I suppose the true definition of ‘name-dropping’ includes one having actually met the name one is letting fall and subsequently mentioning it proudly over supper. In what follows, that definition is largely accurate. I cannot be alone in not having ever mingled among the mighty. But I think it’s quite therapeutic to look back. As long as one doesn’t stare, that is.
The names that follow are indeed mighty to me.
The first two of my good and life-long friends attended the same seat of learning in Repton that let me in at the age of four. We had a limited education, one that concentrated on mostly the 4 Rs – Reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic and Religion. I found a report from those days (the late 1940s) which attested that my knowledge of the Old Testament was ‘Limited’ and the NT as ‘Poor’. Later, it improved somewhat. I failed my Eleven Plus twice, but Common Entrance fared better. We had to learn 30-second biographies off by heart. You will please try to forgive me if I quote one that I still remember:
‘BedewasamonkfromJarrowonTynehisgreatestworkwastheEcclisiasticalHistoryofTheEnglishNationHealsotranslatedtheGospelofStJohnintoEnglishandhediedin735’
One friend at kindergarten (I later learnt more German words), later an NYO oboist, then a well-known architect and to this day a fine baritone, was living near us in the town of Burton-upon-Trent. His father – our GP – was one day called in by my mother to deliver our corgi, Betsy’s, first litter of pups. I remember being in the front seat of the car on his first ever drive after passing his test. At one point he said to his mother, ‘Look at those lovely cows, Mum!’ ‘I can’t look now dear – I’m driving’, she said. I wish I’d been introduced to his brother, the first Starboard Crew Commander of a Polaris submarine crew.
The other youthful friend was later to play the trombone to a stunningly high standard in the same orchestra as I.
I had an amusing experience a few months ago. A young person of 22 came for a couple of lessons. I like to find out a little about them. And after she had played for about ten minutes, I asked her where she was brought up. ‘Oh’, she said, ‘You won’t have heard of it; a little village called Repton, in South Derbyshire’. ‘Oh’, says I, ‘Did you go to Foremark Hall School?’ ‘Yes’, says she. ‘So did I’, says I. How we almost laughed.
The other Burton-upon-Trent inhabitant that I never did hear sing, but wish I had, had departed the famous brewing town nearby 40 years before I appeared. I first smelled the Worthington White Shield and Bass Blue Label (brewed near where she was born) from my bedroom, three miles away.
The lady was a singer called Mabel Mercer. She was to embark on a highly successful singing and acting career in London, Paris and New York. We are told that, when she performed, she simply sat on a chair with her hands folded on her lap. Her artistry was not displayed in any movement or gesture, but simply in the way she sang and expressed her story. Sometimes the Complex may be mind-blowing, but the clue to a true meaning is so often contained within the Simple, if our imagination allows it simply to appear. No grand gestures needed from a true artist.
As a member of a well-known ‘Gentlemen’s club’, I’ve heard many stories of people whose names I’d love to have honestly name-dropped. The great pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch, who died in the same month in 1963 that I landed my first job, was described by his friend Serge Rachmaninov as his ‘spiritual heir’. One evening in the club, between poker games, they were discussing the up-coming first performance of the composer’s Variations on a theme of Paganini. Benno’s guest said he was a little worried about his accuracy in one small place in the piano part. Benno looked him in the eye, and said ‘I have a simple remedy, Serge’. ‘What is that Benno?‘ ‘A small glass of Yellow Chartreuse, taken just before you walk on to the platform. Not Green Chartreuse – Yellow Chartreuse’. After a month or two, a card arrived at the porter’s lodge of the club. Addressed to Moiseiwitsch, it simply said, ‘It worked. Thank you. Serge’. In 1929, Benno had just finished recording in the studio and was told there was room on the tape for more music. He was persuaded to play something quite short after the orchestra had left and performed Rachmaninov’s arrangement of the Mendelssohn Scherzo from the Midsummer Night’s Dream music. He just sat down ‘in his shirt sleeves’ and produced an immaculate rendering of the piece and walked out. I have that recording – nearly 100 years old now, and it is indeed immaculate.
I can easily drop the name of Humphrey Searle, who, 45 years ago, wrote what is to me one of the very best Horn quartets in the repertoire. Prelude, Nocturne and Chase.
I commissioned him to write it at the bar in the afore-mentioned club, after proffering him his favourite tipple, Pink Gin. £100 it cost me. Humphrey was a charming but intensely shy man. It is difficult to imagine him at his job during the war, in a training camp in Scotland, one that prepared foreign soldiers for their highly dangerous work with the SOE, before being parachuted back into their own country. He says that he spoke passable French and German, so was naturally posted to the Highlands of Scotland, where the only language of any use was Gaelic. Having studied diversely with both John Ireland and Anton Webern, Humphrey was a serious composer of what was then called avant-garde music, before Pierre Boulez and William Glock made it fashionable. Humphrey nonetheless wrote quite extensively for film and some fine symphonies. Even a short-lived opera, Hamlet.
