These days, in the world of education and in corners where therapeutic solutions of one sort or another are discussed, there is much talk about the effects of nature and nurture as well as the effect of socio-economic advantages, or lack thereof. Opinions differ as to what extent and in what proportion our backgrounds influence our growth into adulthood. When we have finished earning a living from our chosen profession (interesting word ‘chosen’ – mine chose me rather than the other way around) we have time to sit back and consider our years of work in some sort of perspective.
Happily, the following is not so much about that and me, but about my father, although by the time I have finished writing this I may have come to some conclusions about my own life as well. Like both my father and mother I am nostalgic by nature, that I do know. I look back over my father’s life and see a series of linked events. I have come to think of the inevitability of these events having their echoes, as I string them together, looking for the relevance of my father’s life to my own.
I shall start by giving just one link, not much related to my father, to explain what I mean. Sir John Barbirolli once said to me, ‘Do you know, Julian, the old boy (Sir Edward Elgar) and I have one very interesting thing in common and one way or another it had a great impact on both our lives; he and I both married protestants’. I used to think that this was a rather desperate attempt to identify a link between them, but I came to realise that he saw hidden clues to both their musical development and experience in this this seemingly rather banal statement. Thinking about it now, I began to string together a series of thoughts. The more I pondered it the more my thoughts developed further variegated tendrils. The Elgar connection to me started in 1952, as a 12-year-old listening sleepily to a Barbirolli/Hallé performance of The Dream of Gerontius in Lichfield Cathedral. Strange it was that the headmaster said to me the next morning that if I did some practice (I had just taken up the horn) I might be playing in that sort of orchestra one day. ‘Yeah, yeah’ – or the 1952 equivalent – I muttered to myself. 13 years later I was taking part in a recording of Gerontius, after having been, for 3 years, a member of that very orchestra. They were my first recording sessions and took place just after Barbirolli told me his connection to Elgar.
For some commentators Elgar’s music intones ‘the funeral march of a civilization’ and to others ‘sounds a note of the recessional’ and captures a ‘sunset quality’. His first symphony had been premiered by the Hallé under Richter (he of the more or less disastrous first performance in 1900). The second symphony was first performed in 1911. Three years after that, soon before war was declared, the Liberal politician Sir Edward Grey (1962-1933) was heard to say, looking out of his window in the Foreign Office, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’. Ever since that phase has been associated with the prevailing mood of Elgar’s Second Symphony.
Sir Edward Grey is the country’s longest continuously serving British Foreign Secretary. He held office from 1905 to 1916, exactly eleven years to the day. Despite his criticism of some French foreign policy over the years, it was he who persuaded the government that the country had an obligation to defend France were its borders ever to be threatened. This commitment led to Britain declaring war on Germany, and the subsequent further employment for the lamp extinguishers, in 1914.
Grey had been politely thought of as an easy-going student at Winchester College (on one of my school reports too, the housemaster had written, ‘Still in a minor key, I fear’), where he learned to fish for trout in the college grounds. He was later described as an indolent student at Oxford where he ‘studied’ from 1880. During his time at Balliol he inherited 2,000 acres, a baronetcy and an independent income. He began to enjoy himself so much that he was sent down, but he was allowed to return to obtain a third-class honours degree in Jurisprudence. He did, however, become adept at real tennis.
He was elected Liberal member of Parliament for Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1885, aged 23. His constituency’s borders had been under dispute for years, as it was unclear whether the town was in England or Scotland, after being reassigned after various conflicts over the years, and indeed whether it should better be designated as a sovereign state. I was once told that, while Queen Victoria was signing the declaration of war against Russia in 1853 – 30 years before Grey gained his seat – she thought it wise that, because of Berwick-upon-Tweed’s unusual status, she should include the town as a separate entity in the UK in her declaration of war, because of the confusion I have outlined. However, when the Treaty of Paris which ended the war was signed, the name of the town was inexplicably left out, thus implying that Berwick-upon-Tweed is still, to this day, officially at war with Russia. I think that the truth of this is somewhat doubtful, but it makes a good story. I would add at this juncture that I once caught a salmon in mid-stream on the Tweed. I was in a boat on the Scottish bank when I hooked it, but we rowed over to England to land it.
