On 16th March 2001 the band competed in the London and Southern Counties region of the Boosey & Hawkes National Brass Band Championships of Great Britain and what a day it was.
Preparations weren't ideal with various people having colds/flu, one having an operation and one called away at short notice necessitating a change of instruments for one player at very short notice.
On the day things didn't exactly go smoothly either. Having left with plenty of time, we were in the coach on the M25 when the tyre blew and we were stranded at the side of the motorway. Various panic phone calls later and we were waiting for either of the replacement coach or the tyre repair company to arrive to get us to Stevenage before our time to play. Getting to the venue with band 11 about to play - with us drawn 13, we find that several players who had travelled by car had left the venue for a walk. On talking to the officials about our possible lateness we had been given an estimate of when we were playing by the officials which was about 1 hour later than we played, hence these players had been told to arrive back after we had played. All attempts to contact them on mobiles failed but luckily they were found and were back and ready to play just in time.
The next thing was the "newish" four minute rule. Once on stage and the adjudicator has signalled that they are ready you have four minutes to start playing or you are disqualified. One of horn players was in a wheelchair after her operation and so took longer than normal to arrange the middle of the band and the percussion. Hence we were rather close to the four minute limit when we started.
Just before we went to register I overhead my top 2 cornets talking with the 2nd saying that he couldn't see the music because he had taken an anti Malaria tablet the day before and one of the side effects which "only affected a few small number of people" was blurred vision.
Our final panic concerned Maurice, who because of an injury cannot play Bass at the moment and was persuaded to play Glockenspiel for the contest. Our Glockenspiel has the note names on the bars as do most normal Glockenspiels. the one provided by the contest committee didn't have note names and so Maurice had to try and remember the note to play from the patterns.
After all this it's possibly not surprising that we played very poorly. Our final rehearsal was so much better in nearly all aspects and although we think 17th was a bit harsh we can have no real complaints about the comments or the position.
The players were
| Conductor | Graham Wade | ||
| Principal Cornet | Claire Wade | ||
| Solo Cornets | Steve (Harry) Hubbard | Winston Knight | |
| Soprano/ Repiano/ Flugel | Trevor Ingram | Dan Kent | June Wright |
| 2nd Cornets | Jean Turner | Christopher Hansford | |
| 3rd Cornets | Tony Cooper | Angela Collins | |
| Horns | Bryony Dyer | Graham Ingram | Marianne O'Brien |
| Baritones | Mark Cumner | Charles Woodhatch | |
| Trombones | Peter Walmsley | Liz Jones | Nan Oatway |
| Euphoniums | Stephen Bicknell | Philip Rowden | |
| Basses (Eb) | Richard Shrimpton | ||
| Basses (Bb) | David Miller | Peter Sauter | |
| Percussion | Grahame Robinson | Maurice Wright | Philip Ingram |