Trumpeter Landfrey

And after Browning, Tennyson and Nightingale, Landfrey.

Landfrey was a bugler in the Light Brigade in its catastrophic charge at Balaclava on October 25 1854 in the Crimean War between Britain (and France, Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire) and Russia.

In 1890, at about the time of Florence Nightingale’s seventieth birthday, the plight of the survivors of Balaclava was turned into a familiar national scandal. This was the third of the Crimean War-related recordings Thomas Edison’s agent made in London in 1890 to raise money for them through an exhibition at Edison House.

There are references to Landfrey as Martin or Kenneth Landfrey, or Lanfried, or Landfried. He says Landfrey. Here is the recording:

www.gutenberg.org/files/10204/10204-m/10204-m-001.mp3

“I am Trumpeter Landfrey, one of the surviving trumpeters of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. I am now going to sound the bugle that was sounded at Waterloo and sound the charge that was sounded at Balaclava on that very same bugle [on] the 25th of October 1854.”

A woman’s voice adds:

“Record made at Edison House, Northumberland Avenue, London, August the 2nd, eighteen hundred and ninety.”

Landfrey plays a bugle that was used at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18 1815.

The bugle sounds …

(But as soon as we hear the word bugle, we think not of Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, but of Blow, Bugle, Blow, a no less astonishing poem, now so closely identified with Britten’s setting of it in his Serenade that it seems incomplete without the music.

“The splendour falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.”)