In 1886 Grey plucked up the courage to make his maiden speech in the Commons. Six years later he retained the seat with a majority of 442. Despite these scholastically rather humble beginnings he promptly became, quite naturally, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. The Liberals lost their majority in 1895. Grey had however retained his seat as an MP with a further 300 majority increase in the vote. While he was in opposition, he had enough spare time to spend some of it in his humble cottage in the Itchen Valley. He wrote a diary, later published under the title Cottage Book, Itchen Abbas, 1894-1905. His first complete book A charm of Birds was published in 1897. His book on fly fishing came out in 1899. On the Liberals’ return to power in 1905 he was appointed Foreign Secretary on 10 December that year. Of course, this sort of thing could never happen today, could it?
Despite still attempting to escape the confines of Westminster at every opportunity, Grey became an astute commentator on foreign affairs and began to be suspicious of German territorial greed and interference in trade agreements and felt that Britain was playing into their hands. It is perhaps significant that Britain’s stature and position in the world at that time meant that Lord Grey did not have to leave its shores to meet his opposite numbers. In those days they came to him. Later he was, however, Ambassador the United States between 1919 and 1920.
His influence on me springs less (in fact negligibly) from of his political leanings and more from his acquaintance with Winchester and his trout fishing expertise on the River Itchen as well as the tenuous connection with Elgar and the Tweed. I have a lovely picture of Grey in retirement, with what looks like a crow standing on his hat (which is on his head). Thus, there is for me a tendentious connection of a sort with Elgar and the Itchen near Winchester.
There seems little doubt in my mind that two ingredients in my early background were to shape the way I was to lead my own life. One (if I discount my kindergarten where in fact, I forged two very good and continuing musical friendships) was the school where I was sent as a boarder at the age of 8. The other was the atmosphere at home, under the usually benevolent eye of my mother and father. Mum was intensely practical – she gave Dad a carefully judged amount of pocket money every week, which was perhaps why he could only afford to drink in halves and not pints. I tried this myself once, but it didn’t take. He told me once that the danger associated with only rarely being able to overindulge was that he’d never had a hangover in his life, even when he did drink too much. He needed the self/wife–imposed rules on the matter.
Dad was a music and French teacher and church organist. He was asthmatic and tended towards being quite highly strung. He often suffered a bout of bronchitis a week before an important concert or when he was due to make a speech (‘Practise the asides my boy, practise the asides’), but always managed to recover in time for the event. He was funny and naturally witty (not quite the same thing) but could be distant. Certainly, he was neither a cuddler of babies nor a hugger of teenagers or grown-ups, including his own children. He said they gave him asthma attacks. In this he was inconsistent, for although cats always affected him adversely he hugged them unmercifully. He showed talent as a pianist and improviser when he was young and had a few lessons with the famous teacher Harold Craxton (who taught Winifred Atwell). His younger brother and two sisters were all gifted, musically. He had had a very brief love-hate relationship with the violin in his youth in Birkenhead. His teacher, a Mr Mathews, soon despaired of him. Strangely, decades later he was to work as a coach/accompanist on music courses in Winchester run by a professional violinist friend, Jimmy Matthews (no relation), who had shared the same teacher nearly fifty years before.
Dad was not at first destined to become a musician. This is something my brother and I now identify as a great sadness as it was to affect Dad’s whole life, and prevent him from fulfilling his extraordinary talent as a musician. He was born in an era which carried certain expectations. In the world in which he was brought up anything artistic was unimaginable as a profession. Music was after all synonymous with ‘The Theatre’ in some quarters, something to enjoy going to, but very slightly disapproved of in polite company. If at an early age he had been imbued with the confidence to express himself, he would certainly have echoed Noël Coward’s statement that ‘television was for appearing on, not for watching’. The problem was that my grandfather was more Victorian in his attitudes than Edwardian (Dad was born in 1907). As Dad was the eldest child the choice of profession available to him – and clearly laid out by his father – was between Medicine, the Army, or the Church. The army was out, owing to his already chronic asthma. His younger brother was interested in becoming a doctor and was later a medic on arctic convoys during the war. That left the Church. Soon after leaving school Dad was carted off to Lichfield Theological College and this was to be, many years later, the first geographical link between us.
