Through the Rear Window

THROUGH THE REAR WINDOW MEMOIRS OF AN AMATEUR MUSICIAN

THEO WYATT

© Theo Wyatt

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Preface Here was I approaching 90, very grateful to Aneurin Bevan and the NHS that I was still alive, and very conscious of my good fortune in still having a working memory and just enough zest and energy for a reduced level of meaningful and useful activity. But the view of the road ahead was completely dark. I knew for certain that it would soon run out, and I strongly suspected that if it were lit I should not like what I saw.

Then I had my birthday. Kitty and I were now so deaf that conversation was only possible one-to-one, so instead of a party we let it be known among the organisations in which we had been active that we would be At Home over the nearest weekend and that any old friends who could drop in for a brief exchange of reminiscences would be welcome. One hundred and eleven turned up. Suddenly the view through the rear window was brilliantly illuminated, and I realised how rich in friendship and incident the past had been and what pleasure there was for me personally in revisiting the past.

I had begun this memoir five years earlier for my daughters but the project ground to a halt when I reached the end of my school-days. Now I restarted it, but this time writing for myself, for the sheer exhilaration of unearthing what had lain hidden for years. If anyone enjoys reading it, I shall be pleased, but if not I shall have been sufficiently rewarded by the pleasure of fossicking in the (almost) worked-out mine of my life and bringing these buried nuggets to the surface.

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Chapter 1 Schooldays Infancy at 117 Howards Grove I was born on 29th November 1920 in Nurse Bucket's Nursing Home in Foundry Lane, Shirley, Southampton.

My mother's opinion of Nurse Bucket's services was very uncomplimentary; but that was before the days of a National Health Service and if you were married to a postman on a wage of just £3 a week you could not afford high quality midwifery.

My parents were living in “two rooms” in Heysham Road. That expression has now disappeared but was then in standard use to describe accommodation one step up from a bed-sitter i.e. the top floor of a two-bed semi.

They then moved to a rented house at 117 Howards Grove, Shirley, where I spent the first ten years of my life.

My father with his two brothers had enlisted in the 9th Hants Signals Regiment and had spent the war safely in India. He had been demobbed late in 1919 and married his sweetheart at the earliest opportunity in January 1920. He had been a telegraphist at the Post Office in Hythe on the shores of Southampton Water; she had been similarly employed at Niton in the Isle of Wight. Their courtship, according to my mother, had been carried on, presumably in Morse Code, using their employer's electricity.

The house in Howards Grove was semi-detached, two up and two down. The door opened on to a very steep staircase with my parents' bedroom on the west and mine and my sister Evie's on the east. The “coalhole” was under the staircase. The room to the right of the front door was the front room with a heavy, dark, horsehairstuffed three-piece suite, a what-not, and a glass-fronted china cabinet. The room was used about twice a year. It never occurred to me then what a criminal waste of space this was in so cramped a dwelling, but the fact was that in winter we could not possibly have afforded the coal for more than one fire in the house.

The living room was on the left with a coal-fired range, and leading off that was the lean-to kitchen with a coalfired copper, a gas stove, a sink, a larder in one corner, and in the opposite corner the lavatory entered through a door in the back yard.

There was no bathroom; we washed in the kitchen sink and bathed in a tin bath in front of the fire in the range.

There was no electricity; there was gas lighting in the three downstairs rooms with a proper incandescent mantle and a globe. Upstairs was a simple gas jet on the wall but it was never used; we went to bed with a candle. We all used chamberpots at night. Evie’s small teddy bear landed in it during some particularly boisterous game and had to be dried off furtively on the bedclothes. He was thereafter always known as Stinky Ted, but was perhaps cuddled with even more affection.

Among just a few pre-school memories are those of sitting with my sister on my father's knee in front of the fire while he made up stories several nights running at our earnest insistence about Two-Spots the cow and her two minders called Flandel Waddle and Flandel Day. I still wonder about where my father got those outlandish names from, and why I, after more than 85 years, still remember them so clearly.

Another vivid memory from this period is of my father writing simple addition sums for me in his old army book ruled with quarter inch squares, and of my pestering him for more. I also learned to read at this stage but I have no recollection of being taught or by whom.

Elementary school When I was five I started at Bellemoor Road Elementary School, escorted initially by older children from the road. In the first year we had to write on slates with slate pencils. The sound of slate on slate and the pervasive smell of Plasticene are difficult to forget.

I must have had friends but I cannot recall any names or faces. One boy who had no friends at all was “Stinker” Stone from a problem family at the lower and poorer end of Howards Grove whose underwear was washed at most twice a year and the sleeves of whose jacket were permanently glossy with a thick rendering of snot.

What went on in the classroom has left hardly a trace. The cane, applied to the palm of the hand in front of the class was in regular use. I received it only once for an offence of which I never understood the significance.

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Playground life was altogether more memorable. The boys' toilets had a black-painted wall with no decency screens, and this positively encouraged competition to see who could project his stream furthest up the wall.

The excitement wore off when one tall gangling lad proved to have double the range of any of the rest of us.

For more serious evacuation there was a long wooden bench with door-less partitions and holes over an open channel down which at regular intervals a tsunami of water would be released from a cistern.

My father smoked very rarely (he took snuff instead) and when he did buy cigarettes they were W.D & H.O. Wills' Woodbines which did not have cigarette cards. Since cigarette cards were the main currency among boys and the basis of many playground games I was at a disadvantage. But I came into my own in the conker season because my grandfather was gardener at Hollybank, a big house which had a drive lined with horse chestnuts. I would return after a weekend there with pockets full of these status symbols.

One exciting game was a sort of ring-a-ring-o'-roses round a manhole cover. The objective was to pull someone else on to the cover. If their feet touched it they were out. I always wore boots repaired and liberally armoured by my father with Blakeys – a kind of hobnail. Very good for sliding on the playground's tarmac; not so good for resisting traction. Once, I was the first one out but it was my face and not my feet that touched the manhole cover. I was escorted home covered in blood and until very recently had a large chip out of one of my rather prominent front teeth as a memento. After the war, when I lived briefly in East Sheen, the local dentist found my lack of dental symmetry so distressing that he wanted to cut them down level, but I declined. Now old age has done the job for free. The loss of almost all my molars has forced my incisors to take on a much greater share of mastication than they were designed for and they have ground themselves down to be almost level.

The street Out of school the street was the playground. There were no cars. When my Uncle Erle drove up in a smart sports car on a rare – indeed his only visit - to his poor sister, the whole street turned out to stare. Uncle Erle, by the way, was the only entrepreneur in the family. He was into estate agency and briefly into film production.

He was christened Erle Osborne Smith but found that the judicious insertion of a hyphen between the Osborne and the Smith improved his business prospects.

The only visiting tradesman that I can recall was the milkman who pushed a handcart with a large galvanised conical churn from which he released milk into measures which he then poured into the jug we brought from the door. In the summer there were visits from the man on the Walls “Stop Me and Buy One” blue tricycle who sold a triangular water ice, “Snofrute”, in a cardboard sleeve for one penny or a block of proper ice-cream for tuppence. If you were lucky he might let you have a play with a little chunk of the solid carbon dioxide from the bottom of his tricycle which kept his wares frozen.

The lamplighter came in the evening on a bicycle with a long rod with a hook at the end to switch on the gas street light; and when the weather was very hot and dry a horse-drawn water cart with a sprinkler pipe at the back would come down the street and produce that unique smell of water on long-dried dust.

Apart from these visitors the street was mine. I used it for whipping my top. There were two types of whipping top. One was a straight cylinder about 1½” in diameter tapered steeply at the bottom to the metal stud on which it spun. I could never get used to those. The other had a narrower ¾” stem and a 2” top and I could keep one of these spinning indefinitely with a length of string on the end of a stick. The problem with ordinary string was that it rapidly unwound in use and if you knotted the end to prevent unwinding it would not work at all. I discovered that the ideal material was a woven bootlace but my ceaseless pleas to my mother to buy a pair of bootlaces for the purpose were all turned down.

My other street toy was a large iron hoop about 3 ft. in diameter found in the abandoned gravel pit at the top of Howards Grove which local residents used for fly tipping. I was bowling this along once when a man came up behind me on a bicycle. I stepped aside to let him pass but the hoop ran on and as it slowed it veered sideways and the front wheel of the bicycle ran neatly into it bringing the bicycle to a sudden halt and the rider to the ground. I ran indoors to escape his torrent of abuse.

Bicycles That gravel pit made a wonderful adventure playground. In the puddles under sheets of corrugated iron were newts which we took home in jam jars. But it was the bits of discarded bicycle that gripped my imagination and perhaps fostered my life-long propensity for taking things apart and putting them together again. I gathered

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and took home to the back yard most of the necessary elements of a bike. It had no tyres and no saddle and could never have been taken on the road, but it did have a chain and pedals and a free wheel sprocket and I got it to the point where we could test whether the pedals would turn the back wheel. At that point I discovered that I had screwed the free wheel on back to front so that the machine could only be ridden backwards. My father must have watched my efforts and concluded that they were evidence of a yearning for a bicycle of my own. Shortly afterwards he brought home a second-hand bike he had bought for 10 shillings.

It had a full-sized frame and was really too large for me, being then only 10. This was forcibly brought home to me when my mother sent me to buy three-quarters of a pound of liver from the butcher's shop in Church Street. I put the liver in the pocket of my new raincoat, which was also rather too large for me, having been purchased in the knowledge that it would be several years before a replacement could be afforded. I vaulted confidently into the saddle, but the pocket with the liver found its way on to the saddle before I reached it and being now perched too high to turn the pedals I fell ignominiously into the road.

Brother Ian When I was eight years old I got a baby brother. I think his arrival was unplanned because my mother had been told after a D&C operation some years earlier that she was unlikely to have any further children. I have absolutely no recollection of being forewarned of his arrival; I would almost certainly have been sent away to my grandparents over the period of my mother's confinement; and I have only one clear mental picture from the whole of his childhood, which is of seeing him in his cot at a few weeks old.

Because of the age gap between us he was no use to me as a playmate; and for the same reason he was not a competitor, so we never needed to quarrel. But I still find it difficult to understand how the sharing of the same house and the same meal table for ten years could have left practically nothing in my memory. I do however remember our parting. He had won a place at King Edward VI School, starting as I left. When war was declared the school was hurriedly evacuated to Poole in Dorset to share the accommodation of Poole Grammar School, and I remember standing on the platform at Southampton waving goodbye as the special evacuation train pulled out.

Blighmont Crescent, Millbrook At about this time there was an improvement in the family's finances. My father became a van driver at a slightly higher wage and received a windfall of several hundred pounds. His late release from the army in 1919 was because his regiment had been sent immediately after the war to Russia as part of an expeditionary force to support the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. The operation was kept very quiet and the expeditionary force never saw action, and so far as I could learn from my father's accounts did no more than make its slow way through the Russian winter along the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok from where it was shipped back to England. My father had chilling tales to tell of the journey in unheated cattle wagons and of the use of axes to slice frozen bread. Mementoes that he brought back included a chunk of mammoth tusk carved to look like a log of wood with a tiny ivory axe embedded in it and a massive pebble of rock crystal from the Ural mountains. A campaign to get compensation for the soldiers whose service had thus been extended ran for 10 years before it made any impact on the government, but around 1930 my father did receive a gratuity of several hundred pounds.

This enabled him to take out a mortgage on 33 Blighmont Crescent, Millbrook, a distinct step up from Howards Grove, with three bedrooms, electric light, a bathroom and a garden.

It also enabled my parents to buy with interest-only mortgages two local properties from which the rent, they hoped, would provide a comfortable addition to my father's van driver's wage. The houses were in fact a constant worry and overall a drain on the family income because the Rent Acts introduced at that time controlled the rents at a level which made no allowance for the inflation in the cost of repairs and gave tenants almost complete security of tenure. And then there were tenants who disappeared leaving not only massive arrears but also infestations of bed bugs which necessitated the fumigation of the whole house with sulphur candles.

King Edward VI Grammar School When I was 10 I was put in by my teachers for The Scholarship. This was before the days of the 11 plus. Only

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a selected few were submitted to this examination which was the only way of getting a free place at a grammar school and I think only two from Bellemoor Road School got a place that year.

My parents had promised me a new bicycle if I got a scholarship and I became the owner of a brand new Hercules costing all of £3. For the next eight years it took me to and from school twice a day in term time and was in use almost every day in the holidays.

King Edward VI Grammar School, founded in 1553, was very proud of its history and traditions. Every year there was a Founders' Day in St Mary's church, the main church in downtown Southampton, with the masters all lining up in the choir with their academic hoods and mortarboards to hear the recitation of a list of past benefactions and a singing of the school hymn O God our Help in Ages Past written by our most distinguished old boy, Isaac Watts.

It was a public school, a member of the Headmasters' Conference and it had fee-paying pupils but I was completely unaware of any differentiation between them and the “scholarship boys”. I remember very little about the other pupils and I made no life-long friendships. One contemporary I do remember was Denis Nineham. He was a brilliant classicist whereas I took French and German so our paths seldom crossed. He always seemed destined for the Church and did in fact become a prominent canon in the Church of England and his contemptuous demolition in the school debating society of my rather naïve Baptist religion had a lasting effect on me.

I remember the masters more vividly. There was scruffy, bearded “Tinker” Slade who taught maths and went round with pockets loaded with pliers and screwdrivers and could fix any mechanical problem. There was “Bony” Lock who taught history in a dry as dust fashion and who fascinated me by the enormous amount of free space between his stiff collar and his neck and by his unwillingness either to translate the titles of the foreign organisations he described or to attempt their correct pronunciation. I remember particularly his “Dreikönigsbündnis”. There was “Woggles” Jardine who taught classics, of whom everyone except Denis Nineham was afraid because of his foul temper and swearing. He was said to be a victim of shell-shock from the Great War and after I left school he committed a particularly gruesome suicide. There was Mr Fassnidge – no nickname – who taught French and Spanish and was an amateur entomologist to whom we took any strange insect we found. And there was Mr Rowntree who had a sense of humour. He included in a history test dictated orally the question “How many Heinz varieties are there?” which floored me completely because I had never heard the name Heinz pronounced any way other than “Hines”; and he once wrote simply on my end of term report “Maintains a dignified silence”.

I was a willing and competent but not a brilliant scholar but the music master revealed, to my surprise, that I had a good treble voice and an aptitude for music. I guess I first came to his notice when I entered the school annual music competition singing Purcell's Fairest Isle and won first place. The next year I entered again. The set piece this time was Vaughan Williams' Linden Lea with words by the Dorset dialect poet William Barnes.

The outside adjudicator was the distinguished composer Dr. Armstrong Gibbs and I particularly remember his congratulating me on my “agricultural accent”. I fear he did not realise it was not assumed but was the only accent I had.

The music master was Herbert Deavin, FRCO, ARCM, a chain smoker about 5 ft. tall who quickly recruited me into his choir at All Saints, a rather splendid church in downtown Southampton. The choir regularly carried off the prizes at the Bournemouth music festival.

It was in that choir that I received my basic musical training since there was absolutely no music in the school's regular curriculum. And since all the other choristers were recruited from elementary schools in that area, which was one of the poorest and roughest in the town, I learned a few other facts of life that I might not have acquired at King Edward's.

When my voice broke it was suggested that I should learn an instrument. The school happened to possess an old cello which it would lend to me and had just recruited a cello teacher. Mr Claxton had recently retired from employment on some of the liners that plied out of Southampton on which passengers were regaled at meal times with Palm Court music from a piano trio. It was apparent, even to one as innocent as me, that he had been much influenced by the duty-free liquor available on such vessels. After just one term and a half of weekly lessons he announced sadly that he was retiring; his cello had been smashed when a motor cyclist ran into him on his way home. I always suspected that he ran into the motor cyclist.

He was not replaced and from that point on I was self-taught. I suppose that I must have been quite keen, and because I was the only cellist in the school I had quite a lot of opportunity to take part in the school's musical events. The apogee of my career was in the school concert in my last year when with Herbert Deavin and Mr

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Mouncher, the leader of the local symphony orchestra, I played the slow movement of Mendelssohn's D minor piano trio.

It was just at that time, around 1936, that there came to the school a new French master, Robin Lawson, who had learned the recorder from Carl Dolmetsch and who had a small stock of the cheap recorders being made in Germany. He offered to lend one to anyone who wanted to learn. So I and a few others took up the recorder and we became a successful little group, playing at local functions; and, in my last term at school in 1939, travelling up to London to play to the newly-formed Society of Recorder Players (SRP).

There seems to have been in the 1930s a fashion for pushing grammar school pupils through the exam system as early as possible. I took what was then called the School Certificate at 14 and the Higher School Certificate at 16. It was at this point that decisions had to be taken about a career. My parents had always been clear that even if, on the basis of my HSC results, I were awarded a State Scholarship which would pay my university fees, they could not contemplate the additional expense of keeping me for three years at university. So it was decided that I should try for the Executive Civil Service. But to enter the open competition for that you had to be aged 18. So I sat the HSC exam in 1937 and again in 1938, and spent most of the next 12 months swotting up Latin under “Woggles” Jardine for the third of the optional subjects (after French and German) for the Civil Service exam. English, Arithmetic and General Knowledge were the compulsory subjects.

Berrywood Baptist Chapel It seems strange, looking back on it now, how little connection there was between school and home life. Home life centred round the local Baptist chapel. At Howards Grove we never went to church. Our parents tried hard to persuade my sister and me to go to Sunday school, primarily, I guess, to allow them a quiet Sunday afternoon, but they seldom succeeded. At Blighmont Crescent my parents quickly found their way to the little Baptist chapel at the bottom of the road. Shortly after we arrived it acquired its first full-time resident minister, a charismatic Orcadian haemophiliac named James Thompson with a withered arm caused by haemorrhage following a simple sporting injury. He became a family friend and the whole family were drawn into chapel activities. We attended all the Sunday services in our Sunday best; sang the 1200 Sacred Songs and Solos of Moody and Sankey with great gusto (and in parts); joined the Band of Hope and the Christian Endeavour; and my mother became secretary of the White Ribbon League – the National British Women's Total Abstinence Union. I think my sister and I may even have taken a Sunday School class. It was our equivalent of a club – very friendly and supportive.

I had and still have no problems with the moral teaching. I can go along with most of the Sermon on the Mount. But the personal, revelatory aspects of Baptist theology never got through to me. I never came anywhere near experiencing the “road to Damascus” conversion that I was told would signify salvation; I felt no need of being saved from anything, and the symbolism of baptism by total immersion, to which the rest of my family submitted, struck me as ludicrous. Nevertheless, it took me a long time to realise how unreal and naïve that whole episode had been.

I think James Thompson may have seen in me a potential recruit to the ministry. He was certainly very good to me and when I was 16 gave me the holiday experience of a lifetime by taking me with him to stay for a month with his parents in their croft on the island of Westray in Orkney. The memories of that holiday are still, after more than 70 years, extraordinarily vivid. We spent a week going up, by coach from Southampton to London and overnight from London to Glasgow where we visited his sisters. I slept for 17 hours on arrival. Then by train to Aberdeen and ferry to Kirkwall and Westray.

The Baptist church in Westray was lit by paraffin Tilly lamps which needed pumping up before they could be lit and hissed loudly throughout the service. The organist played and the choir sang from hymn books in tonic sol fa. I had a decent bass singing voice in those days which I used enthusiastically in the hymns and was a source of great wonder to the family. I walked the mile back to the croft with the father and an elderly neighbour and understood not a single word of their conversation. We slept, James and I sharing, in open cupboards built into the wall. We drank chicken soup made by boiling a whole chicken in a cauldron on the range. We ate what sounded like “bare bunnos”, being a sort of scone made of barley flour. We went fishing in the evening for what they called a “coeth”, a fish about the size of a herring which came to the surface in the evening to feed in shoals. The old father rowed; James and I and a neighbour fished each with a six foot broomstick with six feet of line and three hooks with white feathers attached. In an hour and a half we caught 22 score and ten, often pulling them in three at a time. That is 150 fish each, not far short of two a minute.

Quite exciting. The fish were split and dried for consumption in the winter. We went out to lift the lobster pots.

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They never ate the lobsters; they tied their pincers and left them in an underwater cage until they had enough to fill a crate for sending to Billingsgate. They caught as many crabs as lobsters, which they always threw back. We occasionally had crab at home in Southampton and regarded it as a luxury. I had to plead with my hosts to cook one specially for me.

