The older I become, the more I appreciate the disparate threads that have drawn together different parts of my life. I suppose it’s partly the past catching up with me.
I may be wrong, but I suspect that musicians are liable to have more of these strands sewn into their experience than those of some other callings. And, also, that music – with only a few exceptions, occasionally in the guise of conductors, but not inevitably – usually engenders a commonality of spirit and, indeed, humanity. Maybe this consists in the shared emotions, whether contentedly confident or accompanied, in some, by a natural mild anxiety that we experience in pursuing our craft as creatively as we can. After all, most of us are trying to do justice to the music in our desire to express the meaning – tempting to say ‘story’ – suggested by the notes.
There is a rider to this though in that I often feel that underneath most of us quite naturally share an unwillingness to stick our heads above the expressive parapet, like Schultz’s Charlie Brown, who is nevertheless always ready to try again and do the right thing. On the other hand, we sometimes have to resist the temptation to give our own ‘definitive’ and maybe a horribly idiosyncratic interpretation of the music (guilty, M’lud). Some composers must be turning in their graves. I feel that, in the music profession, all these shared feelings and love for music subconsciously bind us to our friends. Pondering the subject gives some sort of perspective to my memories, and brings to mind many of the amazing people and events that have shaped my life.
I was thinking of my flute-playing daughter Katherine, who rang the other day, and I remembered an old friend, a flautist and pianist, who died aged ninety-nine in 2019. This great lady’s name was Joyce Griffiths, née Higgs. She was one of four musician sisters; violin, ‘cello, and herself, with the fourth sister being the formidable (we used to suspect had possibly boxed for her county in her youth, but well-meaning) Mary, a good conductor who directed the Stafford Choral Union. Three of the sisters lived in my hometown, Shrewsbury. They and Joyce took part in all the amateur music-making that took place in the town, and that was where I got to know them.
Joyce had most of her life lived in Shrewsbury, where I, as a fifteen or sixteen-year-old, got to know her. She put up with me most graciously, and I gained so much from her musicianship and her advice. She was very kind and encouraging to me when I started playing locally, and gave me confidence to persevere. The very last occasion I saw her was in her retirement apartment just outside Shrewsbury – only a few years before she died. As I finally left the flat, she generously gave her me her flute for Katherine. “I’m a bit deaf now,” she said, “Not tone-deaf, just deaf.” This was after entertaining me for hours, with interesting and often hilarious stories. The last thing she said was an offer to post me yet another large pork pie, the creation of which she had become masterful.
When I was too young to go into pubs, Bill Youden, cab driver, bass player, and Dad’s assistant organist at St Mary’s where he had been since 1951, became a friend. Once, in the interval of the annual musical (It was ‘Lilac Time’ that year) in the Granada Theatre, Bill told me that, when I was eighteen, he would buy me a pint of Mild and Bitter – it was important that it was mixed – because that was what real musicians drank.
I met Laurel and Hardy in the Granada, doing their farewell tour all over the country, and saw many famous acts there (often before they were famous). Gerry and the Pacemakers, Mr Pastry, Norman Vaughn, and Terry-Thomas among them. There was even a skiffle group in the late 1950s made up of four of Dad’s ex-choir boys. That dates me. Bill told me that he had decided long ago that he would marry the first woman who could drink him under the table, and he did. She was from Bridgnorth, I think, from where I’m told, the cave-dwellers near the town only finally departed in the 1930s. He could play a piece very well from the full orchestral score, transposing the clarinets and horns as he went. Shrewsbury was a most musical town in those days and still is.
In fact, only a year or so later, I had my first half of bitter in the men-only bar of the Lion Hotel at the top of the hill. The only lady allowed in the bar was the nice barmaid, Tiny. On Sundays Dad, as well as the vicar, curate, and choir-men of St Mary’s would foregather there at about midday, after the Sunday morning service. An hour later, I or my brother would eventually be told to ring home and give that week’s reason (a.k.a. mendacious excuse) as to why we were going to be late for Sunday lunch. Long sermon, punctures, etc. The excuses were many and varied. Mum would simply sigh down the ‘phone. She was exceptionally long-suffering. That was in the days when for some reason Argentinian beef was relatively inexpensive and plentiful but roast chicken was a rarer treat.