While he was incarcerated in the southeast corner of the cathedral close in Lichfield, he made some close and lasting friends and he shared a room with one, who later became Vicar of Tisbury. The gas meter in their room was faulty and they could recycle the same shilling for months. The Clerical authorities eventually got wind of this, and Dad was hauled over the coals by them and his father. Despite this glitch Dad became – possibly rather unwillingly – immersed in his studies, which apparently included Sanskrit. The students were wont to place alarm clocks behind the books in the lecture hall, set to go off at different intervals. They were also in the habit of dropping light bulbs from the top floor of the Bishop’s Palace to land in a pleasingly explosive way next to be-gaitered visiting dignitaries on the steps leading up to the front door. I later stood on these steps and imagined this happening.
On one occasion the students threaded rulers between the strings of the grand piano to add further lustre to the hymn singing. Dad assured me his story of him one evening dressing as a young woman and being escorted to a bar in Wolverhampton by an American GI for drinks was true. This stretches one’s credibility somewhat and may have included embellishments, but it was the 1920s, only ten years after Virginia Wolf and five other members of the Bloomsbury Group had dressed as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his entourage and been shown round the famous new battleship, the Dreadnought by the Ship’s Captain. Dad and his friends must have thought their pranks were child’s play. The competition among the theological students for having fun was apparently keen, second only, it may be assumed, to that among medical students.
Dad’s sense of humour was evident throughout his life, but we must not get ahead of ourselves. Towards the end of his three years at Lichfield doubts over his true vocation began to set in. He could never get the accompanying musical side of the liturgy out of his head. To him (as it now does to me), the music usually spoke more eloquently than even the words themselves. After worriedly realising that he was doing the wrong thing, and for the wrong reason, he found himself being groomed for a curacy in a parish in Liverpool, just across the Mersey from Birkenhead where his parents now lived. Dad told me that he actually held out until he was standing outside the Bishop’s study door. And then, as he said, ‘I threw in the towel’.
Although he never discussed his faith, he was to remain a devout albeit critical member of the Church of England all his life, though with occasional leanings towards Rome. He liked its approach to personal discipline but didn’t appreciate the lack of good music in Catholic churches. He was wont sometimes to be more amused by the clergy rather than impressed by them. He had a habit, after a preacher had been particularly pompous and rhetorical in the pulpit, of raising his eyebrows, pursing his lips and twirling an imaginary cassock rope belt. A simple action that spoke volumes.
My grandfather, later to become Mayor of Birkenhead, was displeased at Dad’s decision to give up ideas of going into the Church. He was however, forced to accept the failure of his plan for his elder son. On his return from Lichfield, Dad worked for a short time in Liverpool as an office worker in the huge ship-building firm of Cammel Laird. This firm was the builder of, to name but three, the CSS Alabama (the famous Confederate warship of the American Civil War in1862), the first all-welded ship in the world, then The Fullager in 1920, and later in 1938 the first British aircraft carrier, the Ark Royal (sunk three years later by a German U-boat). Dad used to get to work on the bus. He said that on Laird Street the route passed two chapels with their large, printed posters outside. One said, ‘Drink is your worst enemy’, and a little further down the road the next pronounced ‘Mathew 5:44 – Love thine Enemies’.
Because my father was reticent about his life and activities around this time (he did not think we would be interested), timelines become somewhat blurred in my memory. I do know that for a few months he and his brother (Harold, known for some reason as Bol) were dating identical twins. These sisters had no compunction about peremptorily switching brothers from time to time, and gleefully reliving the experience when they got home.
He didn’t last long making tea in the ship-building industry (his job was naturally even less than riveting), although he noticed that there was a significant drop in output on the Monday following the Saturday that Tranmere Rovers (who played and still play at Prenton Park) had lost their match. The club was elevated to the league (3rd Division North) in 1921 and in their first fixture beat Crewe Alexandria 4-1, watched by the enormous – for their small ground – crowd of 7,000. The stadium is not actually in Prenton, but they had added the name as that part of Birkenhead was thought to carry more of a cachet than Tranmere, a rather poorer district in those days. Uncle Bol was to become the club’s doctor in years to come. For years, Dad would wear a Tranmere shirt when decorating a room and while keeping his trousers up with his old Birkenhead School tie. Despite his asthma he was sporty when he was young. He was keen on demonstrating his skill at putting his left foot forward and at the same time spin-flicking a ball a considerable distance to the left with his back foot. He was a useful tennis player also.
