Is this Cammeyer’s Original Banjo?

[Joel Hooks]

[Richard William Ineson]

I hesitate to stick my head above the parapet on this subject, but in the interests of recording a little of what I believe I know of this banjo, for the sake of banjo history, I offer the following. The photo on the left may have appeared in the B.M.G. magazine in the early 1960s, it appears to show a well known amateur banjo player and B.M.G. contributor, called Len Broomfield sat , holding a zither banjo, possibly outside the house known as 'Lune Lure' in a Derbyshire village called Brailsford. A short article accompanied the  photo, the article stated (this is from my memory and may be entirely erroneous) that the banjo had been given to Broomfield by Cammeyer and this instrument was the one which Cammeyer brought to Great Britain with him in 1888. Broomfield was apparently on good terms with Cammeyer and when Cammeyer retired from public life in 1938 and moved to live in Brailsford (the house was provided for him by Arthur Strutt, a wealthy mill and land owner and zither banjo player) Broomfield used to visit him there. I was offered this banjo to buy, probably 30 or so years ago but I didn't take up the offer as I had three or four Cammeyer zither banjos at the time and couldn't justify buying another. I do not know who did buy the banjo and I do not know where it is now. On a light note, I was discussing Len Broomfield (Broomfield made a few banjo arrangements of various tunes, including Rubenstein's Melody Opus 3 No. 1 in the key of F which appeared in the B.M.G. magazine as well as writing a series of articles) with an arch snob of the banjo world, at the time. The arch snob said to me, "Broomfield couldn't play the banjo, he was a taxi (USA cab driver) driver", which made me chuckle at the time. As regards Cammeyer's residence, 'Luna Lure' in Brailsford, I visited the village and the property sometime in the 1980s  in the hope of finding people who remembered Cammeyer during the time that he lived there, 1938 - 49, with some success. I wrote an article about this voyage of discovery in 'The Banjo' magazine at the time, one  interesting source of information about Cammeyer and the Strutt family, whom I found during my visit, was the local undertaker who I think, was called Ray Jones. Cammeyer's housekeeper, whose name I cannot now recall, had died shortly before my visit so I missed an opportunity to get some 'inside information' on Cam, from the horse's mouth, by only a few weeks.

[Joel Hooks]

Thanks you Richard, now off to find the needle in the BMG stack!

I thought these were that image. I'll take good scans of them since these will be of better quality than the BMG halftones.