The Patriot

Jake "The Patriot" Fletcher

Jake Fletcher's trumpet had once gleamed bright as his future. Trained at the Chapel Royal and talented enough to play for minor nobility, he'd been destined for a comfortable position in some great house's musical retinue. But drink and gambling debts brought him low by 1803, just as Napoleon's threatened invasion sent patriotic fervour sweeping through England. Desperate and clever, Jake took a worn white sheet and painstakingly painted it with the new 1801 Union Jack design and fashioned it into a waistcoat. He positioned himself outside Cambridge colleges with his battered trumpet, his hand-painted flag bold against his chest. His act was simple: rousing renditions of "Hearts of Oak" and "Rule Britannia," tearful ballads about Nelson's death at Trafalgar, and dramatic recitations of imagined royal proclamations urging young gentlemen to join the fleet and sail down the Cam and Ouse to King's Lynn, then onward to glory against the Corsican tyrant.

The tragedy was that Jake could actually play beautifully. When sober, his trumpet sang with a clarity that made even cynical students pause and reach for their coin purses. They'd see the hand-painted flag waistcoat, hear the sweet, melancholy strains of "The Girl I Left Behind," and feel genuinely moved to contribute to this "patriot's" cause - though Jake had never been closer to a naval vessel than the riverbank. But the pennies bought more gin than bread, and increasingly his performances would trail off mid-tune as he nodded into a stupor, slumped against a college wall, his trumpet sliding from his lips, the once-bright paint growing ever more faded and ale-stained. By the 1820s, long after Waterloo had made his act obsolete, Jake still appeared in his threadbare hand-painted waistcoat, playing fragments of forgotten war songs to students who'd been born after Napoleon's exile, falling asleep between notes as Cambridge moved on without him.

The ghost's distressed Union Jack design captures Jake's hand-painted waistcoat in its final years - the brushstrokes still visible beneath the wear, the colours dulled and worn from constant use and the occasional tavern brawl. Those who keep Jake's ghost report hearing phantom trumpet notes in the early evening, always beautiful but always incomplete, trailing off as if the player has drifted into dreams. The music is saddest in October, the anniversary of Trafalgar, when Jake's ghost seems to remember both the talent he possessed and the life he squandered, his tune never quite finishing before silence falls again.

Every ghost is hand-made and unique - yours will be similar to the image shown but will vary in intensity and amount of streaking or other markings making it just as beautiful, but different.