Musicians in Brampton are on the look out for new recruits in a bid to save their band.

Membership of Brampton and District Silver Band has dwindled in recent years and now there’s an urgent call for more people – particularly cornet players – to join and help retain a tradition which has been present in the town since the 1880s.

Long-standing member Andrew Cunningham, 77, of Stanwix, Carlisle, said the situation is getting desperate.

“We need young blood like lots of other bands,” he admitted. “Although there’s a lot of people who can play brass instruments, for some reason they don’t want to join a brass band which is a shame.

“We want younger people to keep Brampton having a band, after all these years that they’ve had one.”

There has been a brass band in Brampton for more than 130 years – and in the days before radio and television, the town boasted two bands.

Andrew explained: “For the ordinary people, that was their main musical enjoyment: to listen to the band.

“They used to parade every week for church parades and carnivals. We’re too old to parade now. We can’t manage. It’s too small a band to parade anyway.”

The band, which currently has eight members, continues to play at church services at St Martin’s, including on Armistice Day.

Numbers have diminished in the past five years, with members passing away, moving from the area and taking ill.

In the days when it had 25 members, the band would enter competitions but it simply doesn’t have the numbers now to compete.

Members are led by conductor Stuart Moore, who is keen for young people to learn and appreciate music.

Andrew, who has played for 70 years, can’t put his finger on why there are no young players coming through.

He thinks the apathy in the area is strange, because across the border in Langholm there is a brass band and a popular junior brass band.

“Music takes you away from all your other problems,” Andrew said. “You just think about the music and playing it.

“You get great satisfaction being in a group, whether it’s an orchestra or a band. When you’re entertaining people and you get an applause it lifts you up.

“I think youngsters are missing out an awful lot these days when they’re playing on their own. If they came down and joined in, all right we’re a bunch of old men, but they’d be so welcome.”

He added: “William Howard is renowned for the orchestra and the musical side of the school and yet none of them come down.”

Sam Potter, 15, of Brampton, a pupil at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School who plays the euphonium, is the band’s youngest member.

He joined last March with three other teenagers – but they soon stopped going.

Andrew said anyone wanting to join will get free tuition and can borrow an instrument to give it a try.

Brampton and District Silver Band meets for weekly practice at 7pm on Tuesdays at the Bethesda Evangelical Church, in Main Street, Brampton.