Forbes spent every holiday from the age of seven with John, working in his machine shop beside his house. John was his grandmother’s brother, who lived with her after her husband, Forbes’s grandfather, had died young when his fishing boat was sunk by a German U-boat in World War I. During his years of growing up near Perth, Forbes was much influenced by his uncle John, who was his mentor, role model and at times surrogate father. Forbes remained at a local school, which he hated, and a year later he found a unique method of getting himself expelled from school before running away to join the Royal Air Force. The class system, though, works in mysterious ways: his parents refused to let him go on the grounds that he might develop ideas above his station. Such was Forbes’s natural ability in figuring out how these engines worked that the engineers arranged a scholarship for him to a very good school. He grew up near two air force bases and a flying school where as a schoolboy he earned pocket money cleaning airplanes, and there was an aircraft engine test facility nearby, where he got to know the engineers who were working on Rolls-Royce engines.
He admits to having been a tearaway as a boy, but he had always had an interest in flying. Forbes was born in Aberdeen into a family of fisher folk and grew up near Perth. Their backgrounds could scarcely have been more different: Forbes is from a working-class family in Scotland, and Yola is from a long-established family in Boston. Forbes worked for many years for two of the leading makers of modern flutes in Boston, and Yola trained as a silversmith.
Forbes and Yola Christie set up Windward Flutes in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, just seven years ago, and have already developed a formidable reputation. Whatever we call them, there is a large and growing market for these instruments, and just as there are some terrific musicians playing them, there are some terrific craftspeople making them, such as Forbes and Yola Christie. ‘Conical-bore wooden flutes’ is rather a mouthful, but perhaps that will have to do for now. Forbes and Yola Christie: Windward Flutes By Robert Bigio Irish flutes, folk flutes, simple-system flutes-what can we call these instruments? They are often used to play what is commonly called Irish music, although even that term is of doubtful accuracy since a lot of it is not Irish.
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