The Band of Hope membership had some far-reaching consequences. There were annual competitions in which, because I was a grammar school boy, used to writing essays, I always won a prize. In 1939 I learned that because I had won a prize in three consecutive years I had been awarded the special prize of a week's attendance at a Temperance Summer School at Selly Oak College in Birmingham. The temperance indoctrination passed over my head, but the rest of the week was an enjoyable holiday. We played tennis in the afternoon and in the evenings entertained each other round the piano in the common room. I produced my one party piece, the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata which I had learned by heart. And having found an accompanist from among the other students and located a collection of Victorian ballads in the library I sang songs like Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep. Before we dispersed I exchanged addresses with one or two fellow students with whom I had become friendly. One was Betty Talbot, a girl of quite remarkable plainness, who will reappear in the story shortly.

In the spring of 1939 I had sat the open competitive examination for entry to the Executive Class of the Civil Service. One hundred places were on offer and there were 3000 applicants. The exam lasted for best part of a week and was held in Imperial College, South Kensington. My parents had a tenuous connection with a distant relative in Chiswick who was persuaded to put me up. In the evening before the first exam and again on the following morning I had a rather nasty nose-bleed but managed to leave in good time to take the 27B bus I was told I needed to get to the Albert Hall. I waited half an hour for a 27B until I plucked up the courage to accost a passer-by who told me the 27B only ran on Sunday. By the time the next 27 got me to the Albert Hall it was 10.25 and the exam started 400 yards away at 10.30. I ran, desperately holding my nose to prevent another bleed and scraped in as the doors closed. The first paper was Arithmetic which I had reckoned was my strong subject. When the exam results were published I discovered I had scored 35%. It almost cost me my career; only the 90+s I got for French, German and Latin saved the day.

Holidays When my sister and I were still at elementary school our family summer holidays consisted of a daily train ride on a “Runabout� ticket to any of the resorts within a distance of about 30 miles to the east of Southampton.

That covered Southsea, Hayling Island, Bognor and Littlehampton. Our favourite was Bognor where an additional attraction was a dairy opposite the station where we were always treated to a glass of cold milk and a chocolate biscuit.

Once I had a bicycle much of the summer holidays was spent with relatives living within cycling distance along the shores of Southampton Water at Hythe, Hardley and Fawley, where lived my favourite cousins, the Somes children Phil, Jean and Theo. They had moved to Fawley around 1936 when Uncle Joe retired. He had been a pawnbroker with a shop at 299 Fulham Road and a house in Banstead. I had in fact spent a few days at Banstead not long before they moved south.

I remember with complete clarity a visit to the pawnshop. Britain had devalued in 1931 and abandoned the currency's link to the price of gold. There followed a frenzied melting down of gold sovereigns, rings and watch-cases which had provided valuable business for jewellers and pawnbrokers, and uncle Joe had a box full of discarded watch movements through which cousin Theo and I were allowed to rummage. I retrieved a large one, still in working order, of the sort which you nowadays see drooled over by the experts on the Antiques Road Show, incorporating a fusee. That device, like a tiny spiral staircase with an incredibly delicate bicycle chain wound round it filled me with wonder, and even after I discovered its humble purpose the ingenuity of its inventor and the skill of the craftsman who made it continued to fascinate me. I was so filled with joy and pride in the possession of such a beautiful machine that back at Banstead, with the loan of cousin Theo's treadle fretsaw machine I made a display stand in the shape of a sentry box in which it hung for several years on the mantelpiece of my bedroom at Millbrook.

Hythe The account of my childhood would not be complete without a reference to the time I spent with my grandparents at Hythe. When my mother was in hospital I stayed with them for several weeks attending the

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local village school and in my teens I spent a substantial part of my summer holidays there. Grandfather was a gardener who tended the gardens and acted as caretaker of unoccupied mansions in the area, first at Dibden Lodge where I remember at the age of 7 or 8 being taken round the empty house and shown the display cases full of stuffed birds. At that time my grandparents lived in an old wooden clapboard house on the Dibden Lodge estate called “The Laurels”. It had piped water but no mains drainage, gas or electricity. Dirty water from the kitchen sink ran along a little trench across the back yard until it soaked into the garden near the chicken run.

There was a privy, a wooden sentry box over a pit in the ground which grandfather had to dig out from time to time. There were the usual squares of newspaper on a nail and on the opposite wall a print, still vividly remembered, of a long-haired Cavalier boy standing on a stool before a table at which sat Roundhead soldiers asking “When did you last see your father?”. I never discovered what happened to the contents of the bedroom chamber pots but I guess they just disappeared into the hedge. There was a chicken house and a shed containing the metal trunk in which Grandma kept the bran, sharps and middlings which she made into a mash with boiled kitchen scraps to feed the birds. If the whole family came to visit there would be chicken for lunch and I was fascinated to watch the practised way in which Grandfather wrung their necks and the speed with which Grandma plucked them.

In the early 1930s they had presumably saved enough to build a little bungalow called “Hillside” in Mullins Lane. It had three rooms in line with two bedrooms opening off a central sitting room and a kitchen at the back.

Piped water and gas but no electricity and no mains drainage. But in place of the privy an Elsan at the end of a wooden lean-to tool shed. Lighting was still by big brass paraffin lamp with a long conical incandescent mantle, a wick that needed daily trimming and a long glass chimney. Aunt Gladys and I sat around it playing dominoes. There was a coal fire and in front of it a rag rug made by pulling strips of discarded textile through a length of hessian sacking.

Grandfather by then worked as gardener at Hollybank which was now owned by the Hythe Pier Company who operated the Southampton Ferry and who developed the extensive grounds into a golf course. In a flat over the old stables lived Mr Whitemore, the local Relieving Officer who was in charge of the rudimentary social security provisions then available under the Poor Laws. His son John became my holiday companion and we sallied forth together on our bicycles to water-filled gravel pits beside the Beaulieu road where we caught newts. Then we discovered that in the much larger pond beside the Beaulieu crossroads were great crested newts, spectacular orange and black creatures now protected by law. We took them back to Hillside where grandmother greeted with obvious lack of enthusiasm the arrival of “more of them nudes”. When term started I sold them for 2 pence each to the local pet-shop owner who put them into a large bowl of tadpoles (for sale at 2 pence per dozen), obviously unaware that tadpoles are the staple diet of newts.

John earned his pocket money by retrieving lost golf balls from the wooded areas beside the fairways and selling them at the clubhouse. He refused my entreaties to be allowed to accompany him, obviously not wanting to share his main source of income. He need not have worried, because when at last he did take me with him I experienced the most frustrating afternoon of my life. He found 12 balls and I found only one despite trying my very hardest. It was a perfect illustration of the fact that some very simple skills like spotting golf balls in undergrowth can be greatly improved by practice.

Grandfather He was a man of very few words and as a teenager I lacked any ability to draw him out, but I would have loved to find out more of his history. I did not discover until long after his death that he was illegitimate. At the age of about four I remember being taken to see a very old lady called Grandma Brown who was in fact my greatgrandmother but never referred to as such. We now know that she brought up Grandfather on her own and subsequently married Mr Brown. He had two daughters from a previous marriage who would have been my step-great aunts.

Grandfather wore a very prominent truss and had a long-standing and disfiguring disease of the eyelids which caused them to curl back and become inflamed. Once a year at family Christmas gatherings he took out his concertina and played dance tunes with, it seemed to me, considerable skill.

He had certain very fixed tastes. Whenever I went on my own to Hythe on the ferry I had to buy for him a halfpound of chitterlings (he called them chidlings) in the butcher's shop in Below Bar, and an ounce of his favourite pipe tobacco which was Ogden's Juggler Shag. I particularly remember Sunday morning breakfasts at which Grandfather alone always had a piece of steak accompanied by a glass of Guinness of which the head always stuck to his heavy moustache and had to be sucked off with his lower lip. I had boiled egg along with Grandma and Aunt Gladys before going off to morning service at Hythe church, to which grandfather

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never accompanied us. They had no radio so Grandfather relied for news on the Daily Express and if he misread a name it stayed misread. I remember his saying several times “I don't like the look o' this 'ere 'Ilter”.

Fawley and Hardley In my later teens I was a frequent visitor on my bicycle to these two villages on the Western shore of Southampton Water. In Fawley Cottage, an old vicarage, lived the Somes family. I got on very well with my three cousins. We attempted to play music on the variety of forfeited pledges Uncle Joe had brought back from the pawn shop. They included an old high-pitch clarinet, a one-string phono-fiddle, an accordion and a 19th. century German cello which had been in a house fire. The heat had produced two massive cracks in the belly and had caused the varnish to melt and run together leaving it covered with a rash of red pustules.

When Joe died I bought it for £150 from Aunt Eve for its sentimental value as the first cello I had ever played, had the cracks repaired and hung it on the wall. I have recently had it professionally restored and sold it for £3,000.

Theo and I set snares for rabbits in their large garden and when a nest of hornets was discovered in the roof above the attic bedroom spent an exciting afternoon there catching them in a butterfly net as they left the nest and killing them in a jar with crushed laurel leaves.

Aunt Lil, my mother's other sister, had married fairly late in life John Pusey, a widowed woodman much older than herself and lived in his tiny fairytale thatched cottage at Hardley with one living room, a very narrow leanto wooden kitchen with a paraffin stove, and an even narrower corkscrew stairway to two small bedrooms above. There was an unused well in the garden with dead slugs floating in the water and a supply for the house was obtained from a spring in the hedge at the bottom of a dip in the road about 100 yards from the cottage. At the bottom of the garden were two brick pigsties with a spider-infested cubicle built into the corner with a seat over a bucket which was the toilet.

John had a horse and cart for his coppicing work which he kept at the farm next door belonging to his sister-inlaw. Returning home about two years after his marriage he fell from the cart and broke his neck. His lonely widow was thereafter a frequent visitor to Millbrook where her pent-up torrents of conversation tested my mother's patience.

We children however had a marvellous time at the cottage despite the primitive facilities, blackberrying in the hedges, building dams in the little stream that ran through the field behind the cottage, and on one occasion bringing home in triumph a washing-up bowl full of the brilliant orange and black caterpillars of the Burnet Moth which had been feeding in thousands on the ragwort which covered the field. We could not understand the obvious lack of enthusiasm from the adults.

Aunt Lil Wiry, sharp featured, eccentric, talkative, and dogged, she was a frequent visitor on her bicycle to Blighmont Crescent where her knock on the back door and her cry of “Anyone at home?” caused my mother's heart to sink. She owned three modern thatched cottages on the main road to Fawley and lived on the rents, and mother had to listen to interminable accounts of the trials of a landlord's life. Those trials were compounded a hundredfold when she decided to sell one of them by the fact that her late husband who had been responsible for fencing the vacant plots had got his measurements wrong so that what should have been rectangular was trapezoid and each tenant unwittingly cultivated a garden of which a sizeable triangle actually belonged to his neighbour.

Aunt Lil had an obsessive belief in the virtues of the antiseptic Milton and we children were obliged to sniff the noxious fluid into our nostrils to prevent winter colds. Her obsession intensified when one of her two cats got its paw caught for several days in a rabbit snare and returned home with the paw in a gangrenous condition.

Aunt Lil firmly believed that she had saved the animal's life by constant application of Milton.

Her quasi religious faith in self-medication was balanced by ignorance and fear of orthodox medicine. When her dentist, who happened to be one of her tenants, declared that her lower front teeth must be removed she persuaded him to come to Blighmont Crescent and extract them without anaesthetic in our living room. She died of what I guess was uterine cancer but when her symptoms drove her at last to hospital she refused to allow an internal examination. The cancer went undiagnosed and untreated and she endured a prolonged and miserable decline, much of it spent on a bed in our front room.

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Chapter 2 The War Years Branston and Moira The Talbot family On September 3rd 1939 Britain declared war on Germany. At about that date I received a telegram from the War Office in London telling me to report on 13 September to the Store Audit Office, Ordnance Depot, Branston, Derbyshire. Branston was not on any of my maps, so off to the Post Office, who identified three Branstons for me, none of them in Derbyshire. The most likely candidate seemed to be Branston on the outskirts of Burton on Trent in Staffordshire. I immediately sent a telegram to the War Office saying “Please confirm Branston, Burton on Trent, Staffordshire.” to which I got an affirmative answer three weeks after I started work there. Fearing the War Office might be more preoccupied at that time with matters other than my posting I had written at the same time to Betty Talbot whose address was “Moira, Burton on Trent”, asking if she knew of an Ordnance Depot at Branston; and incidentally if she could give me any information about local digs. She replied immediately saying there was a big place at Branston known locally as the Jam Factory which she thought might be it; and that until I found digs I could stay with her family at Moira.

I stayed with the Talbot family at 100 Stone Row, Moira, for the whole of my two years at Branston. There was Betty, who I soon realised must be illegitimate and her mother, Gertie, on whose face the unfairness of life was deeply incised. She appeared to do absolutely all the housework, and her final misfortune was to be constantly accompanied by a putrid smell which was never referred to but which I subsequently came to recognise as characteristic of leg ulcers infected with pseudomonas. The other members of the family were Gertie's sister, Annie, who was a keen Jehovah's Witness; and her brother, Walter, a little wizened man with a constant cough who worked as a core-maker in the local foundry and whose lungs had obviously been ruined by the inhalation of the dust from foundry sand.

In all the time I was there I never met or heard reference to any other family, but my daughter Cathy's online exploration of the 1911 Census has revealed that these three siblings were the remnants of a family of 15 Talbot children born in that house of whom 13 survived infancy.

The Talbots treated me with incredible kindness. I was ashamed then and am still ashamed now at the memory of how they spoiled me by feeding me with luxuries like tinned salmon which I knew must have used up the rationing points of the whole family. Betty obviously saw me as the Prince Charming who had miraculously arrived from nowhere to save her from the life of spinsterhood to which her looks were likely to condemn her. Her mother perhaps saw me in the same role. I was careful to do nothing to foster this illusion but was acutely conscious that ordinary civility could easily be misinterpreted by someone desperate to believe. I had absolutely no idea of how to escape. After two years I was rescued by call-up to the Army, and, to my shame, lost touch with the family immediately, fearing that friendliness springing from gratitude might be misconstrued. I drew some solace from the thought that the rather nice Murphy radio and record player I had bought were still there as a keepsake.

Store Audit Office, Branston The situation at work was equally surreal. I found myself at 18 in charge of the auditing of the Imprest Account, i.e. the wages and travelling expenses of this clothing depot with some 2000 employees. The accounts were prepared by a snooty chartered accountant in lieutenant's uniform and I had got 35% in the arithmetic exam. I was in charge of a staff consisting of two ATS girls of about my age, two Clerical Officers younger than me, four middle-aged Temporary Assistants and two old S class clerks, Mr Cook and Mr Brant, who had entered the Civil Service through the special exams held to provide clerical jobs after the First War for ex-service men.

The Store Auditor, Mr Stent, seemed very grand in a large room shared with his chain-smoking mistress, Miss Inman, whose typing skills were almost non-existent and who went off sick with nicotine poisoning during my stay. He was actually a fairly lowly Higher Executive Officer. He left me very much to my own devices. I was sent to learn the business of imprest auditing to the Ordnance Depot at Didcot, for three months. No preparations whatever were made for my stay. I arrived by train with a heavy suitcase, tried to get a bed at several hotels without success and was eventually found a B&B late at night by the police. I spent the entire three months helping to reduce the huge backlog of travelling claims – a subject I never subsequently had to deal with – and returned to Branston as ignorant of my real job as when I left.

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I made a few friends of my own age among my colleagues. There was Harry Graves from the stock audit people in the next room. We used to go rowing on the Trent with Bridget Flaherty, an ATS from my staff whom he subsequently married. There was “Hop” Atkins, one of my Clerical Officers, who got his nickname from the fact that, exceptionally for a CO, he ran a car, with those registration letters. He could afford to do so only because he lived free at home in Derby with his parents. There was an older Temporary Assistant, Mr Davies, who played the organ at a church in Nottingham; I shared most lunch hours with him talking of music. And there was the elderly and cultured Mr Cunningham who took a fatherly interest in me and was particularly supportive when I went off into the Army.

In the winter months I mostly travelled the eight miles from Moira to Burton by train, sitting five a side in a hermetically sealed compartment with nine smoking miners or brewery workers; but in the summer I would save money (and preserve my lungs) by cycling. So I saved up and bought the classiest bike in the catalogue a Sunbeam with three speed, hub brakes, hub dynamo and a chain-case oil-bath which you filled with oil and which kept your chain permanently lubricated, but covered you and the entire bike with dirty oil if you up-ended it to mend a puncture. It was superbly engineered and ludicrously heavy.

Filled with pride in this magnificent machine I set off on an August Bank Holiday Sunday to cycle to Buxton just under 50 miles away, where James Thompson had given me the address of an old friend from whom I was assured, he said, of a warm welcome. I picked up Hop Atkins in Derby on the way. We took a sandwich lunch, relying on the promised warm welcome for our next meal, discovered that hub brakes on a bicycle are very subject to fading and are practically useless on the long hills of the Peak District, and reached the old friend's house in late afternoon to find that he had had a stroke two days before and that all the teashops and cafes of Buxton were closed on a Sunday. The miserable return journey ended for me with the last 12 miles from Derby cycled in a thunderstorm and pitch darkness in which I discovered that although the hub dynamo produced a marvellous light, hardly any of it escaped onto the road through the obligatory blackout louvres on the lamp, and that cycling on unfamiliar country roads in the blackout was decidedly scary. The scariness was intensified when, in a village a few miles from Moira, my feeble headlamp revealed in the middle of the road, just in time for me to avoid running into it, the body of a man with blood coming from his ears. Fortunately the village pub was fairly close, and when I raised the alarm there a party came to carry the body inside. I never established whether it was alive or dead.

In mid 1940 I received my call-up papers. I registered as a conscientious objector citing my religious beliefs and Baptist background and declared my willingness to accept non-combatant duties in the Forces. I was summoned to a tribunal in Derby and, as I had feared, found that my employment by the War Office and in particular at an Ordnance Depot excited suspicion. I was closely questioned about the original meaning of the word “Ordnance” and no amount of protestation on my part that my Ordnance Depot handled nothing but clothing could convince them that I was in some way involved with armaments. I was refused registration.

This was just about the lowest point of my life. I had the option of an appeal but no reason to suppose that it would succeed. I was determined to refuse military service and faced the prospect of prosecution, imprisonment and inevitable dismissal from the Civil Service. By way of consolation on my way back to Moira I called into Horne Thompson, the music shop in Burton, and bought a new cello bow for 27/6. I sold it in 2010 for £500.

The Non-Combatant Corps Ilfracombe I appeared before an Appeal Tribunal in London and was waved through. I received orders to report to No.7 Company of the Non-Combatant Corps in Ilfracombe just before my 21st birthday and became for the next five years Private 97005769, ineligible for promotion in the NCC. Ineligible also for promotion in absentia in the Civil Service, but, unlike any of my fellow conscripts, eligible for Balance of Civil Pay which made up my army pay to the princely sum of £150 a year which I had received as a Junior Executive Officer. I arranged for it to be paid to my mother who carefully banked it. This had two benefits. The major one was that by the end of the war the sum amounted to several hundred pounds and formed the majority of the deposit with which my wife Kitty and I bought 8 Wilton Grove. The minor benefit gave me in some ways even more satisfaction. Pay parades were a regular feature of army life and involved queueing in alphabetical order. For Wyatt that was a tedious waste of time. Having endured this for a couple of years I discovered from an examination of King's Regulations that I could ask for it to he paid quarterly to a nominee. So I nominated my mother who added it to my bank account and kept me supplied with the small amounts of pocket money I needed.

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We were kitted out with uniforms including long woollen pants, gas mask, gas cape, cutlery, and metal plates and mugs. When it came to my turn they had run out of mugs so I got a steel pudding basin from which I drank my tea for the first six months. We slept in two-tier bunks in tiny top-floor rooms in a crummy old hotel, and for three weeks were marched about up and down the Capstone. It was here that Arthur Gay, a commercial artist, painted, as I sat on the top bunk, the portrait which hangs in the upstairs landing. Here also he painted at my request a very convincing portrait of my sister Evie from a tiny 2� photograph I carried in my wallet. At the end of the three weeks we were all posted to different units and I never saw him again. My daughter Cathy however recently brought me the welcome news that she had traced him on the internet, and that after the war he had achieved recognition as a portraitist.