He was making sure to keep alive his hopes about eventually becoming a church organist by having lessons on the huge 5-manual Henry Willis organ of Liverpool Cathedral with Dr Walter Goss Custard, who played there from 1917 to 1955. In the early 1950s when on visits to the dentist in Hope Street, I used to be taken into the cathedral. Later, I played a few concerts there when I lived and worked in Manchester. My friends and I made many trips to the exotically fantastic – relatively novel in those days – Chinese restaurants nearby. At that time, the cathedral building, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott was only partly finished, with half the nave blocked off by a vast re-bricked wall. Finally in 1976, the nave was completed to designs by Scott’s former assistant. It has one of the the longest naves in England. It had taken 73 years to build.
It was lucky for Dad that teaching qualifications in the Public School system (Private – if you are American) were more relaxed during the Second World War. Dad’s first job, teaching French, Music, Games, Latin and anything else he was asked, to teach (unqualified), was in Bradford, where Delius had been born in 1862.
In 1978 Dad and I were talking to George Wood – he didn’t like to be called Wee Georgie – in the Savage Club. It was George who, in 1901, aged 6, was the playing the part of a child swapping repartee while sitting on his mother’s knee in Her Majesty’s Theatre. It was the day Queen Victoria died, and all the theatres in London were dark that night as a mark of respect except that particular venue. It was after all, her personal theatre. As he never proceeded to grow (he peaked at 4 ft 9 in) he went on playing the same part for around 20 years, until his mother died. He was very funny and very clever. When my father asked him whether he would like a drink, he replied that his doctor had forbidden him to partake of alcohol in case it stunted his growth. Not even sherry trifle, he said. Dad mentioned his first teaching job in Bradford to George and said that he well remembered seeing him on the stage at the Alhambra Theatre. George astounded us (this conversation was 50 years after the event) by recalling all the details of the bill that night including the every entertainer – in performance order. George died early in the following year.
Although he had by now had a few teaching posts at various schools in the north of England, Dad was by now very keen to catch up and further his musical education. He came to London when he was about 30 to have theory and organ lessons with George Oldroyd at Trinity College of Music. He was awarded an LTCL and wore the hood – purple edged with mauve – for church services until it wore out. He told a funny story about his later (successful) examination for ARCO too, to be recounted perhaps in another blog. He learned the organ in Oldroyd’s church in Croydon on a fine romantic instrument in the High Anglican St Michael’s Church.
He naturally needed another job at a school to go with his studies, and the one he found was at Cumnor House School near Croydon. Here he met my mother who was housekeeper to the headmaster, Mr Wheeler, and generally looked after the well-being of the boys. A few years younger than Dad, she had worked as a private nurse in hospitals and had had some experience of looking after the everyday needs of bachelors, cooking, and keeping things tidy. All above board – Mum was very well brought up. She once mentioned two such bachelors who lived in Dover Street. In the Autumn of 1929, the men decided to spend a week in Folkestone and Mum went along to housekeep for them. Walking along the front one afternoon Mum noticed a distinguished-looking elderly gentleman swathed in blankets seated in what they used to call a Bath Chair and staring apparently sightlessly out to sea. She made enquiries as to who the man was and was told it was the composer Frederick Delius, who had just arrived by boat from France for Beecham’s Delius Festival in London and was due to be taken there the next day. Unsurprisingly, Mum, at that time, had never heard of him but later, through my father’s prodding, the composer and his music would start to feature very heavily in my life and my thoughts.
Many years, and many house-moves after Dad’s time teaching in Croydon, my parents would visit the very elderly Wheelers in their retirement home in Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight. Over tea and Dundee cake Mr Wheeler said to Dad, ‘Tell me Sam, why did you leave Cumnor House?’ ‘Because you sacked me!’, Dad replied. He did not confide the details.
