IT WAS spring 1949. My hero found himself banging drumsticks against a double bass. An audition panel stared on. The venue was the ballroom at Butlins’ Ocean Hotel at Saltdean, near Brighton.

By his side stood Roy Dexter, the player of the aforementioned bass. For months, rehearsals seized every spare moment Roy could spare. Yet at the last minute, his collaborator dropped dead from a heart attack. My hero stepped in.

Although a trumpeter, singer and bandleader by trade, my hero hadn’t banged drums since he was a lad at St Mary’s Guardians school, a former workhouse in North London. His mother Elizabeth sent him and his brothers there after her husband died from TB in 1915. She couldn’t afford to feed her own family without his cab drivers’ income.

That 1949 afternoon they failed the audition. But why did my hero opt for drums? Did he think his trumpeter’s lip had failed him?

Perhaps so. A month earlier he auditioned for a radio slot at the BBC. The BBC’s new variety chief, an Australian named Jim Davidson, had a reputation among colleagues for having a “patchy” knowledge of music. My hero, who had conquered British audiences a decade before, was flatly rejected.

My hero is Nat Gonella. He would have been 108 today. From those humble North London origins he worked his way up – as we all should. At the beginning he only wanted to play the cornet because the marching band at school offered him a smart uniform. We baulk at uniforms today. But how appealing would a smart outfit be to those dressed in rags?

Nat carried on with cornet, and then trumpet. He made his mark throughout the 1930s, abandoning the financial comfort of restaurant and society dance bands to branch out playing hot jazz. He entertained in cold, working-class halls. Louis Armstrong met, and adored him.

For a generation of people he was the figure who broke black music in the UK. It was through Nat for instance, that Humphrey Lyttleton discovered jazz.

Nat’s recordings made with his Georgians in the 1930s are full of joy, fun and discovery. His fellow musicians shine, such as Pat Smuts on tenor sax and the very youthful pianist Harold Hood, who was killed by a German bomb in the early months of the Blitz.

Listen to I’m Gonna Wash My Hands of You or Skeleton in the Closet. Nat’s records are packed with surprise. Better still there are a set of four recordings he made in New York in about 1938. You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby is my favourite. Because baby look at you now! But now he is almost forgotten.

Hence my 2008 centenary campaign. I had Nat’s records played on Radio One and an entire Radio Two programme dedicated to him – by the wonderful Mark Lamarr.

Yet their successors, who include Jamie Cullum and Geoffrey Smith, no longer reply to my record requests for Nat Gonella.