Kings Cliffe I was sent to Kings Cliffe aerodrome, three miles west of Wansford on the A1. Our job was to dig trenches round the aerodrome for the cables that would power landing lights. We each had a pick and a shovel and were spaced out 30 yards apart and our day's work was to reach the next man. It was January in a particularly hard winter and the ground was frozen solid. The picks had not been sharpened for years, so that what should have been a point was a smooth hemisphere. We had absolutely no shelter, spending all day exposed to the wind on this treeless landscape. One of our number was appointed dummock man who gathered wood to make the fire on which he melted the buckets of dummock which was used to seal the joints of the pipes laid in our trenches. We then had to refill the trenches next day with the spoil at the side, which by that time was also frozen solid and had to be broken up again with a pick. The dummock man was also tea boy and built a large fire round which our gang of about 12 sat as closely as we could for our sandwich lunch. I was still having to drink my tea from a steel pudding basin and my sharpest memory is of the ice crystals which formed round the edge of the tea before I could finish it. The temperature on the aerodrome some nights fell to -20C. Back in the RAF camp where we were billeted the showers had frozen. We washed and shaved on benches in the open with warm water ladled from a coke-fired soyer stove. We wore our woollen vests and longjohns day and night. Heaven knows what we must have smelled like to any visitor whose nose had not been desensitised by living among us.

We lived in wooden huts with about 24 beds in two-tier bunks. Our bedding was four single blankets and a palliasse filled with straw. The straw provided a little cushioning but no insulation from the cold, so we interleaved the blankets to form a sleeping bag four blankets thick. The hut was heated with a single coke stove like a half-grown black pillar box, and coke was fed into it through the top from a tall conical scuttle which we had to keep filled from piles of coke stored in the open. The piles were, of course, covered with snow, some of which found its way into the scuttle and melted when stood next to the stove. So every feed of coke was preceded by a fair quantity of water which produced a volcanic plume of steam, ash and sulphurous gas which shot up to the roof and if you had let the fire burn too low, the water extinguished it completely.

Firstcomers into a hut always bagged bunks near to the stove but sometimes came to regret it.

We moved to similar trenching jobs at other aerodromes in the vicinity. The most unpleasant was Wittering.

The thaw had just set in. The top 3� of earth was soft but below that was still frozen and had to be picked apart, while all the time the snow on the surface continued to melt and send a steady stream of water down the side of the trench to soak our denims and battledress trousers and fill our gumboots.

Althorp and Thornhaugh Hall There was a welcome change of duties when we were sent to Althorp Park, home of the Spencer family and later in the news as the site of Princess Diana's grave. Our task was to remove some old latrines. Loading the demolished timbers into a lorry I managed to run a projecting nail right through a finger. I was put on light duties for a week. We were billeted at that time in a hayloft over the stables at Thornhaugh Hall, the stately home of the Brotherhood family who made their fortune from engineering works at Peterborough. The only light duty I was given was digging out a cesspit, which took only half a day. The rest of the time I was free to explore the extensive grounds.

Thrapston We were constantly on the move from one rough labouring job to another, living in makeshift, commandeered accommodation or, in summer, under canvas. In Thrapston, we were in the old Victorian workhouse.

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Thrapston was unique in discriminating against us on account of our non-combatant status. Almost every village we went to had a Forces canteen run by the YMCA, WVS or other welfare charities. Thrapston was the only one to refuse us entry. I suspect they may have been put up to it by a particularly spiteful Lt. May who was in charge of us. Normally we were in little detachments with an NCO in charge and officers seen mercifully about once a month, but here Lt. May was in residence in the workhouse. I suspect he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and had been put out to grass by his fellow officers.

I had been shopping in Peterborough one weekend and had returned with a 1” Ordnance Survey map of the area, freely on sale in the local bookshop. I also bought a packet of nice brass drawing pins with which I fastened it to the wall of our dormitory for the benefit of my fellows who, if they wanted a cup of tea and a slice of toast and jam in the evening, had to find their way to some other town or village. Devotees of Dad's Army will know that this was a period of extraordinary paranoia about the descent of Nazi paratroopers disguised as nuns who were presumed to have forgotten to bring maps with them and would be frustrated by the wholesale removal of signposts from country roads. The existence of this paranoia among the officers of the Pioneer Corps was demonstrated when I returned one evening to find my map impounded and myself summoned to Lt. May's office where I was harangued about the enormity of the danger I had presented to national security. I protested that maps were freely on sale in shops and that their exhibition in private was perfectly legal. To no avail.

The next day I sought an audience with Lt. May and asked for my drawing pins back. I got them, and still have them, but he missed no opportunity thereafter to select me for the most humiliating jobs he could find or invent.

With another of his victims I spent two days scrubbing the floors of disused workhouse rooms.

Woodford The unpleasant atmosphere at Thrapston was an exception. Some assignments were very pleasant. One I remember in particular was when a small party of about eight of us without an NCO in charge was sent to Woodford coaling depot on the Great Northern Line. Some idiot had dumped a whole train-load of coal on top of the skips that had to be used to move it into the hoppers which fed it into the locomotives. Our job was to dig into the mountain of coal until we found a skip. We were billeted in an old rectory in the village of Chacombe near Banbury, which still had its own little railway halt although passenger services had long disappeared. Every morning at 06.15 an engine and guard's van came from Banbury to take us to Woodford.

And what I particularly remember was the extraordinary splashing sound as the engine's arrival and our marching hobnails woke the herd of cows in the field next to the line who all stood up at once and emptied their bladders.

At Woodford we had a guard's van at our disposal with a little stove for brewing our tea. As tea-boy we appointed Bill Duncombe, known among us as “Roll on Death” Duncombe. He had been a piano tuner who before the war had tuned pianos and harpsichords in the Albert Hall. He was certainly not well suited to the rough life of the NCC but he was more resilient than was suggested by his lugubrious visage and the repeated cry “If this is life, give me death”.

Hanslope After a time our life became more settled and our duties a little less basic. We spent some months under canvas at Hanslope Park, a listening station where German wireless messages were monitored and transmitted to Bletchley. Some of us were employed assisting the Canadian engineers by digging foundations for the dead-eyes which secured the guy ropes holding up the aerials. I spent most of the time painting Nissen huts inside and out. It was a pleasant enough job until it came to the hut used as the cook-house. The painting had to be done at night, so we were on a night shift. I was doing the corrugated sheeting over the range, in which a fire had been left alight ready for breakfast. I was expecting it to be warm work but had to make a hasty descent when the plank on which I was standing burst into flames.

It was at Hanslope that I got the best of the company barber. He was Frank Cake, a cheerful, chubby hairdresser from the Isle of Wight who kept his takings, which were all, of course, in copper, in a long, zipfastened knitting bag. This became more and more tightly packed and it was a matter of some comment among us as to how lucrative his evening's activities must be. He maintained that the bag contained no more than a few shillings so I offered him £2 for it and was accepted. The bag contained over £12. But I had to carry this weight of copper around for weeks before I could dispose of it.

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Ampthill We had a very pleasant few months billeted in an old village hall in Ampthill near Bedford where one of the jobs I can remember was laying concrete roads in the woods of Wrest Park for an ammunition dump consisting of numerous mini Nissen huts hidden under the trees. Very pleasant weather and lovely surroundings.

Another, less pleasant job, was emptying kilns at an abandoned brickworks at Millbrook. The kilns were semicircular in section, were packed almost to the roof with green bricks, a fire was lit, the end wall was bricked up, and the fire was kept going for a week with coal dust fed through holes in the roof. The end wall was then demolished and the bricks removed on special wheelbarrows with the wheel in the middle. Because the barrowman had to bear no weight but simply to maintain balance, it was possible to move very large numbers of bricks. Fortunately for us the bricks were cold; we were told that when the yard was in production kilns were often emptied when the bricks were still so hot they set light to the straw in the railway wagons. The work was unpleasant because the bricks were covered with a thick layer of fine red ash which filled one's nose and throat. And despite the rubber pads you wore on your hands, the bricks were very hard on the fingers.

At Ampthill we stayed long enough to establish local social connections. My close friend at that time was Tom Cowley, a typographer who taught at a College of Printing in Watford. We got to know a young couple who invited us round for musical evenings. Their life was quite difficult because they had a daughter of about two who was severely epileptic and was covered with bruises from the constant falling caused by her fits. The mother played the piano, unfortunately with the sustaining pedal always hard on the floor. Tom and I both sang and I guess I must have played the recorder. Poor Tom suffered a truly ghastly slip when attempting Where'ere you walk which includes the line “Trees where you sit shall crowd into a shade”. He negotiated the phrase successfully first time round but on its last appearance where the word “sit” is followed by a dramatic pause, he spoonerised the “sh” of shall and the “s” of sit. Conversation was slow to start afterwards.

There were no such embarrassments at the Gazely's. George was a market gardener with an enormous bass voice whom we met at the Methodist church in Flitwick, the next village. We were frequently invited back to supper after the evening service and on one memorable occasion were regaled with roast pheasant, the birds having paid the ultimate price for raiding his lettuce beds.

Morton Mill At around this time there was a great re-organisation of the Non-Combatant Corps. Our whole company was packed off by train to Keighley in Yorkshire and housed in Morton Mill, a great disused three-storey woollen mill. The high command seems to have seen this reorganisation as an opportunity to instil some discipline and smartness into our slovenly ranks, so we spent the best part of a week blanco-ing our webbing, polishing our greatcoat buttons and being route-marched over Ilkley Moor. Then most of us went by train to very near where we had come from but minus several of my particular friends including Tom Cowley. The place was Ashby St Ledgers, a lovely village with a stately home that in 1601 was owned by the catholic Catesby family who were involved in the Gunpowder Plot and fled there after Guy Fawkes was captured. Throughout the war William Walton was a guest there. We were not invited in, but there was a WVS canteen in the stables. We slept under canvas in a field.

We did not know it of course because we were not thought to need to know of plans for our future, but we were about to start on a project which would occupy us for the next two years until the war was over. This was the construction and then the running of No.29 Supply Reserve Depot (SRD), a massive food store at Barby, South of Rugby, where supplies were built up in preparation for the invasion of Europe.

Barby Platelaying The site was just beside the Great Northern Line. Engineers had already levelled a large area beside the line, covered it with a deep layer of ash and clinker and built a branch from the main line. On to this came wagons loaded with concrete sleepers. Our first job was to throw them from the wagon to the ground and then lay them out a fixed distance apart ready to receive the rails. The rails came next on flat-bed wagons from which they were levered off to the ground with crowbars. From there they were picked up by teams of 12 men, six at each

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end of the 60 ft. length of rail and carried to their final position on the sleepers. We worked in pairs, each man holding one horizontal arm of huge pincers called “dogs”. I reckoned that each man on average was lifting nearly 2 cwt. Health and Safety regulations would never allow it nowadays. Each team of six bore an equal total weight, but the dynamics within the six were complex. The pair on each side of a pair of dogs obviously had to exert equal lift, so it was unwise to team up with a brawny enthusiast. But there was no way of ensuring that each of the three pairs exerted equal lift, so it was best not to find yourself in a team with four weaklings. It was quite the hardest work I have ever done.

What came next was just about the most tiring and boring. They called it “lifting and packing”. Having secured the rails into their chairs on the sleepers the engineers then jacked up each section of track in turn to be level with the previous section, and we had to secure it at that level by ramming the ash and clinker with a shovel tight under the sleeper. Nowadays it is all done by machine. It must have been a swine of a job full-time, and especially on mainline railways where the packing material was not our light ash but heavy granite chips.

While we were plate-laying, builders and engineers were laying tracks through the depot, building the massive corrugated iron sheds in which the food would be stored and the huts in which we would live until the war ended.

Rugby and the Percival Guildhouse Having spent the summer under canvas at Ashby St Ledgers we moved, while waiting for completion of accommodation at Barby, into huts at Long Buckby, about 8 miles south of Rubgy, and it was here that our more settled location enabled me to develop social and cultural contacts in Rugby. I joined an amateur orchestra meeting at Rubgy School conducted by Alfred de Reyghere, who taught music at the school. I had my mother's old bicycle. It had a frame so lacking in rigidity that if you turned the handlebars without adjusting your balance the frame twisted while the bicycle continued in a straight line. On this I cycled the 8 miles into Rugby every week with my cello in its canvas case tucked under my right arm and my left hand holding the handlebars and the front brake lever. The canvas case had been made by my mother with amazing perseverance on her old hand-wound Singer which was never designed to deal with such heavy fabric, and it continued in constant use for another 50 years. Cycling in this way may sound hazardous but it must be remembered that thanks to severe petrol rationing the roads were almost completely empty. The nearest I came to mishap was when one very dark night going down a steep dip to a bridge over a little stream with nothing but the totally inadequate illumination from my blacked-out cycle lamp I ran into a flock of sheep escaped from a neighbouring field. By some miracle they avoided me and I avoided them and my cello and I escaped unscathed.

I also found the Percival Guildhouse, a marvellous voluntary educational settlement which became my cultural home for the next two years. The resident warden, Maurice Beresford, who lived with his mother in a flat above the house, became a friend and remained so until his death. He spent his weekends researching deserted villages in the locality, abandoned as a result of the Black Death or of the enclosures, and later as a lecturer at Leeds University wrote the definitive book on the subject. At the Guildhouse I taught first year German, joined in folk dancing, attended gramophone recitals given on a wonderful machine with a huge paper maché horn made by EMG Handmade Gramophones, which for those days was what we would now call state of the art, played recorder or sang in a few concerts, and arranged and produced the incidental music for an open air performance on the lawn of Midsummer Night's Dream.

At the Guildhouse I became friendly with an electrical engineer who worked at British Thompson Houston (BTH), Rugby's main employer. He very kindly made me a small radio receiver on which I could listen through earphones to BBC music broadcasts while the rest of the hut listened to Forces Favourites on the communal radio. But he had overlooked the fact that there were no electrical sockets in the hut except the one powering the radio, which was in any case 12 ft. from my bed. We solved the problem with two of the brass drawing pins rescued from Lt. May at Thrapston. We soldered them to the ends of a length of flex, concealed it behind a roof beam above my bunk and pushed the pins into lighting wiring running under the roof. If my private power supply was ever discovered it was after my departure from Barby many months later.

Robert Salkeld With me in some of these Rugby activities was Robert Salkeld who had just been transferred into my NCC company. He came from Newcastle, was a graduate of the Royal College of Music in London and a composition pupil of R.O. Morris. He was, by my standards, introspective almost to the point of neurosis,

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fastidious about his appearance and clothing and in general about as different as possible from me in temperament. But if you wanted musical friends in the Army you could not afford to be too choosy and we remained friends of a sort until the 1960s. He wanted me to teach him the recorder and we used to play simple duets on my descant and treble instruments under a hedge in the field at Ashby St Ledgers. He naturally wanted an instrument of his own, but in those days, long before plastic instruments, the only recorders on sale were made from imported hardwood and you needed a licence from the Board of Trade to buy one. So we applied for a licence. The application form demanded to know, among much else, the purpose for which the product was required. We wrote “To play on” and got a licence and eventually a hardwood treble. But the wood was not properly seasoned and Robert played it more intensively than was recommended in the literature, so that within a few weeks the head split right along the windway. Robert was desperately keen to develop a vibrato like Carl Dolmetsch and lost faith in me as teacher when I admitted I could not reproduce the Dolmetsch sound. In my subsequent teaching career I spent many hours trying, usually in vain, to cure players infected with a Dolmetsch vibrato, which might have been bearable in a modern concerto performed in the Wigmore Hall but was ruinous in ensemble music in a classroom.

Alan Brinn The other musician in the NCC at Barby was Alan Brinn from South Wales, also professionally qualified and very gifted, but his interest in my friendship became very uncomfortable, being almost certainly, as I realised only later, homosexual in origin. He was possessive and jealous of my other friendships, but he did provide one memorable event. He was friendly with the organist at Chelsea Hospital and one weekend took me to meet her where I had the opportunity to play recorder with organ accompaniment in the chapel. What I chiefly remember is that although there was no audience I was incredibly nervous and had great difficulty taking in enough breath.

No.29 SRD and the Bond Gang Back at Barby SRD our life became much more routine – a daily round of emptying railway wagons and stacking the contents in the sheds. What would nowadays invariably be done in minutes with pallets and one forklift truck driver was then done in a couple of hours by a gang of eight with two inside the wagon extracting the wooden packing cases and putting them on to a gangway of rollers perched on columns of boxes, others propelling them along the rollers and another team at the far end stacking them up in stages to the roof which was around 20 ft. from the floor.

I was one of a specialist gang of teetotallers and non-smokers known as the “Bond Gang” which was called in whenever a wagon arrived with dutiable goods such as tobacco or sacramental wine which had to be unloaded into an extra secure shed set aside for bonded goods. It was a plum job because what we handled almost exclusively was cigarettes which came in wooden cases twice the size of food cases but only a fraction of the weight, so we could unload a wagon in half the time and with only half the effort needed for a wagon of corned beef.

We lost our monopoly when a whole train arrived with a cargo of rum. Everyone was called in to help. The rum came in one-gallon flasks with two flasks packed in sawdust in a wooden case. In my gang that day was a jovial Italian asphalter, no stranger to alcohol, who discovered that if you positioned a case carefully near the edge of the roller you increased the chances of its falling off accidentally when it reached a curve, that in such circumstances there was a chance that one of the flasks would break, and that if you were quickly on hand you could catch the contents in your mug as they drained through the sawdust. We ended the shift one man short.

We went through a very hectic period in the weeks before and around D Day, working very long hours of overtime emptying the sheds we had spent months filling. When the war in Europe was over, life became much more leisurely, and one by one any of my my fellows with any sort of clerical background began to disappear, transferred to clerical jobs in record offices to begin the task of demobilisation. I had, I thought, a more impressive clerical CV than many of them, but was left behind at Barby with a rump of asphalters, butchers and carpenters.

Bournemouth NCC Records Office When my turn eventually came I was sent to the NCC records office in Bournemouth. There I found Alan Brinn who I suspect had organised my transfer. There also I saw my own records and discovered I had gone though

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my whole Army career credited with an IQ of 63. That, I guessed, was why it took so long for the authorities to find anyone to take me in a clerical capacity. But my mind went back to a day at Ilfracombe when I had been on kitchen fatigue. We had to be up at about 05.00 to get breakfast ready and were just finishing the washing up of supper things at 21.30 when the officers remembered that we had not been put through the intelligence test that everyone else had taken in the afternoon. So we were marched down to a classroom and presented with a book full of puzzles. I did my best but was much too tired to put my brain into gear.

Birdingbury POW camp The work at Bournemouth ran out quite soon and I had to move on. I was in the fortunate position of being able to arrange my own posting, and I knew exactly where I wanted to go. At Percival Guildhouse I had become friendly with Pat White, also in the NCC but working in a POW camp at Birdingbury about 12 miles west of Rugby. He was very keen on music and I had taught him the recorder. We also played tennis together.

I had two interesting experiences there. Pat had become friendly with a young German prisoner, Kurt Demmler, with excellent English. Pat decided it would be quite an adventure to take him to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford to see The Winter's Tale. We successfully smuggled him out of the camp and back in again but I doubt whether he understood very much of the play.

The other occasion was when the camp's interpreter was ill. There were lots of German prisoners like Kurt with excellent English, but they could not be trusted to be impartial. I, with my Higher School Certificate German, was the only British soldier with even a smattering of the language. It was terrifying. My first duty was to accompany the C.O. Col. Dollar on his weekly kit inspection. The prisoners were all lined up standing to attention beside their beds. “Tell that man to get some dubbin on his boots” was his first command. I could have told him to clean his boots, or to polish them or even to lick them, but dubbin had never appeared in the works of Goethe and Thomas Mann that I had spent eight years studying. And I was certain most of the prisoners knew perfectly well what the colonel meant and would know that I was floundering. I eventually managed to tell him to put grease on his boots and hoped he did not get into trouble.

The other occasion was when two prisoners were up on a charge for having left their cycles in the wrong place when returning from their day's work on local farms. I never really understood what they were alleged to have done, or what their excuse was, but I had a shrewd idea what explanation the colonel needed, so I advanced it and the case was dismissed.

My army service was coming to an end and I needed to think about my future career. If I stayed in the War Office it could be only be a matter of time before I was posted to duties I should have to refuse. I had already applied for transfer to a different department but had no idea whether it would be successful. I decided that if I had to leave the Civil Service I would try for a career in teaching. For that I should need a degree which I would take externally at London. It was necessary therefore for me to have an Intermediate BA which, on the strength of my HSC, I could get quite simply with one English paper.

Welbeck Abbey Formation College There was at that time a quite enlightened scheme by which soldiers could spend the last month before demobilisation at a Formation College, studying privately for whatever qualification they needed. I was sent to Welbeck Abbey, the stately home of the Dukes of Portland. There was no tuition, so I subscribed to a correspondence course and I had unrestricted use of the Ducal library. I became quite friendly with the pert little ATS librarian. One weekend she took me to visit her friend in the sick bay. The friend showed off her ring with a cameo of Diana. They both knew she was goddess of hunting and of the moon. I volunteered the information that she was also the goddess of chastity. “Ooh”, they both said at once, “what's chastity?” This rather shy young man wished he had kept his classical knowledge to himself. Nevertheless I managed to wangle a second month there reading Milton's Lycidas which was the set book for the exam.