After the days of my early struggles with the horn, there was a long gap of about twenty years after I left home, during which I did not see Joyce. Then, in the early 1980s, we renewed our acquaintanceship at the RCM. I and David Mason, he of the trumpet fanfare on Penny Lane, were adjudicating the external ARCM Performance diplomas in Room 51. I saw that the next student was from Lyth Hill, just outside Shrewsbury and he was going to perform the first movement of the Hindemith Trombone Sonata. To my amazement and delight suddenly Joyce was in the room as accompanist. Our respective jaws dropped an inch or two, but we refrained from mutual hugs. She and her trombonist played really well. After we had totted up the marks, I made my excuses to David re: a call of nature and went into their rehearsal room opposite. Joyce was muttering about how ‘bloody difficult’ the piano part was, while simultaneously reaching into her string bag, which contained two items only – an apple and a quarter bottle of (appropriately) Teacher’s Whisky. We exchanged fond greetings until I had to return to the examination room. (In Rangoon just after the war, the local word for Scotch was the only one Joyce learned, she told me.)
In the mid-1990s, I discovered a little more about her when getting to know her great-niece Victoria. Vic was at that time a horn player and violinist in The Irish Guards band. Vic has inherited both a love of music and Joyce’s wickedly original sense of humour from her great-aunt, and the story of her driving lessons in Wellington Barracks will live with me. When she told me that she was related to Joyce I was overjoyed. I gave Vic the odd lesson and began to learn a few more details of Joyce’s life. Later, in around 2010, I was coaching on an international orchestral course near Shrewsbury. It was high time I saw her again, so I got in touch with her and arranged for her to come to The Golden Cross in town for supper and to meet half a dozen of my colleagues.
She made a lovely blue dress for the occasion and amused us all (she was about 90 then) with stories from her extraordinary life. She was a very direct person and her humour was all the more immediate for it. At one point – wine had been taken – I loudly asked her across the table as to when and where we had first played together. She replied fruitily, and equally loudly, hereby immediately quietening the general hubbub, “It was in 1958. Mary was conducting King David by Honegger in Stafford, and you came in a bar early in the 6/8”. If that mistake had happened today, in this age of scientific and computerised wonders, I might have been able to reassure myself of Einstein’s remark, that “Artificial Intelligence is no match for (a young horn player’s) natural stupidity”. We kept up a long-distance relationship after that, with Joyce every now and then sending me her delicious pork pies in the post for my birthday.
Joyce lived in the town square, with her second husband Phil Griffiths, a viola player with whom she played in the Shrewsbury Amateur Orchestra. She was also a respected teacher of both the flute and the piano. For decades she had been playing the organ at the 17th-century Unitarian Church on the High Street in Shrewsbury. She told me that she was proud of the fact that there are plaques on the wall in the church; one commemorating the fact that the young and beetle-loving Charles Darwin worshipped there until he was eight, and a rather smaller one next to it commemorating the fact that Joyce Griffiths played the organ there for four decades until she was in her 80s.
I like the fact that in 1798 Samuel Coleridge was appointed Minister at the chapel and was offered the grand sum of £120 a year. He was already a famous preacher, and the young William Hazlitt walked the eleven miles from Wem to Shrewsbury to hear him give his first sermon on the 14th of January. After the next two sermons, on the 21st and 28th Coleridge was offered a better position by Thomas Wedgwood that paid £150 per year, and left. About 160 years later my father was offered not much more, and by that time a much less grand amount, than Coleridge’s fee (which he accepted) to jump ship – figuratively of course – from the organ loft of St Mary’s to that of St Chad’s.
There now follows information popping into my head that is nothing about Joyce Griffiths. It concerns a coincidental connection to the above names in the fact that Ralph Vaughan-Williams’ great-great-grandfathers were, respectively, Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95) and Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin.
It occurs to me that V-W was a close friend of the immortal George Butterworth, who had set A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad poems to music. They had been written 20 years before Butterworth died, while he was supervising the digging of a new trench nearer the German lines in 1916. He had been mentioned in dispatches and had already been awarded the MC for his gallantry. He would have had a second MC, but I think they cannot be awarded posthumously. I wonder whether he, like so many of the troops, had a small red copy of Housman’s poems in his tunic pocket that day.
