Instrument of war
WWI hero’s violin used for tribute album after its secret is unlocked
WHILE shopping for a violin, folk musician Sam Sweeney was enchanted by the ‘really pure and melancholic tone’ of one particular instrument.
So he bought it and, after taking it home, looked inside the fiddle’s body and saw it bore a signature.
The name was Richard S Howard of Leeds, and the date 1915. ‘But it looked like it hadn’t been around for that long,’ said Mr Sweeney, 29, who was BBC Radio 2’s folk musician of the year in 2015 and is artistic director of the National Youth Folk Ensemble.
Intrigued, he researched the violin’s history and, with the help of his genealogist father Chris, discovered that it had been made by Richard Spencer Howard, a music hall performer who had begun crafting it before being called up – and was killed before the violin was completed or he had had a chance to play it.
Private Howard joined the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment (West Riding) in 1916 and was killed on the first day of the Battle of Messines in Belgium on June 7, 1917.
He had a wife, Martha, and a young daughter Rose. But he had not yet put together the carved pieces of the violin he had made at their home in Leeds.
Mr Sweeney’s father was assisted in his research because the 1911 census was filled in by the head of the household in his own handwriting: the signature matched that on the violin. They also found out when and where Private Howard died, his grave and his granddaughter Mary Sterry, the daughter of Rose, who was unaware of her grandfather’s poignant story.
Last year, Mrs Sterry and other relatives gathered at Private Howard’s graveside in Ypres and Sam Sweeney played the violin on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the soldier’s death.
Mr Sweeney, a former member of the folk band Bellowhead, said: ‘Playing over the grave was incredibly emotional. We were all just stood there sobbing.
‘He was unknown, and all of a sudden there I was playing his fiddle to him.’
Now he has recorded his debut solo album, The Unfinished Violin, using the instrument to play traditional tunes which the Army marched to and an original composition, Rose Howard.
Mrs Sterry, 74, who lives in Lyndhurst, Hampshire, with her husband Dudley, said: ‘It’s a beautiful story. As a child, I’d heard nothing but “your grandfather died in the First World War”. It was in that era when people just didn’t talk about those sort of things.
Mr Sweeney found the violin in Roger Claridge’s violin shop in Oxford ten years ago and paid around £2,500 for it.
Mr Claridge had bought it when it was in pieces at an auction and completed it earlier that year.
The Unfinished Violin album was released yesterday by Island Records. Countdown to the end of
carnage: Pages 46-49