Welbeck was fascinating. The eccentric 5th Duke being the owner of the many local coal mines, was well placed to indulge his passion for tunnelling and excavation. He built an underground library, a ballroom/picture gallery which was our dining room, an underground carriageway between the Abbey and the riding school, and another, even wider with space for two carriages to pass, intended to connect Welbeck with another of his houses at Worksop, several miles away. Construction was abandoned when a section under the end of the lake collapsed. It was strictly out of bounds but I managed to slip in and explore part of it.

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Cornish holidays in uniform One friend must now be introduced, A.F. Roberts. If I ever knew his first names I have forgotten them. In our earliest days at Kings Cliffe there had been three Robertses in the section and the initials that were used to distinguish them became permanent. The origin of our friendship is a mystery since we had almost nothing in common. He was not in the least interested in music or literature or art. Yet in the last 18 months of our army career we had three week-long tandem-ing holidays together in Cornwall, and when I was demobbed I lodged with him in South Norwood for two years.

There are a few vivid memories from those holidays. One started on August 6th 1945 when we were camping in a field on Coppins Farm above Port Isaac on the north Cornish coast. We were met at the farm gate by the farmer's wife, eager to share the news that the Americans had just dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Many people say they can remember the exact circumstances in which they heard of Kennedy's assassination; I still have a keen mental picture of the dry stone wall against which we leaned, holding our tandem, as we discussed the implications.

The next day we cycled down to Padstow to exchange our ration tokens. The butcher was feeling extremely generous because he gave us a whole 7lb. tin of corned beef. We took it back in triumph promising ourselves magnificent stews every evening for the rest of the week. Next morning we put the bulk of the 7lb. back in its tin and into our cold store which was a large square biscuit tin buried in the earth under the tent and covered with a groundsheet and sleeping bag. When we returned next evening the empty corned beef tin was on the grass outside the tent. The farm dog had sniffed it out and had had the whole day to work out how to get at it.

The rest of the week was not entirely vegetarian because on Thursday the combine harvester came to the wheat field next to the farmhouse along with every schoolchild and spare farmhand for miles around. As the combine neared the centre of the field they all gathered round with sticks, ready for the terrified rabbits as they broke cover and headed for the hedges. Later that evening we were all invited to a harvest supper in the farm kitchen. In pride of place on the massive old table were two dishes each with four whole roasted rabbits.

The combine had left the threshed grain in sacks in the field. The next day we were asked to help load it on to the corn merchant's lorry which had come to collect it. We agreed readily, naively thinking that with our long experience of loading railway wagons it would be child's play. The lorry was in the next field backed up against a drystone wall and in the field with sacks was a gangway to the top of the wall made of a bundle of planks.

Two farmhands loaded the sacks on to our backs and AF and I had to carry them across the field, up the plank, and deposit them on the lorry. What we had not realised was that a standard wheat sack held 250 lbs – two and a quarter hundredweights. We managed it, rather to the chagrin, I suspect, of the farmhands, but it was a close-run thing.

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Chapter 3 Civvy Street The Census of Production Office Towards the end of 1946 I got my blue demob suit and brown Trilby hat and black shoes, and a posting to the Census of Production Office of the Statistics Division of the Board of Trade. I was received by Mr Nicholas, a dour HEO in a large room full of people. He showed me to a desk, gave me two spring binders filled with the blank forms used for the 1935 and 1937 censuses which he invited me to study, and told me that I was not allowed to work or see any documents until I had sworn before Bow Street Magistrate's Court to observe the Official Secrets Act. He then left me without introducing me to any other members of the staff. For two days nobody spoke to me. Nobody told me where to find the toilets or the canteen. I was too green to do what I should have done, which was to go out and buy a book to read until I was given some work. It left a bad impression which took a long time to shake off.

Fortunately the office soon became very busy as we sent out the forms for the 1946 census. This was before the days of self-seal envelopes and every one of the many thousands had to be moistened. We were equipped with large whitewash brushes with felt in place of bristles, but before they could be used the envelopes had to be laid out in a row, with their flaps opened and overlapped, so that just the gummed strips were exposed. There is a technique for this rather like that of a conjurer with a pack of cards. I eventually mastered it and it has often proved useful since.

The next two years were grim. The tables of the 1935 census were to be published alongside those for 1946, but in the intervening years a new international system of industrial classification had been introduced; the 1935 figures had to be recalculated on the new basis. Most of this had been done, but as the 1946 results came in they threw up queries and anomalies which caused the statisticians to decide that a manufacturer of (say) mopeds needed to be transferred from the Motor Vehicle Industry to the Cycle Industry. When that happened every one of the tables for both industries had to be rewritten. And it happened so often that some large rag-bag industries such as Mechanical Engineering were in constant flux. It was not good for job satisfaction to know that your week of hard work was likely to be completely wasted. And it was hard work.

There were no pocket calculators and no computers. There were clunky mechanical adding machines but nothing but mental arithmetic for subtraction. And for multiplication and division there was one “Marchant� machine shared by the whole office rather like a miniature cash register on which you turned the handle forward the appropriate number of times for each of the units, tens and hundreds of the multiplier or backwards for the divisor.

Lodging with NCC friends I lodged with AF Roberts and his rather grumpy old father at Whiteley Road, Upper Norwood for perhaps 18 months. It was bitterly cold during that terrible winter of 1946/47, with snow on the pavements of London for three months and day-long power cuts which shut down the pumps of the office central heating and meant that we worked in our overcoats. Rationing was even more stringent than during the war with bread rationing for a time and whale meat on sale in the butchers. I spent most of my free time reading, developing a taste for Fielding, Smollett and Sterne.

Some time in 1948 AF met a young lady at work and conceived a desire to entertain her at home without my presence. Happily I was still in touch with Dick Herne, an atheist NCC friend who taught history at St Paul's school. He had married Audrey, a vicar's daughter, had bought a house at East Sheen, and wanted a lodger to help pay the mortgage. They were very good to me and I lived very contentedly with them until I got married and moved out, just in time to make room for the arrival of their second child.

Developing musical contacts I was meanwhile slowly developing a musical life. Robert Salkeld was in London living in Melody Road, Wandsworth, and had persuaded two violin students at one of the colleges, Theo Lazaroff and Eleanor Baltaxe, to form a string quartet with himself on viola and me on cello. We worked away at Beethoven Op.18.

It was rough and it did not last long but it was a my very first real string quartet and a milestone.

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Much more significant, although I did not recognise it at the time, was a move by Pat White, living in Bournemouth Road, South Wimbledon. We met occasionally to play tennis on local authority courts. He had read of recorder classes run by Walter Bergmann at Morley College and announced we were both going to join. I was not very keen and would never have taken the initiative myself, but he was insistent.

Morley College had been hit by a flying bomb during the war and many of its classes were dispersed to surrounding schools. The recorders were in Paradise Street at Bricklayers Arms. Here I met the members of what became the Oriel Consort – Ken Kenworthy, Ron Plowman, Audrey Abbott and Doris Ford – which later became the centre of my musical world, and here I was warmly welcomed by Walter Bergmann since, alone among his pupils, I had been playing since before the war.

Someone in the office brought word of a small group of recorder players meeting at lunchtime in one of the Board of Trade buildings who were said to be struggling, and suggested I might be able to help them. They accepted my help readily and became the nucleus of the Board of Trade Recorder Group which continued almost to my retirement.

Bryanston In August 1950 I treated myself to a week at Bryanston Summer School run by William Glock and John Amis.

It had a glittering team of tutors - the Amadeus quartet which had just been formed, Alfred Deller and Thurston Dart and Georges Enesco to give master classes. I shared a dormitory with members of the Kalmar Orchestra including Hugh McQuire and Harold Harriott. Colin Davis was playing clarinet in the orchestra. I found myself in demand as a recorder player. I shared a desk with Thurston Dart playing descant in a performance of Monteverdi's Orfeo and in one evening concert I joined Alfred Deller and three members of the Amadeus to play Byrd's marvellous consort song Lullabye.

At another evening concert the Amadeus played Haydn Op.54 No.2. I had read about this quartet in Aulich and Heimerann where it is dismissed as “Rather too much C major”. It was in fact far and away the most overwhelming musical experience of my life. In the slow movement Norbert Brainin's gypsy fiddler with his increasingly dazzling gyrations was breathtaking. And then in that amazing last movement when the cello climbs slowly from the bottom to the very top of the instrument – and does it again and again – was far more surprising than anything in the Surprise Symphony. That quartet was to play a decisive role later in my story.

I was in a scratch quartet with Theo Rowland-Entwhistle who later wrote the volume on violin playing in the Teach Yourself series. Our leader was a Scot with a good technique but appalling eyesight problems connected with his albinism. He could read the music only if it was around nine inches from his nose. He had evolved a way of holding the fiddle which achieved this with a left-hand page and still left room for his instrument and his bowing arm, but to move to a right-hand page he had to rotate the music stand clockwise and move it nine inches to the left. And he could do this with his feet without dropping a note. It was an inspiring example of determination overcoming disability.

We had occasional coaching from members of the Amadeus and one afternoon were working on Beethoven Op.18 No.5 with Martin Lovat. In the Variations is a vigorous cello passage closely modelled on the “drumbeat” variation in Mozart's K.464. Martin complained that I was not making half enough noise. But my cello was a ghastly unresponsive instrument and I complained that I could get no more out of it. “Let me show you”, he said and took the instrument. They played the variation again and to me it sounded much as it had before. As he handed it back he said only, “I see what you mean”.

There would never be another week like it for me. I went again in 1951 but the phenomenal thrill of the previous year was not repeated. However I did take part at Cello 21 in a performance of a piece for 24 cellos specially composed by Anthony Hopkins for the great number of cellists attracted by the presence of Pierre Fournier who was giving master classes.

In 1950 Walter Bergmann had asked me to take over from that September the beginners class at Morley College, then being taught by Timothy Moore who had been offered a post at Dartington School. I could not accept the offer for 1950 but agreed to take it on from 1951. The reason was that I had at last got promotion to Higher Executive Officer and been moved to the Commercial Relations and Exports Division as a part of a team which was to spend the winter of 1950/51 at the GATT Tariff Conference at Torquay.

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GATT Conference at Torquay Torquay was a blissful change from the drudgery of statistics. Our team which was to conduct negotiations with Germany, Turkey and some other countries which I cannot remember shared for our office a large hotel room. There were Christopher Jardine the Assistant Secretary, his PA Edna Long who had a special noiseless Remington typewriter because Christopher could not endure the noise of a normal one, the Principal, John Reynolds, me, and “Barny” Barnwell, the Cockney EO. Jardine fascinated me. If he had to draft a long paper he would sit for perhaps half an hour with closed eyes and his face distorted into a succession of tortured grimaces and would then summon Edna and dictate the whole text at exactly the right speed for her shorthand with no pauses and no corrections. But in anything requiring the use of hand or eye he was hopeless and would I guess have been diagnosed as dyspraxic if the term had existed in 1950. He needed help to open a bottle of ink. And in one embarrassing episode after he and John Reynolds had been playing table tennis at another hotel during the lunch hour, John had to pluck up his courage to tell him that he had put on John's shoes by mistake and walked back without noticing that they did not fit.

My job was to write the minutes of the meetings and get them agreed with the other side. I speedily grasped that the secret was to work out what the other side were struggling to say – the meetings were conducted in English – and put that into my own words. The Turkish team were led by Mr Zorlu who was their Trade Minister and whose English was fragmentary. What we principally wanted from them was a reduction in their duty on tobacco. Mr Zorlu repeated constantly that such a concession would be “tree cherry to the fisc” It took me quite a little time to work out that “tree cherry” might be how a Turk would pronounce “treachery” and that what he meant was that the Finance Minister would have his guts for garters if he gave way on this one. So the phrase appeared in the minutes as “would involve an unacceptable reduction in Excise revenue”. Mr Zorlu shortly afterwards became Prime Minister, and then when his party lost the next election was executed.

In Torquay we got a little group of recorder beginners together, and I have a photograph of us performing a Bach chorale on the stage of the Grand Hotel as part of the delegation's Christmas party.

I buy a clavichord There was one music shop in Torquay and during our stay a rather beautiful clavichord appeared in the window. I was realising the need to improve my very fragile keyboard technique if I was to take over a beginner's class and be paid for it. But I was still single and living in digs, so possession of a piano was out of the question. But a clavichord was so soft you could play it at midnight and not disturb a sleeper in the next room. The shop were selling it on commission for a customer who wanted £80. I knew that was a very reasonable price since at that time Alec Hodsden of Lavenham was charging £100 for a very basic instrument.

But I also calculated that buyers of clavichords were thin on the ground in Torquay. So I offered £45 which was accepted. I had it in my hotel room throughout my stay and made good use of it in selecting and arranging a progressive set of easy Bach chorales which were subsequently published by Schott.

Back to London In the hotel where I was lodged there was only one other delegation member, Pat Jameson. She provided cheerful company at mealtimes in the almost empty hotel and joined my little group of recorder beginners.

When the conference ended in February her father came to collect her in his car and kindly offered to take me and my luggage and drop me at my sister's place in Salisbury. It was memorable as the most uncomfortable journey of my life. The car was pre-war with a top speed of around 35mph. It had no heater, was very draughty, and I was not wearing an overcoat. Half way through the journey I developed the urgent need of a comfort stop but Mr Jamieson drove remorselessly on. Never was I so delighted to see my sister.

During my absence Ken, Ron, Audrey and Doris had formed the Oriel Consort and given their first public concert with the Deller Consort at St Sepulchre's Church in High Holborn. The experience had convinced Audrey that she did not enjoy public performance and wanted to drop out. The others asked me to take her place and I accepted.

Looking for a wife Ever since leaving the Army I had been looking earnestly for a wife. Miss Brown in the Census office set her cap very pointedly at me as soon as I arrived but soon gave up hope. She was statuesque and forbidding; I

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was reminded of her years later when I saw Mrs Danvers in Olivier's Rebecca. No one else ever tried to catch my eye. There was nobody among my musical contacts who seemed remotely attractive.

There was Mollie Phipps in the Census office with whom I formed a comfortable, low-voltage friendship that lasted for about two years. We played tennis, walked in the Addington Hills above Croydon where she lived with her mother and took paddle-wheel steamer trips to Margate. When I got back from Torquay, despairing of finding anything more exciting I proposed to her. If she had accepted I guess we might have lived as comfortably together as most couples who share no more than a desire to raise a family. Mercifully and wisely she refused, frightened of my increasing absorption in activities she could not share. Shortly afterwards she was posted to the Board of Trade Regional Office in Cardiff.

There followed a brief flash of light on the road. I have no idea who introduced Catriona Kennedy-Fraser but she asked me for recorder lessons and I eagerly complied, making a couple of visits to her flat in Hampstead.

She was grand-daughter of Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser, the famous singer and collector of Scottish folk songs and was working as an Assistant Principal in the Scottish Office. She was in a different league from any woman I had ever met – cultured, intelligent, good-looking, supremely self-assured but unassuming and natural. Someone in whose company duke and dustman would have been equally at ease. I knew instantly that this was someone with whom I could happily spend the rest of my life. And she seemed to enjoy my company.

Could the relationship ever have blossomed? I never found out because within a couple of months of our first meeting she was posted to Edinburgh. Being realistic I think it is reasonable to guess that her family moved at a level in Edinburgh society in which I would have found the air rather thin.

Then there was Audrey Abbott. She asked me to help with arranging recorder duets from keyboard sonatas by Defesch she had been given by a Dutch professor. I became a fairly frequent visitor to the expensive Kensington flat she shared with her elderly Dutch mother.

We worked in the spacious sitting room which had an oriel window. This was the room where the Oriel Consort had held its first rehearsals and from which it took its name. When we had finished the Defesch we started on similar duos from sonatas by Loeilliet. Both sets were published by Schott.

Audrey, in the most genteel and tactful way, managed to convey the message that if I proposed she would accept. But although I never learned her age I knew if we married we had a negligible chance of celebrating our golden wedding. She had played viola in the St Paul's Suite under Holst, and he died in 1934. So although I enjoyed her company I was very careful not to raise expectations and kept clear of the flat on April 1st.

I was rescued from this slightly fraught situation on April 23rd 1951. As a member of Walter Bergmann's Telemann Orchestra I was providing the incidental music for a performance of The Winter's Tale by the Morley College Players. It was an uncomfortable experience. The performance took place on a railway loading platform which formed one side of what had been the courtyard of the George Inn in Southwark. It was bitterly cold; the platform was completely open to the wind; pigeons roosted in the roof girders immediately above us; and minutes after the performance started the College Youths of Southwark Cathedral on the opposite side of the street started their weekly change-ringing practice, completely drowning out the actors. But among the new faces in the orchestra was a black-haired girl of about my own age with a very smooth bowing action and a confident technique. Shivering in the courtyard in the interval I summoned up the courage to ask if I could get her a drink in the George Inn. We went in and she disconcertingly ordered a rum while I had my usual tomato juice. Emboldened by my success so far in chatting-up, a technique in which I had had very little practice, I asked if she would be interested in playing quartets one evening with friends of mine at the Board of Trade.

She agreed. Her name was Kitty Esterson.

I had just succeeded in getting a string quartet together at the Board of Trade with Nancy Marchant, Dave Townley and Reg Tait. I had also just bought from Schotts what became and still is one of my most precious possessions, a French Peters complete two-volume set of Haydn quartets published around 1900. Schotts had been asked by the newly-formed Amadeus Quartet to find a set, but by the time they did so the Amadeus had already obtained a copy elsewhere. Schotts sold me the set for ÂŁ7.

We duly met in a spacious carpeted room in Imperial Chemical House lent to me by a friendly Assistant Secretary. With Bryanston still fresh in my memory I suggested Op.54 No.2. The new girl sight-read the forest of sextuplets and demisemiquavers in the Adagio with complete assurance and with a very fair measure of gypsy bravura, and I knew that I had finally found what I was looking for. On Boxing Day just eight months later we were married.

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Commercial Relations and Exports (Canada) After my spell at Torquay I was transferred to the Canadian section of the Commercial Relations and Exports Department working under Yvonne Lovat Williams as Principal and Sydney Levine as Assistant Secretary who were both very generous to me on my marriage and later to my children. My Executive Officer was Lellis Seeger who became a family friend with whom we kept in touch until her death.

Promotions, Recruitment & External Transfers (PRET) Around 1955 I transferred to this section of Establishments Division which left almost no trace in my memory.

From there, still as an HEO, it was on to the Japanese desk of CRE with Cyril Sanders as the Assistant Secretary. He was eccentric and relaxed, often chairing meetings even with the Japanese with his feet on his desk, and driving everywhere in an old London taxi. We remained in touch until his death in 2010.

Commercial Relations and Exports (Japan) The Japanese are noted for their lavish expenditure on business gifts and hospitality and I did rather well. One of my first tasks was to palm off onto the British Council the inappropriate job which my predecessor had inherited of organising tours of British industry by teams from the Japan Productivity Council. The response of the Japanese to this was to send a three-man delegation to the UK to thank me, bearing gifts of a Seiko selfwinding watch, lengths of silk, and pottery, which, after dutifully reporting them to Establishments Division, I was allowed to keep. During my five years there I was taken to expensive Japanese restaurants where I sat cross-legged on the floor eating raw squid with chopsticks and drinking sake, and where I never ceased to wonder at the ability of the waitresses bringing the food to drop instantly and effortlessly to their knees to serve it. Every year Kitty and I were invited to an Embassy party on the Emperor's birthday where we ate tempura and drank champagne.

Insurance and Companies (Unit Trusts) I at length got promotion to Senior Executive Officer and moved to Insurance and Companies Division where I was in charge of the section administering the Prevention of Fraud (Investments) Act. It was another surreal experience. The Principal was Harold Osborne whose real interest was aesthetics. He was Secretary of the Aesthetics Society and, I think, editor of its Journal. He knew absolutely nothing about unit trusts for which I was to be responsible. He was not on speaking terms with Mr Mantle, the diminutive Assistant Secretary. The Under Secretary would never willingly speak to or even acknowledge the existence of staff below the rank of Principal. The work was incredibly boring, consisting of reading day after day in minute detail the wording of the unit trust deeds submitted to us for approval by leading City law firms to ensure that no weasel words had been slipped in which might permit the ripping off of investors. It did however have advantages. I soon acquired a complete monopoly within the department of expertise in unit trusts and was therefore free of interference from above. I was even head-hunted for the job of Secretary of the Association of Unit Trust Managers. I turned the job down. I was quite comfortable dealing with lawyers but the managers themselves were a different breed. Notable among them was Edward du Cann MP whose operations were described by the then Prime Minister as “the unacceptable face of capitalism”.

