the event. In his own enactment of the special relationship, Sullivan planned to present the object on live television to the Museum of the 17th Lancers, a storied regiment that had participated in the fateful Charge of the Light Brigade. Just after stirring the patriotic fervour of its readers, the tabloid reassured them that the American in question had saved the bugle ‘FOR BRITAIN’. The conquest at Sotheby’s occurred when the prize possession was ‘sold’ - and sold, as the Daily Mirror noted, ‘to a YANK’. The daily press and the tabloid newspapers made the most of the occasion, billing it as an ‘unprecedented scene’ and an occasion of ‘high drama’, not unlike the Charge of the Light Brigade itself. On that April day at Sotheby’s in 1964, the agent working on behalf of Harvey and Sullivan was swift, acquiring the bugle in just fifty-five seconds, ‘less time than it to sound the Reveille’. They became its possessors at a sale that attracted great interest, one that attained a drama that was reminiscent of the storied battle that had occurred one hundred and ten years earlier on the Crimean peninsula. In 1964, it was purchased by British actor Laurence Harvey and American television personality Ed Sullivan in a transaction that married the mechanisms of consumer culture to the pursuit of treasured relics. Across the century, his bugle passed through various hands. His brief life notwithstanding, Brittain would achieve immortality as the member of the 17th Regiment who sounded the charge. The young trumpeter was severely wounded on the field of battle, meeting his death just a few months later in hospital. Vale’s query was occasioned by an auction at Sotheby’s, where a coiled bugle blown by Trumpet Major William Brittain was sold for sixteen hundred pounds. So Edward Vale, a correspondent for the Daily Mirror, enquired in April 1964. ‘Just who DID blow the bugle that sounded the Charge of the Light Brigade on the battlefield at Balaklava in 1854?’. (2015) “Who Blew the Balaklava Bugle?: The Charge of the Light Brigade and the Afterlife of the Crimean War”,ġ9: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 2015(20). Keywords: Crimean War, secularization, souvenir, relic, bugle, Charge of the Light Brigade, Battle of Balaklava It points, too, to the long afterlife of the Crimean War and the lingering shadow of the Victorian Age. In the process, it attests to the politics of presence on the field of battle. Why did the contest attain such longevity? Why did it rage with such fervour? This article offers an answer beyond the simple question of provenance as it charts the twists and turns in the dispute, from the mid-nineteenth century through the moment of resolution in the 1960s. Did the distinction belong to Trumpet Major William Brittain or to Trumpet Major Henry Joy? The case, which preoccupied family members and interested parties, was closed some fifty years ago in favour of Brittain’s partisans. In question were two competing claims to have sounded the charge at the Battle of Balaklava, fought at the height of the Crimean War. The battle involved a bugle and its provenance. Its reverberations would, however, last long after, as a battle that was waged in the popular press and in auction rooms across the twentieth century attests. The signal event of the Crimean War, the Charge of the Light Brigade, transpired on 25 October 1854.
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