Back in the very late 1930s, and by now married, Dad found his first organ playing job. This was as assistant to the assistant organist, Malcolm Boyle, at Chester Cathedral. The organist was Dr Roland Middleton, who became my brother Richard’s godfather. The job that went with it was teaching music, etc. in Chester Cathedral Choir School. He was of course in the Home Guard and appears to have spent some of his time fire-watching in the cathedral tower. Once, he said, he angrily rang the local police station to tell them to ‘Put that light out’. They were not amused. The rest of the night he spent playing football up and down the nave. In Chester my brother and I were born, and there Dad was to teach the piano to George Guest the famous Welsh organist who was to become director of Music of St John’s College Cambridge for 40 years (until 1991). It was George who played for my father’s memorial service in St Chad’s, Shrewsbury in 1980.
There is a strange sequence of coincidences attached to Dad’s time at Chester which are linked to the twenty -five years that we spent in Shrewsbury from 1951 to 1976. Charles Burney, the composer and historian, who knew Mozart and all the musical luminaries of the day, was born in Shrewsbury in 1726, and brought up in nearby Condover, where I caught my first trout. He was educated at Shrewsbury School (where I and my brother Richard went) and then went to The King’s School Chester. His organ teacher was a certain My Baker. His half-brother (15 years older than Charles) James Burney, who taught him music, was organist at St Mary’s Church in Shrewsbury for 54 years, where Dad was also organist from 1951. Very strange.
During the war, Dad, unable to join up, became Director of Music at Ellesmere College in North Shropshire (remuneration £3 per week). We lived in a furnished rented cottage in Overton on the beautiful river Dee and Dad auto-cycled four and a half miles from there to school. It was from there that I have my first memory, which was being handed a piece of dry toast from the top of the kitchen range. Some might say that my first memory of food led psychologically to a lifelong over-indulgence in the stuff. It was here also, at the end of the war, that Mum purchased her first car, an Austin 7. Its registration began with YD which my brother thought stood for Year Dot. This car deserves a short history all its own, with its yellow indicator refusing to work and it eventually having no ‘reverse’ on the gearbox. I well remember Mum standing on the doorstep, selling it for £15 cash in around 1952. It was Morris cars from then on – Minors, 1000s and Travellers.
The Chaplain at Ellesmere was the Rev Prebendary E E F Walters of whom we shall hear more later. Dad started to move up the organ-playing ladder, leaving Ellesmere and being appointed assistant to Dr Heath-Gracie, the organist at Derby Cathedral. The school he found this time was The Preparatory School for Repton School, which at that time was situated in the village. From Overton-on-Dee Mum drove us to Repton in Derbyshire in 1946. We lived in a house rented from Repton School on condition that we housed temporary school masters. They used to be called ‘paying guests’ and I remember a young French teacher staying with us, who took a liking to dog biscuits, thinking them very nutritious. Repton is only 3 miles from Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire where White Shield Worthington was brewed from 1829 and is these days difficult to find. Dad said that he had made all his best friends in pubs. He discovered a liking for this particular brew in the 1960s during a trip to Portsmouth to see his old schoolmaster friend Pete Jameson, who had been billeted with our parents during the war. The world is not yet ready for the recounting of the subsequent visit to a local Chinese restaurant.
In 1947 the school moved a short distance from Repton out to a nearby Palladian mansion called Foremarke Hall, recently vacated by the army, having been used as an officer cadet college. Richard and I went there for a short time, and I remember excitedly exploring the underground tunnels near the lake which had been previously used in training.
Mum and Dad then decided that we should live in Shrewsbury where Dad had been appointed organist of St Mary’s, the 1000-year-old collegiate church in the centre of town. We moved just after Richard had been accepted into the choir at King’s College Cambridge in 1948. Richard stayed in Cambridge to sing as a boy and as an undergraduate with a necessary 5 years at Shrewsbury School between them and went on to a distinguished career both as a singer — deputising in The King’s Singers on occasion — and in The City.
Two years later in 1950 I failed the same audition. My reading of Psalm 23 to Boris Ord was not deemed to be sufficiently fluent. Dad’s second choice for me was the choir at Lichfield. As I have said, his former Ellesmere colleague Prebendary E E F Walters had moved to Lichfield as the headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School, and Ambrose Porter was the long-serving organist. Organists had in those days a habit of becoming embedded in their posts. Dad prepared me very carefully for the voice-trials and Mr Porter was sufficiently entranced by my rendition of How Beautiful are the Feet and Lead us Heav’nly Father. That, and There is a Wideness in God’s Mercy written by the son of the Archdeacon of Ludlow, are still my two favourite hymns. Luckily Psalm 23 was not on the audition agenda, and I was accepted as a probationer chorister.