One exciting episode was the first and only meeting of the Prevention of Fraud Tribunal that hears appeals against the refusal of a licence to deal in securities. I was the Secretary and the Chairman was a senior partner in Spicer and Pegler, a leading City firm of accountants. The appellant was a financier, widely suspected within the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England of bond washing, a practice not actually illegal but universally regarded as disreputable.

Since there was no precedent the chairman and I had to work out procedure. We were pressed for time, he had to go into hospital for a hernia operation and I had to visit him there for final instructions. We were discussing a point where what he proposed seemed to me unfair to the appellant. I objected, saying “After all, he may be innocent.” “Of course he's not innocent!” he snapped back.

I was immensely impressed by the skill of our counsel, Neville Foulkes QC, who had every last detail of his brief at his fingertips and produced them with deadly effect exactly when needed. And I was greatly impressed also by the shorthand writers we employed at considerable expense from a firm which supplied them to Hansard and the law courts. They used special little keyboards with comparatively few keys, and they worked

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in pairs doing 20 minute shifts, so intense was the concentration required. The proceedings were nevertheless very slow because the chairman insisted on making his own longhand notes for his summing-up – which he never needed because the appellant withdrew his appeal before the hearing was concluded.

Industries & Manufactures 2 – the inorganic chemicals industry I now got another promotion to Principal – in the Administrative Class at last – and was posted to Industries and Manufactures 2 in what had now been rechristened the Ministry of Technology. I was dealing with the inorganic side of the chemical industry which covered fertilizers, pesticides and plastics. I was working again to Yvonne Lovat Williams, now Assistant Secretary, and to an Under Secretary, Peter Carey, whom I much admired.

I found it very interesting. We had no powers to help the industry but we had to know what went on so that we could brief ministers on what to say in the event of disasters like the Flixborough explosion or outcries over shortages like the shortage of PVC which crippled waste collection when householders could not get black bin liners. I visited no end of interesting places in my five years there – an anhydrite mine in Whitehaven, salt factories in Cheshire where I was given a salt cellar still in constant use, research laboratories where they fed rats on pesticides, chlorine plants in Runcorn and fertilizer factories everywhere.

Visits to Canada I made three very interesting trips to Canada to international meetings on sulphur called by the Canadians who were desperately looking for a solution to their problem of a massive surplus of sulphur piling up in Alberta where it had been removed from natural gas. Nobody wanted to buy it once the cost of 1000 miles of rail transport to the seaboard was included in the price.

One trip was to Ottawa during a strike of air traffic controllers. My flight was diverted to Toronto and I was put on a bus. It was winter, night time and snowing. A short time into the journey the windscreen wiper blade fell off. The driver continued as if nothing had happened, peering through whatever gap he could find between the patches of snow sliding down the windscreen.

I was intrigued on my first experience of a cloakroom to see a paper carrier bag on every hook. All Canadians in winter, I learned, use galoshes which go into the carrier bags. I bought a pair which I still have.

My second visit was to Toronto where I made contact with the local recorder-playing community and encountered my first sub-contra bass.

My last visit was to Vancouver. After the conference I was the guest for a few days of the Whitakers whom I had met in London a year or two before when I deputised for Walter Bergmann at his class in Marylebone which they had joined when the husband was on sabbatical from Vancouver University.

Shipbuilding Division In 1975 I was, rather to my surprise, promoted to Assistant Secretary in Shipbuilding Division with a much larger office, a separate table and six chairs for meetings and a personal secretary. My Under Secretary, Mike Casey, did not try very hard to conceal his disappointment with his new recruit. He was a swashbuckling, highliving businessman type, able to mix with the chairmen and managing directors of shipbuilding companies and pass himself off as one of them. A teetotal, non-smoking, music lover was not what he wanted as a sidekick. I was responsible for the yards – Govan, Appledore, Sunderland and Camell Laird. - which had already fallen into public ownership as a result of previous crises. I got on perfectly well with their managing directors and we succeeded in our main task of keeping them afloat with Treasury money. But my dislike of Casey and his contempt for me made it a rather miserable two years. The whole industry was in turmoil throughout his period as the Callaghan Labour government struggled to nationalise it. When they finally succeeded my job came to a sudden end.

Casey became Chairman of the new British Shipbuilders and typically one of his first actions was to enquire about the acquisition of his own executive jet.

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Retirement At home we were going through a very difficult time. Kitty's mother, Janie, had been living with us for two years, far advanced in dementia, increasingly paranoid, and regularly disrupting the sleep of all of us including our daughter Barbara who was doing A levels. We were very worried about leaving her alone during the day.

Matters had come to a head in the summer of 1976. I was committed to running the An Grianan course in Ireland and we wanted to combine it, as we had done for many years, with a family holiday. Kitty’s brother Maurice and his wife Val at Chelmsford had taken Janie in 1975 but the relationship had become strained and this year they refused. So around April we approached Social Services and asked if they could find a place for her in a retirement or nursing home for the fortnight of our absence. They agreed to do so.

In July they sent a geriatrician who asked the standard questions about the day of the week and the name of the Prime Minister. A week later Social Services rang to say they could not take her; she was too far gone for a home and there were no beds in the mental hospital.

We decided to fight. We wrote saying that on the strength of their earlier undertaking we had committed ourselves to this journey and we intended to go. We would leave a well-stocked refrigerator and larder and we would write to the Police, the Fire Service, the local press and the local MP warning that there was a demented woman of 93 alone in the house, and explaining why. Would we have left her if our ploy had not worked? I doubt it: we would probably have engaged a resident carer. But it was not necessary. Social Services found that there was after all a bed free at Springfield Mental Hospital.

The incident brought home to us that when we were both working we were skating on very thin ice. One of us was going to need to retire to look after Janie.

I could put my pension in cold storage until I reached 60 in three years time but Kitty was the obvious choice since she earned much less than me. Best of all however would be if I could persuade the authorities to retire me “in the public interest” which would mean I got my pension immediately. I went to them explaining our domestic predicament, saying that I was thinking of retiring and putting my pension in cold storage but enquiring if there was any way in which they could justify public interest retirement. I thought there would be only a slim chance of success but realised later that I had unintentionally made myself completely unemployable. No Under Secretary would in any case be keen to take a man of 57 who would spend most of his three years learning the job; he would unquestionably refuse to take a man who was thinking of retiring early. And if further encouragement to dig in his heels were needed he would find it in the unflattering reports which I have no doubt Casey had written. So I got my pension and lump sum, six months salary in lieu of notice and £1,000 as compensation for loss of office. My colleagues collected for a very generous leaving present which I spent on an office desk at which I type this and an M&S leather jacket which I wore daily for the next 30 years and which will feature later in this narrative in connection with the Ritz Hotel.

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Chapter 4 Life with the Recorder The Oriel Consort The Oriel Consort had come together in 1950 and given a public concert with the Deller Consort, and on my return from Torquay in 1951 I had been invited to join. Ron Plowman was a keen rugger player, a smoker, and an officer in the RNVR who spent a week each summer commanding a minesweeper. He played a lovely Dolmetsch black-wood descant. Doris Ford played a very reliable tenor and produced a rich sound from a prewar Herwiga. She was a rather spinsterish, middle-aged civil servant. Ken Kenworthy was the organiser and librarian and played a Dolmetsch bass with rather less rhythmic security than the rest of us. I played the Robert Goble treble in very handsome Burmese tulip wood I had bought for ÂŁ3.7s.6d. from Boosey & Hawkes with my first month's salary. It had been intolerably sharp and I had persuaded Goble after the war to make a replacement middle joint, but its intonation was still dodgy.

We rehearsed in the first-floor flat in Guilford Street which Ken shared with his cheerful and patient wife Beryl.

Ken, through his position as Secretary of the Society of Recorder Players and our close relationship with Walter Bergmann, gave us regular opportunities to perform and we established a position as the leading amateur group in the London area.

Personnel changes We stayed together as a quartet playing mainly four-part consorts until Doris left us around 1963. Unlike Ron, Ken and I who had frequent social encounters outside the consort, Doris kept her private life under wraps and it was only at second hand that we learned that she had developed an unspecified neurological condition from which she died a year or two later.

Elaine Kaye took her place for a while. But our repertoire was broadening and we decided to expand to a quintet to cover the far greater range of works in five parts written by Tudor composers. For the remainder of our time as a performing group we were joined by Herbert Hersom and David Mitchell.

Repertoire Ken was our librarian and resident arranger. He had a cushy job as Secretary of the Probate Registry at Somerset House and spent much of his day in the solitary splendour of his office arranging items for our repertoire.

Many of these were of simple suites of dances by early 17th century composers such as Melchior Franck, Hassler and Schein which had formed the staple diet of customers for consort music since before the war. But shortly after I joined them Ken found a new and much more exciting source in Bach's The Art of Fugue. We struggled at first to make sense of it, but with perseverance discovered it to be as exhilarating an experience as anything in the repertoire, and Contrapunctus 4 and 9 appeared in many of our programmes.

Another addition to our repertoire came from Ken's contacts with John Beckett. John was Irish, a cousin of Samuel Beckett, an extremely talented pianist and harpsichordist, who had come to London at about this time with his friend, Michael Morrow, with whom he had set up the early music group Musica Reservata. They scraped a living as best they could, and had jointly landed perhaps the most bizarre employment ever offered to a professional musician at Musicians Union rates. A stylish West End restaurant had installed a fountain feature which for 15 minutes in every hour entertained diners with an aqueous ballet in synchrony with a recording of popular ballet music. Conducting the performance on alternate days were John and Michael, operating behind the scenes the valves which controlled the array of fountains. John had filled his idle 45 minutes with arranging for recorders the chorale preludes from Bach's OrgelbĂźchlein. He intended to offer them to Schott for publication but before submitting them wanted confirmation that his phrasing suggestions were practicable. Ken offered our services to play them through from John's manuscript.

The beauty of these musical gems took some time to reveal itself to us, but we eventually came to regard them as running a close second to The Art of Fugue in terms of performer satisfaction.

They were published by Schott in score in seven volumes. Some thirty years later when Schott had long since let them go out of print and removed them from their catalogue, and I had started publishing Oriel Library, I asked John if he would allow me to republish them. He readily agreed but said that Schott still had the

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copyright. They did indeed, having presented John with a contract which omitted the provision that I am told is now obligatory that the copyright would return to the arranger or composer if the publisher ceased to market it.

When I approached Schott they displayed the dog-in-the-manger attitude that is fostered by the easy monopoly of copyright: they would let me have the copyright only if I bought all their unsold stock. I sidestepped the problem by asking Roy Marks to make his own arrangement of a selection of them, knowing that the result was likely to be note for note the same as John's.

Concerts Shortly before he died early in 2014 Ron sent me a folder of 31 Oriel concert programmes he had collected. It is very far from complete but has been a useful reminder of some of the more adventurous and interesting concerts.

We hardly ever promoted our own concerts; we performed at the invitation of schools, clubs and music societies. But in April 1955, with the active support of Walter Bergmann, we booked the Salle Erard in Great Marlborough Street and put on a successful concert which I believe made a real contribution to our reputation.

The main item, which concluded the programme, was John Blow's Ode on the Death of Mister Henry Purcell in an edition recently completed by Walter Bergmann. It was scored for two counter tenors, two recorders, strings and continuo. There were few other counter tenors at that time and none I suspect with whom Alfred Deller would have wanted to perform, so he had invited Wilfred Brown who had recently appeared on the musical scene and had a lovely high tenor voice. The rest of the programme consisted of a spread of ancient consort pieces by Palestrina, Scheidt, Fritsch and Corelli, and modern works by Marx, Farcas and Staeps.

During the rehearsal of the Blow Ode I had been conscious of frequent glances from Wilfred Brown. At the end he came over and said, “I think you were at the Temperance Summer School at Selly Oak in 1939 and I remember you singing a song which went like this.� And he sang the first few lines of Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep. That feat of memory over an interval of 16 years of an event I had almost forgotten seemed to me at the time miraculous, but it is of a piece with a phenomenon I have since experienced quite frequently. The impression of an occasion made on a performer, in which I include conductors and class teachers, is vastly different from the impression made on the listener. People quote back to me statements and phrases I have used which they have obviously found memorable and I have forgotten completely.

Wilfred Brown might have had a brilliant career as a singer - I cherished for a long time a recording of a broadcast of Vaughan Williams' On Wenlock Edge – but it was cut short by his death from cancer a few years after his concert with us.

In the winter of 1956/7 the Elizabethan Singers conducted by Louis Halsey invited us to join them in a series of Sunday recitals at prestigious public schools such as Oundle, Repton, Framlingham, Ardingly and Lancing.

These were pleasant occasions. We travelled with the singers in a chartered coach and were fed and watered by the school. The alternation of madrigals and recorder consorts made a more digestible meal for teenagers than an unrelieved diet of either alone. And we got to play in some very splendid and resonant surroundings.

Among more informal engagements which do not feature in Ron's collection of concert programmes were visits to Hitchin to assist in the recorder days arranged at Benslow by Helen Wright, the then Musical Director.

We would put on a short recital in the evening and in the afternoon I and some of the others would help individual groups.

The last programme in Ron's collection is dated February 4th 1968 when we contributed Staeps' Seven Flute Dances to a concert by the New London Singers.

I think it was Ron who first announced that his life was getting too crowded to find time for the rehearsing and travelling that our 17 years of concert giving had entailed. I by now was teaching three evening classes a week in term time and was not inclined to argue.

Looking back on those years I regard them as time well spent. Performing, provided you are not booed off the stage, is a powerful promoter of self-confidence. And the intimate knowledge from the inside of the major works in the recorder consort repertoire was absolutely invaluable when I found myself running courses based on one-to-a-part playing.

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Evening Classes Morley College I found that I enjoyed my first paid teaching job with the Morley College beginners' class, then out-housed at Paragon School at Bricklayers Arms. I taught descant and treble together, using Robert Salkeld's clever First Concert Pieces which enabled students with a vocabulary of only three notes each and a self-taught pianist teacher to achieve a result that could be called music. After a term or two a few descants could be persuaded to take up the tenor and we could then graduate to Walter Bergmann's Handel Album and to Robert Salkeld's Purcell Album. At the end of the year they all became somebody else's Intermediate Class and I took on another roomful of raw beginners.

City Literary Institute The other well-established recorder classes were at the City Literary Institute in Drury Lane under Marilyn Wailes. In the late 1950s she was wanting to reduce her teaching commitments and I was asked if I would take over the lowest class. It was not a class for raw beginners, but for those who had exhausted their capacity for advancement. There were a few characters among them who made the sessions less depressing than they might have been. There was a retired actress in her eighties, voluble and witty, who complained one evening that her plastic descant would make no sound at all. I lent her a replacement, took the offending instrument home and discovered that the windway was almost completely blocked with a blue sticky substance that could only have been denture fixative. On another occasion a muscular young man was playing a Dolmetsch bakelite treble which, unaccountably, was horribly out of tune. In those days Dolmetsch plastic instruments were fitted with a loose polythene sleeve to make an airtight joint between the head and middle joint. When I took this instrument apart I found that it had been put together so clumsily and with such force that the whole sleeve had been squeezed like toothpaste down into the bore of the instrument.

A year or two later Toynbee Hall invited me to start a beginners' class. From that point there was a sequence of changes in the London recorder teaching world of which my memory can provide no more than the overall outcome. This was that Walter Bergmann gave up the Morley College classes which were taken over by Robert Salkeld, including my beginners class; I gave up the class at Toynbee Hall; and the City Lit class was transferred to Marylebone Grammar School and subsequently to Gateway School in Lisson Grove. A few years later Robert Salkeld moved back to his home territory at Newcastle upon Tyne, and Paula Campbell and I took over all the Morley College classes. I remained there, teaching one evening a week, until I reached Morley's retirement age in 1986.

Morley College again Paula took a beginners and an intermediate group. She also ran privately, but using Morley premises, the fivepart Morley Recorder Consort which performed publicly.

I took the Consort Class, consisting of two or three groups playing one-to-a-part. A fair amount of diplomacy was necessary in putting musically compatible players together and persuading the incompatible to wait for an invitation.

I remember two moments of ghastly embarrassment in particular, both involving my own daughters. Both had become accomplished players by the time they joined the class and I was completely unprepared for one of them bursting into tears when I suggested, gently as I thought, that a phrase might by played differently.

The other occasion needs some explanation. Anne Blackmann, who was then National Secretary of the Society of Recorder Players, played an expensive, ivory-ringed Moeck descant which was nevertheless wildly out of tune. I asked if she had no other instrument. She said apologetically that all she had was an old Dolmetsh bakelite instrument, long since discarded. That model had been the very first really successful plastic instrument. When it was introduced, Walter Bergmann had conducted an experiment with his Morley College class of which I was then a member, playing behind a screen a series of passages in random order on the bakelite instrument and on a Dolmetsch hand-made black-wood instrument. We had to note down which was which. The results from the other listeners were incoherent; my results were all wrong. I took this as demonstrating that there was a detectable difference and that the plastic instrument was musically superior. It did however have weaknesses. The elegant profile of the foot joint, moulded in brittle bakelite, was ridiculously fragile.

I told Anne to put the Moeck at the bottom of a drawer, to play nothing but the Dolmetsch plastic in future, but

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to take extreme care of it because it was fragile and irreplaceable. Two weeks later she left it on a chair while the group took a tea break and when they returned my daughter sat on it, shattering the foot joint beyond repair.

Recorder testing and tuning service If you are teaching a roomful of recorder beginners you judge your success by whether the combined sound is attractive, and it was very soon clear to me that success was going to be elusive because of the very variable intonation of the instruments available. And the worst offenders were the wooden instruments that students had bought under the widely held delusion that a higher price guaranteed a higher quality.

I decided that DIY retuning was going to be necessary. I knew from examination of my own instruments, and from articles in The Recorder & Music Magazine which included X-rays of historic instruments, that final tuning was done by undercutting tone holes, but nowhere could I find anything about the methodology or the acoustic principles involved. So with a little experimentation and a scraping of logical deduction I worked out the basic physics and persuaded one or two students whose instruments created the worst intonational mayhem to let me have a go at retuning them. Mercifully both parties recognised the success of my efforts. So I wrote an article on the subject which I submitted to Schotts who were then publishing the magazine. It took them three years to pluck up the courage to publish it. I have no evidence either that it persuaded anybody else to try their own retuning or that it ever justified Schotts' fear that ham-fisted readers would be encouraged to ruin expensive instruments.

My teaching and conducting provided continuing proof that treatable intonation problems were still common, and, being now retired, I began to think of offering my services more widely. To do that and charge for it I believed I would have to provide documentary evidence that I had corrected the instrument's defects. There were now on the market affordable tuning meters which read the pitch of a sound to an accuracy of onehundredth of a semitone. But such a reading on its own was meaningless because pitch depends on breath pressure which in some parts of the recorder's range could easily make a difference of a semitone. I needed to produce a graph on which I could plot the breath pressure needed to produce an even-tempered chromatic scale at A=440.

I devised a way of measuring the pressure of the air going into the windway by fixing a length of capillary plastic tubing to the underside of the mouthpiece and connecting it to a simple manometer of a water-filled Utube. It told me that the range of pressures involved lay between 5 and 100mm of water but was far too cumbersome and inaccurate for my purpose. I needed a proper pressure gauge with a dial calibrated in millimetres, but had to call on the services of the trade association before finding the only firm in the country which manufactured what I wanted.

All I now needed was a sheet of graph paper on which would be plotted the pressures needed to play the instrument in tune before and after retuning, along with a line indicating the ideal profile I was aiming at. That ideal profile would be one in which pressure increased by the same percentage at every point in the scale. But there was a problem; on ordinary graph paper that line would be a parabola, impossible to draw with a ruler. I should need to use logarithmic graph paper on which the ideal profile would be a straight line. There was still a problem: no printed graph paper came remotely close to matching my parameters. I should have to draw my own, and if it was to be intelligible to my customers it would have to follow the convention of having lines of increasing thickness for units, tens and hundreds. That meant buying proper draughtsman's pens.

Now came the really tedious part. No two adjacent horizontal lines on the graph were the same distance apart; the position of each one had to be calculated using the logarithmic function of a scientific calculator and then marked on the graph to the nearest 0.1 of a millimetre. It took several days of work but the result justified the effort. The completed graph which accompanied the retuned instrument clearly showed the improvement I had made, and by comparing my results with the ideal profile the customer could see the areas where the intonation might still need a little care.

