Free The Band That Played On by Steve Turner

competitions were held starting in 1897; the Palais des Beaux Arts presented lectures on exciting new scientific discoveries, such as the X-ray; renowned architects and designers such as Gabriel Ferrier and Gustave Eiffel worked on new hotels; and the streets of the principality were the first to be covered in tar.
    It was in this vibrant place that the first two sons of Leon and Marie-Rose had been born, but both died in infancy. Marius, the eldest, was a victim of diphtheria and then, six months before Roger’s birth, her second-born son, Marcel, died unexpectedly. These tragedies could have been what sent Marie-Rose back to her mother for comfort and help. With Leon at work in the Casino she would have had a lot of free time and yet would have been apprehensive about the possibility of losing a third child. Two years later there was another son who lived, Gaston Leon Carolus Bricoux, nicknamed Lolo by the family.

    Roger Bricoux (left) with mother Marie-Rose, father Leon, and brother Gaston.
    It seems to have been from his father, Leon, that Roger inherited his love of the arts. Leon had grown up in Paris during the 1860s and 1870s when bohemianism was flourishing and the world was looking to the city as a capital of culture. It was the era of authors Flaubert and Hugo; of artists Gauguin, Renoir, Courbet, and Manet; of the poets Baudelaire and Rimbaud; of the first exhibition of impressionism and the founding of the Folies Bergere; of Haussmann’s creation of modern-day Paris with its wide boulevards, radiating circuses, and public parks. Leon’s father was a painter and his brother, Charles, a teacher of drawing. He was given music lessons from an early age.
    In Monaco Leon earned enough money to buy a grand home at 37 rue Grimaldi and also to finance regular visits back to Cosne where they would stay in a house they owned in Bannay. The fact that Leon knew the royal family of Monaco and drove his own car impressed the locals. With his neatly trimmed hair, flourishing mustache, and air of dignified success, Leon Bricoux cut a dash in rural France.
    Roger was given a Catholic education in Monaco, first under the Christian Brothers at College St-Charles and then under the Jesuits at the College de la Visitation. When Prince Albert I separated church and state, Leon decided that Roger would continue his Catholic education over the border in Italy at the French speaking College St-Charles in the village of Bordighera, and later la Coeur Immacule de Marie in Taggia. He was confirmed at l’Eglise Sainte-Devote in Monaco in 1903, the same church where he and Lolo would later take first communion.
    On graduation Roger was accepted by the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna, Italy, Mozart’s alma mater, which had a great reputation for teaching cello. He studied there for three years, winning first prize for his cello playing, and then moved to France, where he spent an additional year studying at the Conservatoire de Paris. While in the city he was able to work to pay his tuition fees. One short-term contract was with the orchestra of the spa town of Uriageles-Bains. After this he returned to Monaco.

    Roger Bricoux with cello.
    In 1910, at the same time that Wallace Hartley was on the Lusitania , Bricoux accepted a twelve-month contract with the Grand Central Hotel orchestra in Leeds. Somehow he must have come to the attention of the Black brothers. The Grand Central Hotel, which had opened in 1903, was on Briggate, not far from the Grand Theatre (1878), which presented serious drama and opera, and the Grande Arcade (1897), and around the corner from Collinson’s Café (1903). Bricoux traveled to England by train and ferry and took lodgings on Melbourne Street, a ten-to fifteen-minute walk away from the hotel.
    It was a stirring prospect for a twenty-year-old boy, especially for one who barely spoke English. Leeds had only recently become a city (1893) and its center was being modernized with a series of elegant shopping