My friend the trumpeter Reg Service, who has died aged
93, was one of a small but significant group of black Britons who played jazz and
swing music in the UK before the second world war.
He grew up in Streatham, south London,
the son of Mabel Moore, a white English mother from Maidstone, Kent, and
Richard Service, a Jamaican engineer who left the country when Reg was nine
months old. At the Strand school in Brixton Hill, Reg played the trumpet and
formed a band with classmates including the trumpeter Norris "Lou"
Robinson and the trombonist John Jackson, whose father was the trombonist Ellis
Jackson of the Billy Cotton showband. At the South West London Rhythm Club,
they met and played sessions with Terry "Spike" Milligan and Ray
Ellington.
Black danceband musicians were rare in Britain, but
the band leader Tony Carmelli encouraged them. Touring the halls with Carmelli
(later, as Tony Carr, the composer of the 1974 hit March of the Mods), Reg
learned to deal with irregular paydays. In London, he played gigs with the
Jamaican trumpeter Leslie Thompson, but missed a 1937 trip to the Netherlands
after auditioning unsuccessfully for the American saxophonist Benny Carter.
He found work in unlicensed Gerrard Street dives, then
moved upwards to Mayfair and the New Florida, where he played with former Ken
"Snake Hips" Johnson sidemen and others, backing the American singer
Adelaide Hall; the drummer was Edmund Ross (better known as Edmundo
Ros, who died a month after Reg).
Reg did wartime service in the Royal East Kent
Regiment (The Buffs) and, while stationed in north Africa, sent home for his
trumpet. He played troop concerts, but following a year in Italy with the Army
Claims Commission he experienced lip problems on trying out for Leslie
Hutchinson's new "All-Coloured" band.
When Hutchinson suggested a change of career, he
became a civil servant. As assistant to Ivor
Cummings at the Colonial Office, he was at Tilbury in June 1948 to greet the Empire
Windrush, arriving from the Caribbean. He continued to help relocate newcomers
in Brixton and elsewhere but like Cummings, also British-born of mixed-race, he
experienced conflicts of interest when caught between the traditionalist views
of his masters and the need to secure justice for the new arrivals.
After two years in Barbados, supervising the use of
colonial grant aid, he returned to music semi-professionally. He played for
ballroom dancers initially, then joined the big band revival. He worked with
Mike Daniels, Trevor Swale and several other bands from the 1970s into the 90s,
switching to electric bass guitar when his lip troubles returned.
I met Reg when the saxophonist and writer Dave Gelly
brought him to a public discussion featuring some of his prewar colleagues. I
invited him to the British Film Institute to help identify Fela Sowande's
sidemen in the 1939 thriller Traitor Spy, and he was amazed to see his youthful
self on film.
A charming and
thoughtful man, he remained an amusing informant, especially when recalling
society women at the Florida with their "tea" invitations to African
dancers and the overtures he received from friends of Noël Coward.
In 1965 he married Dawn, a clerical officer at the
Ministry of Overseas Development. He is survived by her, their children, Anita
and Chris, and three grandchildren.
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