I still needed to add one further refinement. The breath pressure needed to produce a note of the desired volume and pitch would vary with the resistance offered to the breath by the windway, which in turn would primarily depend on its height at its shallowest point. Windways normally have a gentle taper from the mouth end but have a 45ยบ chamfer at the other, making its shallowest point inaccessible to all conventional measuring devices. I knew that Dolmetsch measured windway height with tapering gauges of his own manufacture, but even if I had been able to make such a thing for myself I should have hesitated to use it on a customer's instrument for fear of damaging the delicate surfaces.

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Here my interest in microscopy came to my aid. By putting the head joint under a dissecting microscope with a measuring graticule in the eyepiece, shining a light through the windway, reflecting the light into the microscope with a tiny mirror, and focussing the microscope on the point where the light in the windway met the dark shadow of the chamfer, I could take a very accurate measurement of this otherwise inaccessible point.

I kept the service going for several years until demand fell off because the development of excellent plastic instruments led to their acceptance by the great majority of amateurs.

There were occasional eye-opening surprises. I received one very handsome treble bearing the name of a maker with an international reputation for the excellence of his instruments. The buyer had been disappointed with the intonation and sent it back to the maker who claimed to have retuned it. She was still unhappy and sent it to me. It was by far the worst instrument I had ever tested. The low F, G and A, and the high E and F could not be played in tune at whatever pressure or with whatever fingering I tried. I had to return it with a report saying that I could see no way in which it could ever be made usable.

To balance that account of failure I cannot resist the temptation to report one successful moment when I drew a bow at a venture and hit the bullseye. A customer had sent me a Moeck descant asking me specifically to adjust the middle D which was very flat. I tested it but before I could send my report she phoned to ask how I was getting on. I told her that there were a few notes that needed adjustment but that the D was not among them. “Then whyever am I having such repeated difficulties with it?”, she wondered. I said that I guessed she might have been playing the five-part fantasias of Michael East with someone using a Dolmetsch descant.

There was a moment of stunned silence before she said, “How on earth could you possibly have known that?”

Having played and coached these lovely fantasias I knew that many of them ended with a unison middle D for the two upper instruments. That was a safe choice for Michael East writing for viols on which it is the highest open string, which one might expect to be carefully tuned by the player before play commenced. On the recorder, however, it is a booby trap. Any canny arranger would avoid like the plague writing a unison descant D on a final semibreve because it is by far the most difficult note to control. And the reference to a Dolmetsch descant was not pure chance either; from my experience I could say with a fair degree of confidence that if a middle D on a Dolmetsch was out of tune it would be sharp, whereas on a Moeck it would be flat.

The plastic instrument survey Around this time – the early 1980s - there were significant developments in the manufacture of plastic recorders with the introduction of a new material, ABS. And if I promise never to spell it out again perhaps you will permit me to add that its initials stand for acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene. It is difficult to imagine a material better suited to the manufacture of a recorder. It is strong – virtually impossible to break in normal use. It is thermally stable, expanding and contracting very little with changes of temperature. It is totally impervious to moisture. And perhaps most significant of all, it can be moulded to such close tolerances that air-tight push-fit joints can be made, doing away with the troublesome twine, cork and polythene which had previously been necessary.

New names were appearing, including international giants such as Yamaha, and I knew from models that occasionally turned up in evening classes that some of them should have been carrying a musical health warning. The idea came to me that I should be providing a useful service to the recorder community if I used the equipment and expertise I had acquired for the testing and tuning service to prepare a Which-type factual report comparing the performance of all the plastic instruments on the market.

The project, however, was not without danger because it might involve being critical of products of powerful corporations. Publishing a simple graph showing the breath pressure required for each note would be safe enough, but it would be meaningless unless the figures could be compared with an idealised profile like the one I offered to my customers; and that profile had no greater authority than my opinion. I needed a profile that carried much greater authority, and it took me quite a long time to think of a way to get it.

The solution was to assemble a panel of four well-known teachers, to play to them an in-tune diatonic scale on each instrument, asking them to grade the resulting sound as under-blown, acceptable or over-blown, (a) for consort use and (b) for solo use. By averaging the results I constructed a graph of acceptable pressures and then made it into an idealised smooth curve using regression analysis.

The results were published first in The American Recorder, covering models available in the US, and then in May 1983 in Recorder & Music Magazine, using models available in the UK.

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I got no feedback from the publication of the report. Reading it now 30 years later, I can understand why. I had gone to such lengths to make my results legally unassailable that I had made them completely indigestible.

The mere mention of regression analysis would have warned the average recorder player to give up now on the attempt to make sense of it all.

With hindsight I think I could have been rather more courageous in revealing my own conclusion from the survey, which was that for anyone wanting to play consort music one-to-a-part, to join in SRP massed playing or to play in a recorder orchestra, the Yamaha 302B range was going to be the first choice.

I now always carried two spare Yamaha descants in my instrument case, and I remember in particular one incident in which they came into their own.

I was taking an ensemble session at Tavistock, playing a Purcell four-part Fantasia. The sound from the four descants all sitting together in the front row was sour enough to turn litmus red. I got the four to play the passage again concentrating on staying in tune with each other. No improvement. I checked their instruments.

Two were playing Yamaha plastic; two were using Moeck Rottenburgs. I persuaded these two, somewhat reluctantly, to borrow my two Yamahas. They tried the passage again and what emerged was a sound I had never heard in all my decades of teaching and conducting and was never to hear again – four recorders so perfectly in tune that it sounded like one superhuman instrument. And this was from four very human run-ofthe-mill amateurs.

Ireland An Grianan The name is Irish for “The Sunny Place”. It is situated near the village of Termonfechin, about five miles from Drogheda in Co. Louth on the East coast , some 30 miles north of Dublin. The house in 80 acres of parkland was previously known as Newtown House, a name it still bears on the Ordnance Survey map. In the 19th century it became the home of the Lentayne family and its connection with the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA) began in 1929 when Mrs Lentayne allowed them to use it for their annual summer school.

After the war it became the Bord Failte Tearmon Hotel.

In 1954 it was bought by the ICA with a grant from the Kellogg Foundation and in 1956 with another grant they built the large Kellogg Hall. Adjacent to it, and built in the early 1970s, is the Horticultural College, under separate management, providing a two-year residential course for girls. It is now closed but the recorder course still has the use of its large classrooms and its gymnasium. Back in the 1970s, the course also regularly used its bedrooms.

In the 1990s the ICA caused much fluttering in the An Grianan dovecote by appointing a MAN as Director.

James Creed was a fundraiser and property developer with no background in education and over the next few years, with grants from the Kellogg Foundation and from commercial sponsors, he absolutely transformed the place. The subterranean kitchen with the rats and the dumb waiter to the cramped dining room above were replaced with a spacious and airy dining hall and a lavishly equipped kitchen on the same level. The range of 19th century farm buildings which had housed the pottery and weaving rooms and the demonstration kitchen were swept away and replaced with a quadrangle of large teaching rooms and dozens of single bedrooms. His final project was to build along the drive to the house four luxury four-bedroom houses which would provide income for the ICA from letting to rich Japanese golfers visiting the golf club being developed at neighbouring Seapoint. It was understood that if there were vacancies in August the recorder course might use them.

The facilities are not quite up to the standard of some residential adult education establishments with all single or double en suite rooms. But none of them could provide the 100 plus beds the course now needs; none of them could match the warmth of the welcome from the An Grianan staff or the taste and texture of the homemade bread; and none of them can match that two-mile stretch of dune-backed, empty sandy shore just 20 minutes walk away across the golf links.

Joe Groocock's course 1968 In the '50s and '60s I had deputised for John Beckett whenever he was offered an engagement more appealing than teaching a group of recorder players in Ealing. But it was a complete surprise when in May 1968 he asked if I could take his place on a week-long course in Ireland. This was an elementary music course, now in its second year, aimed at primary school teachers, consisting mainly of choral singing but with the addition of elementary recorder. The course was led by John's old piano teacher, Dr Joseph Groocock,

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whom he obviously revered, but who was not a recorder player. John in the normal way would never have passed up an opportunity to join Joe Groocock in his beloved native Ireland, but an invitation to play harpsichord accompanying Dame Joan Sutherland at the Edinburgh Festival was irresistible. The organisers were offering to accommodate our whole family, we had no holiday arranged and we had never visited Ireland.

We decided to accept.

We were met off the ferry by Nancy O'Neill, organiser from the educational body which financed the course.

She was the embodiment of the Irish reputation for hospitality. She settled us into a boarding house in Greystones, a seaside resort south of Dublin, provided a limousine and chauffeur to take us to the course at An Grianan and to bring us back after the course to Greystones where she organised a few day trips into the Wicklow mountains. We were beginning to fall in love with Ireland. Joe Groocock and I got on well and before the course ended he invited me back for the following year. With the enthusiastic backing of the family I agreed.

1969 and Achill Island After that first course in 1968 I realised that to get the best out of a family holiday in Ireland I needed independent transport. I was 47, had never driven and had never felt any pressing need to own a car in London. I decided nevertheless that I must learn to drive and would hire a car for the week following the course from one of the vast number of car-hire firms offering their wares in Irish travel literature.

I got my licence at the first attempt in May and set about hiring a car, only to find that twelve months possession of a clean licence was a standard requirement. I tried one firm after another and had almost given up hope when I found a firm who in response to my pleas that at my advanced age and with a car full of my own progeny I was unlikely to be a reckless driver agreed to provide one in return for a massive excess clause.

Nancy O'Neill managed to exceed the warmth even of last year's welcome. On the morning after we returned in our limousine from An Grianan she escorted us to the car-hire firm in Dun Laoghaire and then led us sedately into and right through Dublin until we reached the open road to our destination on the West coast.

My first solo drive to Achill Island was 307km, incredibly tiring for me, but uneventful. The three girls now 15, 12 and 9, squashed together in a seat designed for two slim adults, were quiet as mice throughout - no doubt as tense as their driver.

We had chosen Achill Island because the guide books told us of its rugged scenery and the map showed it was very sparsely populated and could be expected to be unspoiled and not crowded.

We had booked a week with Mrs McCarthy in the village of Dooagh. We found we were all five sharing one room. We went to bed promptly and I slept the sleep of the dead despite the broken spring protruding from the mattress cover just beside my pillow. Before retiring we were asked when we would like breakfast. When we suggested 08.30 it caused obvious consternation. It was only later we discovered this was because at that hour the two teenage McCarthy daughters would still be asleep under the dining room table. We were persuaded to settle for 09.30.

What we did not know was that Achill Island, because of its remoteness and the relaxed attitude of its authorities to matters of law and order, had become a summer Mecca for the wilder elements of the Irish teenage population. The great sandy beach at Keem was crowded with tents and every Mrs McCarthy on the island made hay while the sun shone; surveying that bleak landscape you could well believe that what went into the hayloft in August would have to last a twelve-month. One evening at about 11.30 when the girls were safely asleep in bed Kitty and I drove down to the centre of the village to take a look at the night life. It was noisy and quite scary with boy racers in old bangers tearing up and down the narrow road. And the view through the window of the bar made one think this was what the Black Hole of Calcutta might have been like if floodlit. Achill in August had been a poor choice for a family holiday but it did not in the least diminish our pleasure at having been invited to participate in another course at An Grianan in 1970.

An Grianan 1970 What went wrong with the 1970 course I never discovered. Joe Groocock told me only that the arrangements had been mismanaged and he had withdrawn. By the time of the 1969 course, however, one or two Dublin recorder amateurs had heard of it and enrolled, including Arthur and Bernadette Agnew and Corrie and Patricia Flanagan and I had been able to separate them from the beginners. With my own family and Joe's

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wife, Doreen, I formed a viable intermediate group which played Schmeltzer in seven parts. This greatly whetted their appetite and they enrolled again for 1970 bringing a handful of other players of a similar standard with them. The authorities at An Grianan allowed this group to be treated as a course, filling the places left by the absent singers and recorder beginners with a dressmaking class.

It was a happy week, culminating in a performance at three levels on the An Grianan staircase of a three-choir Gabrieli canzon, which miraculously managed to hold together when several dressmakers, in a hurry to get to their own couture display in the Kellogg Hall, forced their way between the players during the performance.

That evening was spent in earnest discussion of the future. There was obvious enthusiasm among Irish recorder players for a summer school, but their numbers were hardly large enough to support one. An Grianan could be expected to welcome, especially in August, a course that could fill their beds, but which they did not have to organise themselves. For my part, I knew from my years with the Oriel Consort that there was no more satisfying experience for any player than playing music as chamber music. And I saw in the Irish situation a chance to organise a course based on playing one-to-a-part, something that was available in profusion for string players in England in evening classes, summer schools and weekend courses, but so far as I knew had never been offered to recorder players.

In retrospect I marvel that we ever summoned up the nerve to go ahead. The enthusiasm of the Irish players was obvious but to be viable we would need to attract far larger numbers of British players away from wellestablished courses with well-known tutors and persuade them to undertake a long and expensive journey to a course of a sort they had never before attended, with a team of largely unknown tutors. I knew that once they had visited the beach and toured the antiquities of the Boyne valley they would be back for more, but could we attract them in the first place?

Fortunately An Grianan, accustomed to catering for the wives of subsistence farmers, shared my propensity for operating on a shoestring, and their charges enabled us to set an extremely low course fee. An Grianan also agreed a very flexible deal. They would reserve all their accommodation for us for the third week of August without a deposit on condition we gave them a firm booking by April 1st. Any beds we did not book they would be free to fill with their own courses. Our informal committee of Wyatts, Flanagans and Agnews agreed we should give it a try, Pat Flanagan agreed to handle applications and take charge of liaison with An Grianan on bed allocation, and I set about drafting a brochure and application form with a detailed questionnaire, got it printed, sent out a stock of copies to each SRP branch secretary, and kept my fingers crossed. My worries were unfounded; we received 80 applications.

The First Anglo-Irish Recorder Course Before I get down to explaining how the course was organised, I think I should explain the background to my thinking. For me there was no experience to match playing Haydn string quartets with friends in one's own home. The recorder, I knew, could provide a reasonably close approximation to that experience, and its repertoire, although very much more limited, was almost all written as chamber music. Yet all that the recorder establishment offered was playing that chamber music 10 to a part in a church hall with the SRP or studying the minutiae of a Handel sonata in a technique class with 30 others at a summer school. What I wanted to do was to equip amateurs with the ability to play a Holborne Galliard with four friends at home. There are specialised skills needed for that which can remain undeveloped if you always play under a conductor surrounded by others all playing your part: (a) the ability to count and keep a mental metronome going in your head; (b) the ability to disentangle the cross rhythms of 17C music; (c) the ability to hear the bar-lines in the music and use them to find your way back when lost; (d) the ability to follow the harmonic sense of the music and detect when others are lost, and the courage to stop the music in that event; (e) the social skills to keep others relaxed in your presence and to know when to offer leadership and when to defer; (f) a knowledge of the repertoire sufficient to enable the choice of suitable music.

The programme I devised would, I hoped, help to develop most of these skills while still providing a memorable musical experience.

I decided on two 90 minute sessions of one-to-a-part playing at which regular attendance would be expected.

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The first at 09.30 would be for permanent groups of six chosen for their compatibility who would play together every day. The second at 16.30 would be for non-permanent groups chosen without regard for compatibility arranged so that each day students played works of different size from trios to octets with players whom they had not previously encountered. The period after lunch would be free for the beach or the Boyne valley. The rest of the day would offer lectures, master classes, ensemble playing and choir, and the final session would be massed playing of a large scale work. Attendance at all these sessions would be a matter of choice.

The regime for the permanent and non-permanent groups was designed to match so far as possible the conditions of domestic music-making. There would be no set music and no appointed leaders. One member of each group would be appointed music monitor, charged simply with choosing a selection of music from the hire library which consisted of my entire collection of consort music all housed in used Board of Trade manilla envelopes, marked E, M or D to indicate the level of difficulty. Each group would have the services of a tutor for 30 minutes of the 90 minute session. No doubt those 30 minutes would be instructive, but it was in the remaining 60 minutes that I fondly hoped the more intangible social skills might be acquired. In that 60 minutes participants would be experiencing a situation entirely new to them – making unsupervised music with strangers.

The choice of compatible players for the permanent groups was obviously crucial if they were to have a rewarding week. Much time and thought had gone into it before the course started using the replies to the questionnaire that had accompanied the application form. Once the course was under way tutors were briefed to keep an eye open for misfits and for the very first course we distributed a questionnaire asking players to state whether they felt they were above or below the standard of the rest of the group. Spotting a misfit was much easier than finding a vacant slot in a group that would benefit from his transfer.

The application form questionnaire had sought to facilitate group formation by asking for the names of other players with whom the applicant would like to be grouped. We discovered that although Miss A had nominated Mr B, Mr B would run a mile rather than share with Miss A. We hastily reworded the questionnaire for the following year to ask for the names of others with whom the applicant had agreed to share a group.

The application form warned that the course required the ability to hold a part on one's own while sightreading. It was clear in the first year that a few participants had never done this and had no idea how different it was from playing in a class. There was also a problem in forming viable groups because only one player in 10 owned a bass. We somehow skated over these difficulties, but in the second year, with a significant drop in the number from England and a small increase in Irish numbers the problem could not be overlooked. We had around a dozen players, most of them playing only descant, whose presence would wreck any otherwise decent group. If there had been just one or two we could perhaps have persuaded them to sit out the one-to-apart groups, but not with that number. Instead we formed Group X and gave it a tutor for the whole 90 minutes.

For the next year Group X remained in the programme, but steadily rising standards then made it unnecessary.

1972 The 1971 course was generally agreed to have been a success, so a course was booked and advertised for 1972. But the Northern Ireland Troubles were beginning to spill south of the border. In February the IRA burned the British Embassy in Dublin, the British now regarded Dublin as being almost as dangerous as Belfast and the tourist traffic from England came almost to a standstill. If our English contingent were frightened off, the course would incur a heavy loss. After anxious consultations we decided to go ahead, guessing that those who had actually experienced the peaceful atmosphere of An Grianan would find it difficult to envisage its being bombed. The numbers were down a little but the course was not going to collapse for lack of numbers.

It was however to face a really serious threat to its future from a totally unexpected direction. When we arrived we were told that the previous week there had been a number of stomach upsets, attributable, they thought, to the fact that the course had been a Mother & Baby Week. Within days course members started to go down with diarrhoea and vomiting and by the middle of the week three of the five tutors were in bed, including Dick and Monica Coles. Dick was a doctor, had seen through the windows of the kitchen the rats running over the working surfaces, and knew the connection between rat urine and Weil's Disease. He declared firmly that he and Monica would not be coming again.

After the course, a delegation was sent to ICA headquarters led by Stan Corran, one of our players and a man of some substance in Ireland as head brewer at Guinness. The housekeeper, Mrs Curtain, was dismissed and went off to run a boarding house in Galway. She was replaced by an ICA stalwart, Mrs Norman, widow of a

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Church of Ireland vicar, well used to keeping a parish in order and bearing a remarkable likeness to Margaret Rutherford. She was a splendid choice. We became very fond of her and she of us, and there were no more health scares.

The music parcels The quantity of music we took to the course consisting of my entire consort collection and the stock of music supplied by Schott and Faber on a sale or return basis was more than we could possibly carry, so it was packed in 10kg parcels and sent by post to An Grianan to await our arrival. Ireland had a 20% VAT on printed music which in the UK was zero-rated. In 1971 nevertheless our parcels arrived without incident but in 1972 what awaited us was a note from the Customs post at Dundalk station saying that the parcels were awaiting collection on payment of the appropriate VAT. Realising that this might be a problem I had consulted my Board of Trade colleagues dealing with exports to Ireland who had sent me a copy of the appropriate regulations. In Ireland, as in the UK, printed books were exempt from VAT, so the Irish authorities had carefully added a sentence defining a music book as “printed music in booklet form, stitched or stapled”. Most of my own music was not stitched or stapled, so at Dundalk I picked a parcel that I knew contained music from Schott which would be stapled, invited the Customs officer to open it, pointed out the staples and successfully claimed that the parcels were books and not subject to VAT. But we never again took the risk of sending our music by post.

Power cuts In 1978 an unsuccessful attempt to solve the Northern Ireland problem with a power-sharing agreement caused widespread industrial unrest, including a strike of electricity workers which resulted in planned power cuts. We were warned that on Thursday we should lose power at 20.00. We decided to try to keep playing. We went down into Drogheda and bought four 12V. inspection lamps and a supply of flex, hung the lamps through the upper windows of the Kellogg Hall, arranged the chairs with their backs to the window and drew up four cars beneath the windows. When the lights went out the car owners, to a great cheer from inside, clipped the flex to their battery terminals, producing just enough light for playing to continue. Afterwards, on a stage with practically no light at all, Keith Rogers and Pam Flanagan produced a memorable performance of the first movement of Brahms' E minor cello sonata.