When I arrived at the school the Theological College was still there (it closed finally in 1972) and I was amazed to see an African student playing football matches for the college team in bare feet. What they used to call ‘muscular Christianity’. No doubt the japes of my father’s time were still being performed by the students. As the numbers in the school increased the Bishop’s Palace that Dad had known became the new school building in 1953 when the new Bishop downsized to the other end of the Close. But the song school remained in the northwest corner, where, by being placed next to a senior boy, I learned to sight-sing before I could read music, and where, in the winter, we would warm our hands on pebbles heated on the coke stove in the middle of the room.
Before the Clean Air Act in 1956 the were frequent dense fogs in the cathedral close, which sometimes made the building difficult to see. At 7:45 am every day, before breakfast, rain or shine, we had to run around the cathedral and would often manage, under the cover of the fog, to slip in through the North transept door and out through the South transept door without being observed by the headmaster, thus cutting off half the journey. We always managed to genuflect to the altar as we crossed the nave, of course. I was lucky to be mentored by Richard Lloyd and I still have recordings we did together there, in the Dean’s library. Richard once sent me a post-card from a place called Richard’s Castle, near Ludlow, later another of my fishing haunts, which he pronounced as the most magical spot in the world.
Dad never visited me at weekends while I was there. Mum came about twice a term in the Austin 7, with a box of six eggs, each one with my name clearly painted on it. We would not get a boiled egg once a week during term otherwise. Dad was of course always too busy with services at St Mary’s in Shrewsbury. His own first choice of prep school in which to teach was Prestfelde School and his second was Kingsland Grange, which was only a short walk up the cinder-path from our house in Oak Street. Later, Dad was appointed Director of Music at the prestigious Adams Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire (founded in 1658). Here it seems he was partly responsible for teaching French to Jeremy Corbyn and Music to the disc-jockey Simon Bates. For a few years he managed to get to school by 9:00 am by getting up very early, cycling the two and a half miles into Shrewsbury, parking his bike in the church porch, walking to the station, getting the train to Wellington and then the ‘bus to Newport and walking up to the school. How he managed this with his asthma I do not know. But as he never drove a car he quite enjoyed gentle cycling exercise. Once he was hauled up in front of the magistrate for going over a stop sign on the Belle Vue Road with no traffic in evidence. The magistrate was lenient with him and said that if he had been wearing a tie at the hearing, he would not have fined him ten shillings.
After a year or two of this effort of getting to school, Dad decided enough was enough and was given a room at school to use during the week, before he returned to Shrewsbury on Friday evening in time for choir practice and the services over the weekend. In his absence, Mum took the opportunity to enjoy various types of employment herself. At various times cooking for the director of music at Shrewsbury School in the evenings when he was entertaining visiting musicians, looking after the elderly in a nursing home, selling up-market ladies’ clothing in Shrewsbury and briefly doing the cooking at a boys prep school outside town. She always managed to find time for us though. Our family could certainly do with the money. When later at the age of 20 I had finished my first week in the Hallé orchestra I rang home and Dad asked me how much they were paying me. ‘Twenty pounds a week’, I replied. ‘That’s a pound more than I’m getting’ he said. Luckily for us our fees as dayboys at Shrewsbury School were generously paid for by Dad’s brother, Bol. Uncle Bol was good at making money, telling us that he had once come back from the casino at Deauville with every trouser and jacket pocket stuffed to overflowing with francs.
Some years ago, Richard and I went to dinner with the organist John Williams. The other dinner guest said that he had been at Adams Grammar School in the 1960s. Richard and I pricked up our ears and asked him if he remembered Dad. He smiled and told us that once Dad caught him and another boy smoking in the bushes. Dad hauled them out and told them he would let them off on one condition. ‘Please Sir, what is that Sir?’, they asked. ‘That you give me one’, replied Dad. He had those boys in the palm of his hand from that moment on.
He would bring music alive by playing something from The Messiah to the boys and when it had finished, pointing to the main school gates facing on to what used to be the Roman road (the precursor of the present-day A5) and saying that on a wet April evening in 1742 Handel’s coach could have been seen rattling past on its way to get the boat at Holyhead for Handel to travel over to Dublin for the first performance.
