Major Peter Parkes had a long and distinguished musical career serving in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, the Royal Tank Regiment, the Royal Engineers, the Grenadier Guards and the Royal Army Medical Corps. He then followed in the footsteps of many other famous military musicians by taking a leap into the unknown and moving into the world of brass bands.
But let us go back to the beginning and ask, 'When did it all begin?'
'...Wanted: Two solo cornets for country band, constant work for good strong labourers available in the local iron and steel works, single men only, good footballers preferred...'
Not the kind of advertisement you would see today, but in 1909 banding was a bit different then.
Diamond Creek is a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. This township is a little over fourteen miles north-east of central Melbourne, just north of Eltham, where Arthurs Creek joins Diamond Creek. Settlement was attracted to it rather later than the more open areas of the Plenty River and the Yarra River, and the first European inhabitants were mostly timber getters and paling splitters. At the 2016 census the population of Diamond Creek was 11,733.