In 1739, James Burney, half-brother of Charles Burney, who later had a daughter, Frances (known as Fanny), was appointed organist at both St Mary’s and St Chad’s. He maintained this position for over 50 years. The brothers were both brought up just outside Shrewsbury, in Condover and were quite briefly to attend the same school that I and my brother did, albeit (well over) 200 years later. There the connection between us ends.
In 1739, Robert Cadman had a notion to ‘fly’ (most probably with the help of a tightrope) from St Mary’s steeple across the River Severn to the Gaye Meadow (later and until recently home to Shrewsbury Town Football Club). He fell to his death when the rope broke as he was climbing the steeple.
What follows will be possibly of even less interest to those who might be reading this, but the village where the Burney’s were reared, Condover, is near the village of Cound, which later was to sport, arguably, the second iron bridge ever built, by Thomas Telford, in 1797 This tiny imitation of Ironbridge’s structure over the Severn gorge is near the confluence of the Cound Brook – which I used to know well – and the River Severn itself, just up from Ironbridge. Telford had earlier been the county architect of Shropshire and was the man who proclaimed (Old) St Chad’s Church to be unsafe. No-one took any notice and the church collapsed in 1788. So, he changed careers. By 1793 a new church had been built.
After some time at Shrewsbury school, the Burney brothers were educated at Chester Cathedral Choir School, where they were taught to play the piano by a certain Mr Baker, who had previously been organist at St Chad’s in Shrewsbury. The same 200 years later, my father, Sam Baker, assistant organist at Chester Cathedral was teaching the piano to George Guest at that very same school and went on to be organist for 20 years, first at St Mary’s, and later at St Chad’s, whose organist had been – you’ve guessed it – Edmund Baker, who had gone on to be assistant organist at Chester Cathedral.
That’s more links than in a black pudding factory in Bury. I shall attempt to desist from here on. Therefore, I finally catch up again with Joyce, my main subject. In the Noughties, I was in the habit of going regularly to Shrewsbury to teach, and one week I arranged to see her in her little house outside the town. She welcomed me with champagne and smoked salmon sandwiches and we proceeded to talk for hours. She began by saying that her father had fought in the Second Boer War.
At one stage she told me that during and after the Second World War she had been shot, accidentally, three times. After driving an ambulance during the blitz, the first incident was, when working as a land-girl she received a shot in an embarrassing area from the gun of the farmer aiming at rabbits in the ever-decreasing area of corn that was being harvested at the time. The details of the second wounding I have forgotten, although she pointed out the outline of a tiny bit of shrapnel still lodged in the back of her head. The third was in the aforementioned Burma in 1947 when she was slightly wounded by an off-target marksman on the local shooting range. She was there (now Myanmar) at that time with her disabled first husband who had returned to the ravaged country to help restore his rubber farming interests after the war, largely destroyed by the Japanese.
As I have said, Joyce said that the only word she learned to speak in Burmese was ‘whisky’, useful in the officers’ clubs and the embassy. She dropped into the conversation the fact that in 1947 she had fun entertaining three very small girls, all only about two years old, as to where the notes were on the piano. One of them she believed to be Aung San Suu Kyi who was born in 1945 and who has retained her love for the piano all her life. If this is true, Joyce’s influence did indeed spread far. Suu Kyi’s father, Aung San, was assassinated in July later that year, 1947. My visit to her home was the last time I saw Joyce, although we did correspond. That was in the days that we wrote letters and could afford the stamp.
Joyce lived a long and fruitful life. More than many, perhaps. I have not even scraped the surface of it. As I intimated at the beginning of this memoir, she was just one of the most remarkable and unusual people I have known. One has the right to have one’s favourite football team (Tranmere), and cheese (Explorateur). My favourite filmmakers were Powell and Pressburger. There is a quote from the end of the film ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ that goes something like ‘The rights of the uncommon man must always be respected’. Joyce was an uncommon woman, and I still wear the socks she knitted for me with pride, when I can find them.