Dad used to pretend to fall asleep at his desk during the lesson, with the ash from his cigarette becoming longer and longer. As the hubbub in the classroom increased, he would pretend slowly to wake up and say, blearily ‘Where am I?’. When he had run out of ideas at the end of term he would have music quizzes. Typical questions were ‘Who wrote Handel’s Largo?’ and ‘What was Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s middle name?’, and ‘Which was the last of Mozart’s 41 symphonies?’. They would be made to stand in the litter bin if they got all the answers wrong. He was thinking after he had retired, of writing his autobiography and calling it Forty Years without a Syllabus. It would have been an interesting read.
At Adams he started a subscription series of concerts, sometimes giving organ recitals and at other times accompanying the soloists himself. Often these were advertised on the programme as ‘Prize Winners from the Royal Academy of Music’. I played for him on a few occasions. But he often had very good soloists, like the famous violinists Frederick Grinke, and his friend the Canadian-born David Martin and Lisa Fuchsova, the renowned Czech pianist whose debut was at the age of ten with the Czech Philharmonic in 1923. He would put on a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta nearly every year, interspersing them with Messiahs and B Minor Masses. I am looking at his (broken) baton as I write. He developed a close friendship with the local Catholic priest in Newport, Father Smith, and they would drink un-consecrated communion wine in the evenings, after school.
At most times at St Mary’s Dad had a very fine choir, recruiting boys from as he put it ‘the hedgerows, highways and byways’ all over town and outside – and good male singers. But on one occasion he was so disgusted with their singing of O Thou, the Central Orb by Charles Wood that he tore up the music after the last chord and sprinkled it down from the rather high organ loft, over the choir. This was told to me by Bill Youden, his sometime assistant. He said in his Telford accent ‘Loik bloody confetti it wus’. Bill had various driving jobs. Once, when we were walking up the steep hill just over the English Bridge, we saw a funeral procession coming down on the other side, at about 5 miles per hour. Bill, who was driving the hearse, saw us and gave a toot to to toot toot on the horn. Bill was one of those superb musicians who could read a full score perfectly, entailing transposing the clarinets, strings, wind and brass where necessary, all at the same time.
Another strange thing had happened when E E F Walters (we called him ‘Preb’) gave up the headmastership at Lichfield and became vicar at St Mary’s where Dad was organist. They had their differences. Dad did not appreciate that Preb was tone-deaf. Before he had to intone the Versicles, Dad would give him a note to start on. This was not the usual F, but an F sharp, the note on which he always said, with some justification, the choir would stay better in tune. This note was usually ignored by the vicar and so instead of a nice gentle F sharp on the flute stop Dad would try to help by ‘making a mistake’ with the stops and play it fortissimo for a split second on the trumpet stop. Then he would quickly ‘correct it’ and revert to the flute. Dad would insist on choosing the music for services and the vicar would not always see eye to eye with him.
The culminating insult to Dad’s sensibilities was committed by the vicar at Christmas time. Dad had made half a dozen beautiful full-sized posters to be nailed to various places in the town, advertising the always terrific Ceremony of Nine Lessons and Carols he put on every year. On the one in the church porch, Preb had crossed out the small T of ‘St Mary’s’ and made it a single capital S in High Catholic style. This enraged Dad, as this was not a Catholic church, and was for him the final straw. It was serendipitous – if not prebendipitous – that there was coincidentally a job going at St Chad’s up the hill, and that was that.
He was happy there in his new church, after Richard had persuaded him to ask for more money than they were offering. Dad would have accepted anything. From St Chad’s Mum and Dad retired to St Dogmaels near Cardigan, Dyfed and spent a few happy years there until he died. He sometimes was asked to deputize at St David’s Cathedral.
Some years after he had died in 1980, the BBC broadcast his Ave Maria Gratia Plena from St. David’s as one of their regular Choral Evensongs on Wednesdays. It is not possible that he was playing the organ in Derby Cathedral in 1945 for the very first BBC broadcast of Choral Evensong, but he would have been doing so had it been a year later. His speciality was his harmonic sense and especially for the psalms and the last verses of hymns. Ambrose Porter always extemporised exactly the same notes as we processed into the chancel in Lichfield – we used to hum along with him. I never heard Dad play the same thing twice – surely one of the marks of a fine musician.