It was in this same year that the An Grianan office received a phone call in the early evening saying that there was a bomb in the Kellogg Hall. The Irish by this time had developed a nose for false alarms, and Corrie Flanagan, who brought me the news from the office, advised that it was almost certainly a hoax, and that we should ignore it and certainly not broadcast it. It was good advice, but I would much have preferred not to be the one taking the final decision.

Misfits In my class teaching and conducting I had come across a few individuals who seemed to have rhythmic difficulties far greater than normal, who showed no improvement despite their earnest endeavours. In massed playing they were carried along by the others, but in a one-to-a-part situation they became a real headache because, particularly when sight-reading, they repeatedly got lost. In a non-permanent group this could ruin the enjoyment of the others for a whole session; but in a permanent group it could ruin a whole week. We had four regulars in this category and what made them particularly difficult to deal with was that they were all very keen and earnest, had no conception that they were different, and were not helped by being given a simple part; they could get lost in a passage of four repeated semi-breves.

Matters came to a head when I was coaching one of the four (we will call her Jean) in a trio with two teenagers. They were playing a very simple trio in 2/4 by James Hook and she was on treble. After she had broken down three times I said to her “Let's try this. Don't try to play the notes. Just listen to the two girls on their descants and you tap out a rhythm accompaniment in quavers on the music stand.” Her taps were completely random and bore no relation to the music.

That crystallised in my mind the conclusion that this failing (which I christened rhythm blindness) was an incurable neurological condition and that accepting sufferers on a course of this type was the equivalent of accepting a colour-blind man on a watercolour course.

I subsequently formulated a theory to explain what caused it. I had read that perfect pitch – the ability to

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identify a heard frequency and reproduce it later - was found only in people who had been introduced to practical music-making by the age of three. I had also read that if a baby is unlucky enough to be born with a medical condition that requires a bandage over one eye for the first few months of life, that eye will remain for ever sightless because the neural pathways to the optic centres of the brain have not been laid down.

The essence of rhythm is the ability to remember and reproduce the distance in time between repeated stimuli.

It seemed reasonable to infer that the laying down of the neural pathways to permit this might also be possible only in the first three years of infancy, with the result that children who were never bounced on a parent's knee to the accompaniment of “Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Coss� might grow up rhythm blind.

The final chapter of Jean's story is rather poignant. At the end of the course I called all the tutors together and we agreed that we should take the unprecedented step of asking her not to come again. I wrote in the gentlest tones I could manage that her particular rhythmic problems made it difficult to fit her into the unique structure of the Irish course, and that we felt she would find a more congenial environment for her obvious love of music-making in one of the more conventional recorder summer schools. I sent the letter and heard nothing for three weeks. Then a beautifully wrapped parcel arrived from Australia containing a letter from her explaining that she had gone straight from the course to do a lecture tour in Australia and that her hosts at Canberra University had taken her up into the local mountains where she had spotted several exotic lichens which she had collected, knowing of my interest in them.

A misfit which had the potential to be truly awful occurred when an Israeli grandmother who had been to the course several times wrote asking permission to bring her 11 year old granddaughter, who she said was brilliant and could play anything. I knew that an 11 year old might well be able to rattle off a Telemann concerto at a speed to dazzle a fond grandmother but incapable of handling the rhythm of a Holborne Galliard. I replied asking the grandmother whether she was certain that the girl could sight-read the sort of repertoire she would encounter on the course. Grandmother said she was, so against my better judgement I gave my consent.

The first session was a complete shambles. What the fond grandmother had not revealed was that the girl did not have a word of English. So when, as I had feared, she repeatedly broke down it was almost impossible to start again. Fortunately a solution to all these problems was ready to hand, which contained a pleasing element of poetic justice. For all the remaining one-to-a-part sessions I put grandmother and granddaughter together, instructing Granny to act as interpreter and to let granddaughter double her part.

Social blindness was less crippling than rhythm blindness, but still caused headaches for the organiser. Where did you put the autocrat who insisted on providing unwanted leadership? There were four such who came from time to time to my courses in England. Two came from the USA where brashness is more common than here; the others were an English couple. One year when their visits coincided, despairing of finding suitable niches for all of them, I decided to put them together. They might fight like Kilkenny cats but at least it might teach them a lesson by showing them what unwelcome guidance felt like. After the course I asked them how the week had gone. They all declared it was the best group they had ever had.

Tutors From the beginning I set my face against bringing in celebrity tutors like Hans Ulrich Staeps and Ferdinand Conrad as Bamforth and Martin did with the Northern Recorder Course. And I went even further by paying all the tutors exactly the same as I paid myself, which was the lowest figure I thought they could accept with dignity.

Until 1977 John Beckett, Paul Clark and I formed the core of the tutoring team, with a succession of others joining us for a year or two. None was an established figure in the recorder world; all were, like myself, essentially amateurs, most with experience in running SRP branches. They included Jane Ward, Jennifer Robinson who was Joe Groocock's daughter, Roger Jarvis and Keith Rogers, both from Belfast, and Valerie Butt from London.

Also in the team was Marion Doherty. She and Bernard Hayden had been students in 1971. By 1975 they were married and she was a tutor. As she still is nearly 40 years later under her maiden name, which she resumed when she and Bernard separated.

In 1977 I was invited to teach on the Northern Recorder Course where I met and was greatly impressed by Philip and Margaret Thorby. I asked whether they would be interested in joining the Irish team. They would, but only as a couple. The team of tutors for the 1978 Irish course had been advertised and the finances would not run to two extra tutors so I put the idea aside for later. Then early in 1978 John Beckett said that he was finding it difficult to devote a whole week to teaching amateurs and would like to be excused. At the same time

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I learned that Philip had fallen out with Denis Bamforth. So Philip and Margaret joined the team and a new era began.

Philip introduced Marion Scott, and Pamela Flanagan was recruited, providing a link to the local administration. And with Paul Clark, Marion Doherty and myself that remained the recorder line-up until I retired in 2004, but augmented occasionally by viol tutors such as Joan Wess and Peter Wendland.

Families From the beginning the Wyatt, Agnew and Flanagan children had come to An Grianan almost as matter of course. Most of them were able to join in as players. And their presence contributed strongly to the informal, domestic atmosphere that I felt was appropriate for chamber music. An Grianan was helpful, charging only half their already very reasonable rate; the availability in August of the vacant bedrooms of the Horticultural College next door meant they were not displacing adult students; and the access to the beach turned their attendance into a seaside holiday. So we began to advertise places for non-players. That move, I believe, did more than anything else in building the unique atmosphere that the course came to enjoy.

Over the years the course developed a vigorous tradition of extra-curricular activities which have left me and no doubt many participants with the most vivid memories of An Grianan.

Quizzes Anagrams were initially popular. In the weeks before the course we would gather round the table with a Scrabble set and try to make a comic sentence out of the letters of a composer's name. When we had a dozen we would inscribe them on A3 sheets and display them in public rooms around the house before the course started. There would be a small prize for the first correct set of answers. People would form syndicates and huddle together in the bar at night. When that became too easy we made an anagram of a composer's name and one of his works. That certainly slowed completion times.

A variant of the anagram was the buried composer in which contestants were given a printed narrative where the dismembered corpse was interred in sentences such as “To cure toothache rub in iodine”.

Limericks The rules were very simple. It had to relate to music of the sort made at An Grianan and it had to contain an Irish place name. The winner would be the one which got the most laughs from the assembled tutors on Friday morning. A truly outlandish and apparently unrhymable name, of which Ireland has a plentiful supply, would obviously be a bonus point. The competition produced a wonderful show of wit, but leading the field was Mary Carson, a chemistry lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin. One of her best was in a year when we had heard one evening a gemshorn trio of almost comic ineptitude.

A student from Borris-in-Ossory After studying an old music glossary Met his end at the zoo Through the mistaken view That gemshorns are got from rhinoceri The other was found pinned on the notice board the morning after Mary had overheard me mispronouncing the name of a village we had visited.

A tourist in Ireland astray And seeking to find out the way Should know Ballybofey Does NOT rhyme with coffee But rather with café au lait A limerick, not by Mary, which has lodged in my memory was A devout treble player from Maam Played Handel and Bach without qualm

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But when asked to play Britten She flinched as if bitten And recited the 23rd Psalm The beach The first communal beach activity was in the early years. A farm tractor had shed two bales of straw on the track from house to beach and Roderick Whitfield, a non-playing husband in the party, saw the opportunity for a bonfire and lugged them down to the sand. During the afternoon others scoured the beach for driftwood and by dusk there was a truly impressive pyramid of timber awaiting the match. Mrs Norman brought sausages and a portable gas ring from the kitchen, and when the evening ensemble session was over we all trooped down, including Sister Mary Angela, the fiddling nun, lit the bonfire, cooked and shared the sausages, and then, as the nun, utterly incongruous in her black and white habit played Irish jigs and reels on her fiddle, we, like owl and pussy cat, hand in hand on the edge of the strand, danced by the light of the bonfire.

As the number of children increased we decided to choose a day when the tide and the weather forecast were favourable and announce a sand-castle competition with junior and senior classes and a prize from the tuck shop for the junior class. Initially one of the tutors was appointed a judge but a year or two later when we had a distinguished foreign visitor we asked him to do the judging, and he, having some architectural knowledge, introduced a mock-serious note, commenting in a learned fashion on the stability and layout of the structures.

Other outside judges have followed suit.

The Ceilidh The first ceilidh was in 1973 when the Irish contingent brought in a band from Drogheda who gave us what I imagine was a traditional ceilidh mixture. There were Irish dances; a Victorian ballad about a poor, blind boy, sung seriously but of such OTT sentimentality that in England it would have been played for laughs; recitations and mournful traditional Irish songs sung in Irish.

Thereafter we made our own ceilidh every Thursday night. For the dancing Paul Clark was usually on piano, Monica Dewey provided an excellent rhythm section on the spoons, occasionally switching to her brass (sic) recorder when the tune needed beefing up. Marion Scott's husband, Philip, added a lively fiddle, and there was always someone in the party with a bodhran. Pamela Flanagan was the caller, miraculously marshalling clumsy English legs into a routine; Arthur Agnew sang a song in a voice that might well have passed for Count John McCormack; Mavis Johns offered a recitation; and Douglas Sealy sang traditional Irish songs in Irish. We could not understand a word, but the songs told most plainly of the sorrows of Ireland's past. The ceilidh was the time when the course collectively let its hair down. But for me the most moving experience of all my years at An Grianan was at a ceilidh listening to Sydney Stokes, a remarkable character, now well into her eighties and very frail, singing a Dowland song remembered from her youth.

Sean Keane There was so much home-made music that we normally felt no need for imported performers, but John Beckett gave us a rare and memorable treat when he persuaded Sean Keane to play for us. Sean was a traditional fiddler who came to prominence as a member of The Chieftains. John playing Giles Farnaby and Byrd on virginals took turns with Sean playing unaccompanied Irish jigs and reels. Kitty and I as string players were fascinated by Sean's technique, but although sitting within touching distance we could neither of us work out how he produced his ornaments because of the lightning speed at which they were executed.

The Arrangers' Competition.

This became a regular and popular feature of Wednesday after morning coffee. There was a prize of ÂŁ10 for the winning entry, the arranger had to get together and rehearse the performers and present to Paul Clark by Tuesday evening scores of the arrangement and if possible of the work on which it was based. The tutors, armed with Paul's preliminary assessment, sat in judgement behind the table on the stage. While they agreed their verdict in the drawing room, volunteers entertained the audience in the Kellogg Hall.

In the early years Chris May, a regular on the course, who already had a reputation as resident arranger for Paula Campbell's Morley College group, ran off with most of the prize money, but as the event prompted more people to try their hand he faced stiffer competition, and some very successful arrangements appeared.

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One unsuccessful competitor to whom my heart went out was the one who spotted in Bach's Magnificat a delicious contralto aria with accompaniment for two flutes and continuo, and worked out that transposed up a minor third it would fit beautifully on recorders. What he did not know was that Bach had had the same idea two hundred and fifty years earlier and that Bach's version was in Schott's catalogue.

The Course Concert - and after Fitting everything into the course concert was sometimes tricky. Room had to be found for all the peripheral activities – the choir, the recorder orchestra, the renaissance band and the winning arrangement. But it also had to provide space for any of the permanent groups that felt their achievement merited display. The management's selection of items was usually accepted without question. There was one year however when a French group made such a fuss about my polite rejection of their offering that I relented. Not until the gemshorns some years later did we have to listen to so shambolic a performance.

It was John Beckett who in the very first year of the course refused to recognise the end of the concert as the end of music making and started a tradition which still continues. When everyone had had their tea or coffee and slice of barm brack (or fetched something from the bar), he rounded up all the string players he could find (including a startled Sr Mary Angela) and with himself and Paul Clark on recorder and Kitty as solo violin pulled them all through Brandenburg 4. The more adventurous course members then joined in finding other works for recorders and strings in the library. And so it continued until close to midnight. If the moon were full and the night balmy some of the younger ones would still not have had enough and would make for the beach for a moonlight bathe.

Other Courses Easter Early Music After I retired from the Civil Service in 1977 my new-found leisure enabled me, encouraged by the success of the Irish course, to start similar one-to-a-part courses over here. At around this time Peter Powell, a Welsh regular on my weekend courses, had persuaded his contacts at Swansea University that there was scope for a Welsh early music week and suggested they should ask me to run it. So in 1978 an Easter Course started at Clyne Castle in Swansea. The team of tutors was essentially the same as for An Grianan. After a few years the University withdrew its sponsorship and we assumed financial responsibility ourselves and dropped the Welsh connection. From that point the course lived a nomadic existence. It moved from Clyne Castle to Gregynog, to Southlands College, first at Wimbledon and then at Roehampton, and even emigrated for one year to An Grianan. Eventually it settled down at St George's School at Ascot where it continues to flourish.

Theobalds Park The Irish course became very popular and over-subscribed, leaving applicants on a waiting list. This sparked the notion that there might be support for a similar summer course in England. We started in 1979 by booking Woodlands Park near Cobham, a residential education centre belonging to the Borough of Haringey. Two years later we had the opportunity to move to Theobalds Park in Enfield which I had encountered when invited to run weekends for them. We continued courses there in early August very happily until Enfield decided to economise by closing and converting it into a luxury hotel.

Both these courses were successful and I believe enjoyable both for tutors and students, but neither came anywhere near matching the magical family holiday atmosphere of An Grianan.

On one occasion at Theobalds we found we had five contrabasses. This was the sort of opportunity that Paul Clark could not resist; overnight he composed a five-part canon for the five instruments. He at first thought of calling it Contraceptives, but fearing Catholic offence changed it to Contra-indications. Not content with that he added text so that it could be sung simultaneously as a round. He found just the words he needed in a packet of Kwells: “This product may cause drowsiness. If affected do not drive or operate machinery.�

Kelly College In the late 1990s I was asked by Dr. Daphne Medley, an enthusiastic regular on my courses, to organise a course in Devon. She had already found a location at Kelly College, a Victorian public school for the sons of naval officers, just outside Tavistock. It was fully booked for the Easter and summer holidays but available at

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Christmas, provided we avoided New Year's Day which was reserved for the Hunt Ball.

We had to scratch around for tutors but had a viable level of demand from players. But it was far from ideal.

The campus was scattered over the hillside behind the college, and with the residential block half a mile from the dining room, the caretaker running a minibus service between the two at meal times. The main college had been empty and unheated over the Xmas break and, being built like a cathedral, had a thermal time lag of about three days. So if they switched on the boilers when we arrived on a Monday we shivered until midweek.

The winter of our second visit was particularly severe with the Tamar river frozen over. After our third visit Kelly College announced that our January bookings had proved unremunerative and they did not wish to renew them. I was not sorry.

Weekend Courses Belstead House Throughout this period I was involved in several weekend courses. Belstead was a delightful Jacobean house on the outskirts of Ipswich, acquired by the County Council as judges' lodgings but made available when the assizes were not in session to the local education authority as a residential adult education centre.

I was introduced to it back in the 1960s by Walter Bergmann who invited me as his assistant on an early music weekend. Also, there was the Jaye Consort of Viols led by the quirky Francis Baines. Over supper on the first evening Walter and Francis had a spirited argument about ornamentation, Walter maintaining that performers should restrict themselves to what the composer wrote. In the session that followed the consort concluded their contribution with a selection of fantasias and at an appropriate point in the final piece Francis, looking straight at Walter throughout, launched into an extravagant cadenza of ornamentation. It must have been extempore and it was quite brilliant.

Belstead set aside two weekends each year in spring and autumn for recorder weekends, and for more than 30 years until I retired in 2004 Paul Clark, Paula Campbell and I provided it. I came to love that old house, perhaps even more than An Grianan because of its more intimate scale. And even as I write this I am filled with wonder at the sheer good fortune that enabled me to spend my weekends year after year at public expense in beautiful surroundings, doing what I loved best, which was making music with fellow amateurs.

The Hill, Abergavenny This was one of the many residential adult education colleges set up by local authorities in a flush of post-war liberal enthusiasm. Michael Muskett had run recorder weekends for them which were not well supported; Peter Powell, who came from nearby Brecon, recommended they invite me instead. So from the early 1980s to 2004, usually twice a year, Paul Clark, Paula Campbell and I ran one-to-a-part weekends there. They followed the same pattern as at Belstead. I would arrange the programme beforehand with alternation of permanent, non-permanent and ensemble sessions, and would carefully select the various groups. The result would be typed up, along with playing room allocation, tutors' rota and music monitors and posted on the noticeboard, with a copy for each tutor. Thus everyone knew for every moment of the weekend where and with whom he or she was supposed to be. One might have expected that this degree of regimentation would be felt oppressive, but I never detected the slightest resentment. Participants were, of course, free to choose their music from my library, which towards the end had grown so large that it needed a sizeable galvanised trailer to transport it.

Participants also had Saturday afternoon free, and there can surely be no area of the UK more richly endowed with ancient churches, abbeys and castles than the area around Abergavenny. We tutors certainly took full advantage of our free Saturday afternoons. It was as well we did. Like so many other similar institutions, it has since been closed.

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Chapter 5 Chairmanships Non-Combatant Corps In the Army, members of the NCC were ineligible for promotion, a restriction that nobody found irksome except the Pioneer Corps NCOs who were in charge of us private soldiers. We were herded together in haylofts, stables and cellars while the NCOs found themselves something superior which they could call a sergeants' mess and in which they could keep themselves to themselves. The last thing they wanted was to share our accommodation. But unless one of them did so there was no way a stableful of us privates could be marched neatly to the cook-house at mealtimes because none of us had any authority over the others. The solution was, by Army standards, surprisingly democratic: to let each section choose a Section Leader who would wear no insignia other than a white plaited lanyard in his epaulette, get no extra pay, have no disciplinary powers, but be responsible for falling his mates into three ranks and marching them to their destination. He would also speak for the men in the highly unlikely event that the officers wanted their opinion.

In one of my earliest postings I was nominated for the job. This I found totally inexplicable. I was almost the youngest in the section and would have ranked myself as having quite the lowest level of self-confidence. The system fell into disuse later on, but for the first two years of my service I was usually wearing a lanyard. At the time I ascribed this to the fact that I was picked on as someone too nervous to cause trouble, but my later experience suggests that my fellow conchies may have detected some leadership quality of which I was completely unaware. Was it that I appeared to have a ready command of language? Or was it because as a singer I was not afraid to make myself heard?

Back in Civvy Street the same phenomenon kept recurring. I would become active in a society, be voted on to the committee and in a year or two be asked to stand for Chairman, but never for Secretary or Treasurer. And it always came as a surprise because there were always others who seemed to me better qualified.

Kingston and District Chamber Music Society When Kitty and I got settled into our house in Wilton Grove and looked around for other string players to make up a quartet in our spacious music room we cursed our poor judgement in choosing a musical desert like Wimbledon. Almost every musical contact we had lived in Hampstead or Golders Green. So we both joined Bernard Robinson's Informal Orchestra and carried our instruments to Hampstead and back once a week on the tube. The music room remained largely unoccupied. But Kitty did have one contact south of the Thames in the person of Mrs Wilkinson who in 1952 brought news of moves being made by Norman Askew, Music Adviser to the County of Surrey, to start a chamber music society in Kingston. We went along to a few preliminary meetings but by the time of the inaugural meeting in 1954 we were preoccupied with the recent arrival of our first daughter and so cannot claim to be founder members. Once we had baby-sitting organised we became active members and continued so for 50 years until forced by failing eyesight to stop playing, at which point we were honoured with the award of honorary life-membership. We built a thriving musical life around our membership and never again regretted our original choice of SW19.

