Ken Matthews was working at the CEGB's Marchwood Engineering Laboratories near Southampton when, in 1977, a group of his colleagues, who were keen brass band enthusiasts, started "having a blow" during their lunchtime break. He went along and was soon given an instrument and taught the rudiments of playing. It was not long before this group decided to form a brass band and so Marchwood Brass performed its first engagement later that year. A sponsorship deal from Vodafone led to a name change in 1989 and the band is now well established as the New Forest Brass Band. Ken has been a playing member of this band ever since it started and, as he has access to a substantial amount of archive information, he has been able to write this account which traces the band's history from its inception to the present day. Along the way, the band has won many cups and performed in numerous concerts and other events. Ken has remembered incidents, both humorous and more serious, which have made his book a personal memoir rather than a chronological historical treatise.

Contains 17 songs for the Christmas season. Most of the songs are for unaccompanied congregational singing, several have been arranged for choirs, and may serve as anthems or introits. Full music and notes by the author are provided for each song.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.