At the age of 80, Darlington's Mike Frankton is still touring the world as a clarinet player. Then again, he's survived a brush with Chinese bandits during the Second World War and coped with Hitler's concentration camps. Viv Hardwick talks to the amazing octagenarian of music.

FROM the death camps of Nazi Germany and later being captured by Chinese bandits to preparing for a clarinet concert tour of Japan next month, 80-year-old Mike Frankton has lived a fascinating life. The retired ICI chartered electrical engineer, who lives in Darlington, didn't even take up contrabass clarinet seriously until he was 58 and now performs and creates arrangements for ensembles.

Even falling out of a tree and breaking his elbow recently hasn't halted the progress of this remarkable music-maker.

"I was lopping branches off the tree when I fell and broke my elbow, but I could still waggle my fingers so I could still play," he jokes. "I tried playing the clarinet while I was still at school, but it was during the war and nothing really happened. So I didn't do much until I retired and attended college in Newcastle. I was 58 and playing a low key role in Durham Concert Band, but when I retired I decided to study music more seriously.

Up to that point, he'd been in charge of ICI's electrical and instrument department at Billingham, and retired when two departments doing similar work were merged. "I knew it was going to happen so I planned it all beforehand. I'd worked 27 years on and off for ICI straight from school at Welwyn Garden City," explains Frankton, who faced his first crisis in life while working as a young lab assistant. The Quaker registered as a conscientious objector to war service and volunteered for the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), which took him to France and Germany at the tail end of the war. Soon the young ambulanceman was "being asked to carry out medical procedures that wouldn't ever be permitted today", dealing with refugees and opening up the concentration camps.

"We worked with the Military Government in Europe, looking after displaced people and opening up concentration camps. I can't remember the name of the first one we went to but the second one we spent a lot of time at - a camp called called Bergedorf, which is near Hamburg. You just have to cope with it and there's no option, but I'd never want to go back and look at Belsen. I saw it first hand and the whole business of incinerators and all the piles of clothing and people in a skeletal state was deeply upsetting. When we opened up the camp the people inside were helping us to carry others out on stretchers and they worked on, even when we were flaked out. It's amazing what the human frame has to cope with when you have no other options."

Frankton met several Quakers from Darlington in the FAU and soon realised what a large part the religious group played in the North-East town. He regards his most memorable time as arriving in China and finding a huge stash of medical supplies left behind by the US. The FAU set up a network of trucks and garages to distribute the stockpile through the western area of China from the Burma border to the Gobi desert. "We were driving trucks and taking convoys of medical supplies to outlying hospitals and mission stations. You'd be on the road for weeks on end making deliveries because it's such a vast country," says Frankton who vividly recalls being attacked and captured by bandits.

"It did come quite close. We had about six trucks going to a hospital in the extreme west towards Tibet and we were attacked after they blocked the road. A guy with a sword came up to the side of the truck and he tried to hack the handle off the door and battered it so hard the sword broke off at the hilt. I got out and another guy started beating me with a sword across the shoulders. I got down on the ground and then another came up with a pistol, motioned me to the side of the road and I thought 'he's going to shoot me now, but it doesn't matter because nobody knows and we're miles from home, so who cares?' It was complete serenity, but the guy just waved the pistol at me and didn't shoot," he explains.

He and the other drivers managed to escape capture by deliberately slowing down the bandits to such an extent that one decided to let them go. "I survived that and I'm still here," says Frankton.

He didn't return from China until 1950 and eventually did an engineering degree and rejoined ICI "a little higher up the company than lab assistant". After a roving role in the UK and abroad, Franton recalls moving to join ICI on Teesside in the 1960s and having a few doubts about claims that the giant works was in the countryside after observing "all I could hear was the clanking of drums in the drum-making plant and steam and smoke and all the rest of it, but in fact it was true. Half a mile from the factory there were fields."

Frankton's move into music proved to be a happy accident because his recently acquired knowledge of computers allowed him to become one of the first musical arrangers to produce sheet music using software.

His two interests led to the setting up of The Darlington Clarinet Ensemble. Then well-known clarinettist, teacher and Tees Valley Music Service head of instrumental and vocal training, John Mackenzie, inspired Frankton to help him create the British Clarinet Ensemble (BCE) in 1995. The ensemble has appeared at major venues across the UK and Europe, and been invited to perform in the US twice. Frankton and Mackenzie will be taking the ensemble to Tokyo in July to appear at the Clarinetfest.

Frankton has formidable support in the shape of wife Lesley, 78, who taught weaving at Darlington Arts Centre. He admits that his days with the BCE might be numbered but he wants to continue with the Darlington group as long as they'll have him. He says: "What amazes me is that I am 80 and I can't really believe it. My impression of people aged 80 is that they're using a Zimmer frame but that's no longer true."

* Darlington Clarinet Ensemble will be playing at Alnwick Castle Gardens on Sunday and for the Friends of the Bowes Museum on July.