Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who spent much of his time judging music competitions across the country, revealed that organisers would go to extreme lengths to ensure impartiality. One expected him to sit, curtained off, in a custom-made crow’s nest on stilts; another shut him in a hotel room while he listened to the brass bands passing unseen beneath his window.

At another brass band competition, Coleridge-Taylor was lowered into a deep pit which was then lidded with boards. But the lack of sympathy for adjudicators was never clearer than when he saw a limp, rain-soaked figure hanging over the bandstand rails after a long day. It proved to be a fellow-judge. Nobody else seemed much bothered.

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