I own a letter written by Bernard Van Dieren, who was a composer and friend of Peter Warlock. In fact, he was drinking with Warlock the night before Warlock died. Someone said that Warlock did not forget to put some food down for his cat first. No one plays Van Dieren’s music these days, but I love it. It has a chromatically pastoral quality but is adventurous too. The letter, now framed on my wall, was a plea to the owner of a newspaper, suggesting he should propose within his pages that Frederick Delius, who had been appointed a Companion of Honour three years before, in 1929, should be knighted. He was casually turned down, rather like a bedspread.
Thinking of Searle’s music for film, of four people I greatly admire, one was the thriller writer, ex-Oxford organ scholar and composer Bruce Montgomery. It is a toss-up as to whether I prefer his music to Carry on Constable, or Arthur Benjamin’s music for Above us the Waves, or the French Communist Georges Auric’s score for the 1954 film, Father Brown. They all match the action – and lack of it – perfectly. Where would all the best films be without the music?
Father Brown starred my favourite actor – the aptly Roman Catholic – Alec Guinness. Although he was not a member of the brewing family, he reminds me of the time when, at the end of a long boat trip to a small town at the far end of a Norwegian fjord, the Hallè concert could not start until a member (and very prominent local citizen) of the other Guinness family, who had a house at the top of a nearby mountain, had arrived. We all stood and watched the lights of his car as it took its time descending to the fjord-side. We then took our seats and finally embarked on the overture, and then probably the Grieg.
I am sure it is true that the gradual development of personal beliefs and convictions affect the path of our actions, and certainly they must have influenced the nature of the work of the greatest composers. The obvious example is the Lutheran Bach, but I sometimes think that the more humanist Brahms, as his work matured, might have written a wonderful opera. Maybe along the lines of the possibly Nietzschean ideals of Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet, which, from the opening scene, deals with very human desires and is overladen with a foreboding of future tragedy. How many people can sport five consecutive consonants in their philosophy? Psychiatrists perhaps.
We have all been close to famous people at one time or another, but this is not in itself a clever enough fact to include in one’s written or spoken CV. My meeting with or just being in the same room as any of them has been entirely luck. Musicians are fortunate that way. Few of those I’ve been fortunate enough to meet, or from whom I’ve learned something useful, are household names.
Nevertheless, living among horn players, as I have done, the essence of all human life is contained therein. I consider it a great privilege to have actually met and had a drink with Vince de Rosa. To me, although I’ve known many masters of the instrument, alongside Dennis Brain, De Rosa was arguably the best horn player and nicest person ever. In the Nag’s Head in Covent Garden one time, with him were Jack Cave – his colleague on innumerable film and recording sessions for decades, their two wives, plus Hugh Seenan and Jim Brown. Apart from myself, a stellar crew. The two couples were on an extensive sea trip and had landed at Harwich two days before. The photo is, of course, on my wall.
Angling contains possibly as wide a range of characters as Music. I gaze lovingly at a nine-foot Hardy trout rod propped up behind a chair in my front room, remembering another person I am proud to have known. He was John Hillaby, a keen trout fisherman, natural scientist and writer, whose widow gave the rod to me after he had died. John wrote for the Guardian and spent the rest of his time walking across the world. I have his fascinating accounts of his walks. On one occasion, he told me a most interesting story about the great German ornithologist and amateur musician, Ludwig Koch. Being Jewish, Koch had escaped from Switzerland in the late 1930s, where he was working on a radio programme, having been advised to do so by the director of the programme. It’s interesting to note that Herrmann Göring was an admirer of the young man’s work.
John Hillaby had been sent to interview Koch for the paper on the occasion of the ornithologist’s 90th birthday in 1971. After the interview was over, one incident he recounted (when he was 17 years old) concerned his discovery of Wagner’s original concept for the rhythm and music for The Ride of the Valkyries. It involved the rather awkward motion of swans taking off and landing on the Wannsee, southwest of Berlin. Importantly, Cosima Wagner also featured in the story. However, the world is not yet ready for that particular detail.
Talking of wildlife, and going from Berlin to Norfolk, I am perhaps among the few people left who have, first-hand, so not entirely relevantly, seen a coypu. It was in the late 1950s. It seemed huge. Probably because, compared to any other rodent, it was.
Nearly all that I have recounted has come to me at least second-hand, if not third-hand. I was once reliably informed by Anthony Tunstall that, in his opinion, I had never had an original idea in my life, and I concur with that. But if we are lucky enough to have known those people that have had an original thought, we are still luckier than most.
