Cornies: A son digs into his father’s musical history, and a stage play ensues

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In the days after Phil Sparling died in a London hospital in October 2010, his son, Andy, did the dutiful thing: He wrote his father’s obituary.

Andy wrote about how his dad had quit high school and left his Clinton home at 16, saxophone in tow, to play in a band. How he’d met Andy’s late mother, Margaret Elaine Nichols, at a dance hall in Port Stanley. How his dad had become one of the first members of a band that became the RCAF Streamliners, playing for the troops in Britain and on the continent between 1943 and 1946.

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Andy wrote about how his father had finished high school after the war, graduated from Western University in 1951, then taught French and Latin at high schools in Strathroy and London.

At least those had been Phil’s day jobs. Along the way, he had continued playing music – saxophone, clarinet, oboe – until the early 1980s.

During the decade following his dad’s death, Andy Sparling became “borderline-obsessed” with his father’s wartime service and the history of the RCAF Streamliners, a 15-piece swing ensemble regarded by the great bandleader Glenn Miller as “the best band in Europe . . . next to mine.”

A former broadcaster and Loyalist College instructor who still plays the trombone, Sparling read everything he could find: clippings from newspapers and military publications, personal memoirs, service records, archival material. He interviewed family members and cobbled together a near-complete list of the band’s performance dates.

The research confirmed much of what Sparling already knew, but also yielded new information about a service band that was deeply rooted in Southwestern Ontario.

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Phil Sparling and saxophonist Jack Perdue hailed from Clinton; trumpeter Billy Carter was from Goderich. The trio jammed while attending the RCAF technical training school in 1941 in St. Thomas, where they met bassist Jack Fallon, from London.

The ensemble grew with the additions of trombonist Bill Bebbington, from St. Thomas, trumpeters Fraser Lobban and Claude Lambert, from Owen Sound and Wyoming, respectively, and Frank Palen, of Woodstock.

By the time the Streamliners officially were sent overseas in 1943 – at the request of Martin Boundy, conductor of the military band at RCAF headquarters in London, England – they’d acquired additional musicians from across the country. (After the war, Boundy held numerous musical positions in this London, as well as a stint as a city alderman from 1963-69.)

The result of Andy Sparling’s research was a book titled Dance Through the Darkness: The Untold Story of the RCAF Streamliners.

The book caught the attention of James Harrison White, a retired University of Guelph psychology professor and clarinetist, who had retired to Goderich and joined the Huron County Historical Society. White’s grandfather, James McKay, had joined the British navy in 1912; he died when his cruiser was torpedoed in the Mediterranean at the outset of the First World War. McKay’s diaries, however, survived.

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In Sparling’s book about the Streamliners, White saw the obvious connections between Canada’s wartime musicians and Southwestern Ontario, especially Huron County, which figured prominently in the British Commonwealth’s air training program.

White contacted Sparling with an idea: Might the story of the Streamliners work as a stage play?

A year’s worth of meetings by teleconference, writing and revisions, in consultation with veteran community theatre dramaturge Duncan McGregor, produced a viable script.

Then, a lucky twist: A grandson of trumpeter Carter, in Portland, Ore., discovered in an attic an analog recording of a near-complete Streamliners broadcast from inside a BBC studio from 1944. Sparling promptly had it restored and digitized by Chad Irschick at Inception Sound Studios in North York.

The selections on that recording form the basis of the musical soundtrack for Streamliners, which will run at The Livery, Goderich’s 140-seat theatre, from Oct. 16-27. The story is told through projections, a small cast and 26 swing dancers. It’s a thoroughly community-based effort to mark the 100th anniversary of the RCAF and the most ambitious show in The Livery’s 40-year history.

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McGregor, who directs the play, says the production offers up “a piece of our history as a country.” He also recalls asking Sparling, when they first met, what he hoped to accomplish with the script.

“Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?” McGregor had asked.

“I’d like to understand my father better,” came the reply.

The quest for understanding between fathers and sons is as old as time. Some of us mentally replay old conversations in a kind of loop, hoping to glean insight. Others sift through photographs and mementos in search of clues.

Some of us, it turns out, write plays and become characters in them.

Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist. cornies@gmail.com

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