The Society's original constitution contained no limitation on the period of service of its officers, and the Society found it had a chairman who was happy to be re-elected each year without making any other contribution to its running or development. In 1958 some livelier members of the committee proposed a maximum four-year term for all officers, which was adopted. I was asked to stand as chairman of the new committee and was elected. I had several ideas for innovations, one of which was a Christmas party with party games, quizzes and seasonal buffet food. For the very first one we put on a performance of Geoffrey Hartley's mini-cantata for strings, oboes and two soloists, The Barmaid of Hale, which was based on a limerick which went: There once was a barmaid of Hale Tattooed with the prices of ale, And on her behind for use by the blind She had them repeated in Braille

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The Christmas party became a calendar fixture although the party games which I enjoyed organising, including the Hat Game, a boisterous version of musical chairs, have given way to set-piece choral and orchestral works.

I also tried evening coaching sessions, which have since expanded into whole-day affairs. Our first coach was Cecil Aronowitz, and I particularly remember his taking a group through Mozart's Kegelstat Trio K.498, in the very first bar of which piano and viola are required to play in unison a turn containing a hemi-demi-semiquaver triplet. After one or two untidy failures he took the viola saying “Let me show you how we actually do it on stage”. He played the opening quaver with a flamboyant sweep of the bow, slowing it steeply for the diminuendo until by the time he reached the triplet it was motionless on the string while his left hand fingered the notes being played by the piano. The illusion was complete.

Another innovation was the summer outing, so successful that it now has a spring companion. We went to Little Benslow Hills in Hitchin with which I was already on friendly terms from running recorder days for them. It had the right accommodation but was on the wrong side of London, as one of the first Hitchin outings illustrated. There were four clarinets in the party all asking to play the Mozart quintet, so to make sure they got what they wanted, the first session was given over to four clarinet quintets and a few odds and ends. But that year there were road-works at Brent Cross and the traffic was chaotic. So many of the players were delayed that not one of the clarinet quintets took place. Over the following years several venues were tried until someone found the music school at Hindhead which meets our needs perfectly.

There was one further change dating from this period for which I think I was responsible, which was the distribution to every member of an annually updated membership list with details to facilitate contact. I stepped down at the end of my four years reasonably satisfied that the KDCMS was in good health.

Four years later the AGM had to elect a new chairman and the committee had nominated three candidates.

Before the voting slips could be handed out, Mrs Manning, an outspoken founder member, intervened from the floor to ask “Why can't we have Theo again?” She had not consulted me on the proposal. The rules were found to offer no impediment and I, although taken completely by surprise, could find no reason to refuse, so my name went forward and I was elected for a second term. I had no further innovations up my sleeve but I think it was during this period that I bought a piano for the Society. In those days we met in St Andrew's church hall in Balaclava Road, Surbiton, which in addition to dreadful acoustics, had an ancient Broadwood grand dating from Beethoven's time. Our pianist members deserved something better but we had no idea how to get it. Then one morning on my way to work through Waterloo I saw an advertisement of an auction the following week in Farnham including a Bechstein 6ft Grand. I took a day off, picked up the KDCMS treasurer, called briefly at the vicarage to get the vicar's half-hearted agreement, took the train to Farnham and bought the piano for £100. It cost almost another £100 to get it carried to Surbiton and to have it regulated and tuned by Steinway. The society had no problem finding the money to reimburse me, but found negotiations with the church treasurer very sticky. He insisted we hand ownership of the piano to the church, but refused to offer any kind of undertaking about our future access to it. Fortunately no dispute ever arose and we used it happily for several years until we moved to Kingston Grammar School which had an even better instrument.

Society of Recorder Players I cannot recall how or when I joined the national committee of the SRP, but I guess it must have been Walter Bergmann's doing, and it must have been in the early 1950s. The old guard of Hunt, Dolmetsch, Bergmann and Dinn who also ran the Recorder in Education Summer School were a well-entrenched oligarchy. I doubt if I ever made any significant contribution to debate. So when Edgar Hunt, who had been Chairman since 1937, announced in 1974 his decision to retire, it came as a complete surprise when I was proposed as his successor. I again suspected Walter Bergmann's hand.

I remained chairman until I turned 65 and was replaced in 1986 by Philip Thorby.

SRP London Branch I do not think I contributed any innovations to the national society but I did make some changes to the London Branch when I took over from Water Bergmann as Musical Director. Walter, who was employed by Schott's, chose the programme predominantly from its catalogue and brought copies from the shop, which members were expected to buy. I was not yet into publishing but photocopiers and even offset-litho machines were beginning to proliferate in government offices and it was usually possible to persuade the operators to make

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copies in their spare time in return for modest financial inducement. I decided the branch could start to build its own library, consisting mainly of arrangements of my own or borrowed from friends. It grew slowly at first but more rapidly once Oriel Library was in operation.

When the catalogue reached a decent size I felt it was too valuable a resource to keep to myself, so I sent a copy to all the other SRP branches inviting them to borrow from it in return for a refund of the outward postage.

It is still available, operated by my successors. I have a copy of the 2010 issue which contains over 350 works, most with parts for 50 players or more and some, prepared no doubt for SRP festivals, for 250.

Benslow Music Trust The Rural Music Schools Association had been set up in the 1930s by Mary Ibberson, with sponsorship from pillars of the musical establishment, to promote the setting up of such schools. A local benefactress, Esther Seebohm, bequeathed it Little Benslow Hills (LBH) to serve as its headquarters. Post-war educational reforms removed the need for separate rural music schools, and the association turned to offering short-term courses at LBH under Helen Wright, who had been Mary Ibberson's deputy. An offer by the Oriel Consort to provide Saturday sessions combining recital and coaching was accepted and a period of collaboration with LBH began.

The association's finances, however, were precarious, and its council, which still contained several members of the great and good inherited from its prestigious foundation, could see no prospect of viability and decided to sell the property, and donate the proceeds to an appropriate musical charity. However, many participants in its post-war courses had developed a strong attachment to the place, and refused to believe that it could not be made viable. They appealed to the Charity Commission, who ruled that as the association held the property in trust under the will of Esther Seebohm, the council were not at liberty to sell it without first establishing that no other party was willing to take over. At that point the old council resigned and a new council of activists was elected.

A year or two later I was asked to join the council, and a year or two later still, which would have been 1986, was invited to become chairman. I did not enjoy the experience. I had just had a heart attack and was beginning to suffer from angina; the 100 mile drive through London to and from meetings was taxing; and the council, born of a protest movement, contained fractious members whom I was not strong enough to control.

One was the Musical Director Michael Procter, friendly on the surface, who took no notice of budgets set by council, believing that it was for him to decide what to spend and for council to find ways of covering his expenditure. A year or two after my chairmanship he was acrimoniously dismissed.

Another was David Moore, chairman of the Executive Committee, an architect and, during my time, a millionaire property developer, who was very generous in putting his professional services at Benslow's disposal. Not long after my appointment he invited me to meet him at Marble Arch for a discussion over morning coffee. He conducted me along Piccadilly and straight into the Ritz, where he was welcomed as a regular visitor and I was refused entry because I was wearing my habitual M&S leather jacket. As his guest I felt I had no alternative to submitting to the indignity of leaving M&S in the cloakroom and donning the oversized jacket kept at reception for the purpose. I do not think he planned it, but he should have known better than to try to take a leather-clad guest into the Ritz, and if he really was ignorant of their dress code, the tactful response to their rejection of his guest would have been to walk out and take his guest to somewhere more appropriate. It was intended to impress; all it did was to leave a nasty taste and an uneasy relationship.

Then there was Richard Wiggs, who had come to national prominence a few years earlier as leader of the opposition to a third London airport at Wing, near his Biggleswade home. He was a single-minded and effective agitator, but not a committee man. He got under the skin of council members by trying to rail-road the Instrument Loan Scheme, which Benslow had just taken over, into providing a violin for his protĂŠgĂŠ.

During my chairmanship the association made some progress, changing its name to Benslow Music Trust and setting up a support organisation, Friends of Benslow, but I was increasingly convinced that I was not the right man for the job, so I announced my intention of retiring, and was succeeded by Judge Willis. Since those rather turbulent days, Benslow has settled down and continues to provide a unique and invaluable centre for amateur music-making.

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Chapter 6 Chamber Music In Chapter 3 I recounted how Kitty and I became engaged on the basis of her performance of a Haydn quartet.

You might imagine that once we were married and settled in a house with a music room our life would have been one long string quartet. Yet so far chamber music has received hardly a mention. One of the reasons is that what you have read so far has all been gathered from the lumber room of my memory, and the details of the considerable amount of playing that went on are not there. They are nevertheless recorded. In 1960, when the girls were out of nappies and sleeping through the night, conditions became propitious for us to spend our evenings in serious exploration of the chamber music repertoire. I had never kept or felt any urge to keep a day-to-day account of my experiences, but I now thought I ought to keep a record of what we played, with whom, and what the assembled players thought of it. It is all written in a handsome leather-bound journal, starting in October 1960 and running, with occasional gaps, to June 1995. I can no longer read it for myself but must rely on Kitty or a visiting daughter to read excerpts to me, but the recital of just a few entries reveals a musical and social life of quite extraordinary richness and variety. I hope I can convey some sense of that. The raw statistics of the first eight pages give some measure of the activity. They cover a period of just over six months, from June 24th to December 2nd 1961 and record that in that time we hosted 55 musical sessions at Wilton Grove, involving 29 individual visitors of whom three were from abroad.

Those sessions were all trios or quartets and not one of them was preparing for performance. Skip forward ten years and the pattern changes, reflecting our deepening involvement in KDCMS. More sessions are now rehearsals for performance, and larger works appear, usually for performance, including the Schubert Octet, septets by Beethoven and Kreutzer, and the Dvorak Sextet.

Skip forward to the 1980s and the picture changes again. Many entries are now in Kitty's handwriting and describe morning sessions with her Housewives Quartet.

None of the foregoing captures the variety and excitement of the making of new friendships which our chamber music brought with it. Perhaps the best way of doing that will be to recall some of the personalities themselves.

C.Brownlie (CB) I was on my way to the office one morning with my cello in its canvas case under my arm and had stopped to look in the window of a gents' outfitters next to the station. An elderly gentleman came up and said “Do you play chamber music?” When I replied that I played little else he introduced himself. He was an optician and had just bought a practice located above the Singer sewing machine shop in Wimbledon Broadway. He played violin and viola. We invited him round for an evening and he soon became a regular visitor. In the three months from June to September 1961 the diary records 27 musical sessions here with CB a participant in 8 of them. He was, however, essentially a loner, having, so far as we could discern, no other musical contacts. He became our optician, providing the rimless pair I have worn ever since, and provided the contact that found Kitty the violin she played for the rest of her playing life. He had emigrated to New Zealand, made friends there with a violinist named Sam Artis, and when they both became disillusioned with life there, returned with him to England. Sam got a position in the second fiddles of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and in March 1963 brought news that the leader, Hugh McGuire, had a Josef Rocca violin for sale for £200. Kitty fell in love with it immediately, played on it with total satisfaction for 45 years, and when she could no longer play sold it for £10,000. It had belonged to Peter Mountain who had been leader of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

He tells in his autobiography, Scraping a Living, of his fondness for Rocca's violins and of how he had had to make do with copies until he was eventually able to afford a genuine instrument.

We kept in touch with CB after he retired and moved up to Yorkshire. After a few years there he moved back to the London area in Pollards Hill, and we resumed our musical contacts. It was during this period that he asked me to join his only daughter as executor of his will in which he bequeathed to me his music library, which would have made valuable additions to the Merton Music catalogue. At this point his nomadic instincts kicked in again and he moved to Truro where he developed Alzheimer's and his family sold all his music to a local dealer, including all of Kitty's Spohr violin duos which he had borrowed.

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Jean Cangley Jean vividly remembers her first meeting with us. She had just settled in the locality after a nomadic existence with a soldier husband, had joined KDCMS and signed up for the 1978 summer outing at Southlands College.

There we established an instant rapport on account of her Dublin origin and her knowledge of An Grianan and her involvement with the chamber music weekends there. We invited her and a viola friend to supper and quartets at Wilton Grove, played Haydn and Schubert, and wrote that it was a very good evening. For Jean it represented the opening of a door into the world of informal, domestic chamber music that she had been brought up in in Dublin where her mother was a busy cello teacher at the centre of just such a world.

She went on to establish her own contacts, spent four years as a very efficient secretary of KDCMS, and served a further spell as the committee member charged with assisting new members to find appropriate contacts. She still performs this sort of service informally, taking late beginners under her wing and leading them up the gentler slopes of the repertoire. For one of these groups we have been delighted to make our music room available and to hear its echoes reawakened.

Her most important contribution to chamber music, however, has been in organising Quartet Study Days held twice a year at Leatherhead under Abigail Dance, who has developed remarkable skill in what might seem the impossible task of rehearsing ten quartets at once. An approachable quartet from the standard repertoire is chosen – most recently Mendelssohn Op.12 - and sets of parts are prepared with the bars uniformly numbered which I print and sell. Participants are drawn from as far away as the South coast and the days are often oversubscribed. There is an abundant supply of days, weekends and week-long courses devoted to playing chamber music one-to-a-part; there are very few which provide practical, hands-on experience of the repertoire to those who are still working their way towards the reading skill and confidence that would enable them to hold a part on their own.

Marjorie Gill and Beatrice Musgrave Until our marriage Kitty had played regularly with a Jewish quartet meeting in the Ben Uri Gallery in which Beatrice was the viola. She worked as an art editor for the publishers Thames & Hudson and gave us a great pile of proof prints of old master reproductions which we used to turn the wall of our corridor-length toilet into a picture gallery. Beatrice introduced us to Marjorie Gill, then in her early eighties, the widow of a patent agent who had made a fearsome reputation and a more than comfortable living by acting as expert witness in court cases. To us, in our forties, Marjorie's determination to improve her technique seemed almost miraculous. She even bought a tape recorder and taped her own practice in order to check on the intonation when no longer distracted by the problem of finding the notes. Her ambition was to master the late quartets of Beethoven to which we devoted many sessions, both at Wilton Grove and at her house in Richmond.

Phil and Betty Higgins Phil was a mathematics lecturer at Royal Holloway College at Egham and living in Wimbledon whom we met through KDCMS. He had a brain of quite frightening power which enabled him to complete the Times crossword each morning on the journey to work. His first visit to us was just before Christmas when we happened to have arranged round the walls of the music room a quiz for the KDCMS party consisting of a dozen poster-size cards in which the names of famous musicians were concealed in a rebus for the Christian name and an anagram for the surname. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, for example, was presented as a table loaded with party food and the question “Is fishcake rude?� Phil ran his eye round the walls and read the answers off without a moment's hesitation. He was never patronising or overbearing, but he exuded intellect and this inhibited the sort of comfortable intimacy we enjoyed with others. He was very competent on violin and viola and had built a handsome viola for himself. His wife, Betty, was an excellent cellist, and with Kitty formed a group which they called their Housewives Quartet which met in the morning or afternoon and worked on items for KDCMS. Phil introduced to us Alan and Linda McConnell, and together we performed Dvorak's String Sextet at KDCMS, a performance which I felt was among the most successful we ever achieved. Our collaboration came to an end when Phil was offered the Chair of Mathematics at Durham.

John and Roma Lear John and Roma appear on the first page of the diary in 1960 and reappear regularly until it ends in 1995. They

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were our closest musical friends, and after John died, Roma continued to maintain contact.

One year we had arranged a quartet session at Wilton Grove on New Year's Eve. The playing went well, and as we prepared to break up after coffee, someone said, ”Why don't we see the New Year in with a quartet?”. It caught the prevailing mood and we all agreed, choosing Haydn's Sunrise quartet Op.76 No.4 as the best fit for the occasion. It became a sort of signature tune for us, brought out whenever we felt nostalgic about the blessings of our musical friendship. It was the last quartet we ever played together at their house in Hinchley Wood, and the occasion was especially poignant. John had been diagnosed with prostate cancer some years earlier. Its progress had been kept in check with hormone treatment but he had recently been suffering back pain which interfered with his bowing. He and Roma had spent the previous day at the Royal Marsden in Sutton in a frustrating wait to see consultants and a frustrating failure to get straight answers. Over tea they showed me the letter John had been given to show to his GP. The first sentence read “This man has metastasised prostate cancer.” That told me instantly that John's back pain was terminal cancer of the spine, but I was not sure that either John or Roma realised this. They were obviously shocked by the abruptness and seriousness of my advice that they should at once get in touch with a mutual friend who had been in charge of the Princess Alice Hospice at Esher. But they followed it, and John's last months were kept as comfortable as possible.

There were two high points in our musical cooperation. In February 1968 we had been working seriously on the String Quartet No.8 by Shostakovich. This is a sombre and turbulent work, inspired by the composer's visit to the ruins of Dresden, destroyed with terrible loss of life by Allied bombing. Its technical demands were at the limit of what we could dare to perform, but we all loved the work and made enough progress to offer it to a music society meeting at Downe House on Richmond Hill. We shared the programme with two singers and their accompanists. The event was covered by the local press under the heading “Eight musicians of talent” and says of the Shostakovich that the whole work was performed with professional style.

When all four of us had had our eightieth birthdays we thought it might be intriguing to offer an item for a KDCMS evening under the title of the Octogenarian Quartet. We toyed with the idea of performing a quartet by Fauré written when he was 80. It proved too difficult to prepare in the time available, but I got an easy laugh in the introductory remarks by claiming that we had to reject it as inauspicious because Fauré died shortly after writing it. Instead we played a very attractive quartet by Leopold Jansa described on its title page as “Designed for such as cannot yet attain the higher positions”. The performance had one interesting spin-off. Adam Brand, a very competent oboist, told us afterwards that it brought home to him that by the time he reached his eighties he would certainly have lost the strength and stamina needed for the oboe. So he took up the cello, and is now a member of the quartet which meets in our music room.

Alan and Linda McConnell Alan was from Chicago and was teaching at Royal Holloway under an exchange scheme. His wife Linda was a professional violinist and an inspiring leader. During the year they were here we enjoyed many stimulating evenings of quartets. In my musical life there have been just two or three transcendental moments with leaders such as Linda when everything clicks into place and becomes effortless and the music seems to be playing you rather than you playing it. Kitty fared even better than I since Linda usually led her Housewives Quartet. After the McConnells returned to the USA they separated and we never saw Linda again, but Alan kept in touch and stayed with us on occasional visits to London and also became a keen customer of Merton Music.

Irvine and Pam Simpson Irvine (violin) and Pam (viola), some ten years our juniors, joined KDCMS when they moved to Petersham in 1967. We speedily established that together we were a well-matched team and we met fairly regularly until Pam's death five years ago. Irvine was born in Whitehaven, had a passionate attachment to the area and owned a holiday cottage beside Wastwater in which we spent a memorable long weekend as their guests.

When we were playing quartets one evening the Lake District put on a truly spectacular thunderstorm which knocked out the power supply leaving us to complete the quartet as best we could round an old oil lamp.

Irvine was active in the little church of St Peters which gave Petersham its name. Captain Vancouver who first charted the coast of British Columbia is buried in the churchyard, and every year a memorial service is held, attended by the Agent-General for British Columbia. Irvine provided special music for the service and crammed a small orchestra of his family and friends, including Kitty and me, into the tiny musicians' gallery beside the organ. Participation required preparation and timing because the only toilet facilities were 400 yards

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away in Richmond Park across the main road to Kingston. For the orchestra the service was followed by a convivial lunch at the Simpsons' home in Sandy Lane.

Nancy Dawson and Madeleine Stroh We fell in with Nancy, a viola player living in Tooting, fairly late in our playing career. She was born in Canada to German immigrant parents and was the widow of an RAF airman she had met during the war when he was training in Canada. She liked occasionally to bask in the reflected glory of her unmarried sister Madeleine Stroh who was the first woman to win a place in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York, where she played viola. In the orchestra's summer break Madeleine usually spent a few days with her sister in Tooting, and on these occasions they would both devote a morning to quartets at Wilton Grove. Madeleine, whose first instrument had been the violin, always led, and these were very special occasions indeed.

On what was to be her last visit Madeleine told us over lunch that her return flight had been cancelled and she was having to spend three further days here. I at once asked if she would play with us again. She would if we could assemble the players to enable her to lead the Mendelssohn Octet, which she had not had an opportunity to play for many years. It was a tall order to assemble a competent octet at such short notice but I reckoned we had the contacts to do it. I decided however to add my own conditions; I would get a party together if I could make the invitation doubly irresistible by promising that she would also lead the Spohr Double Quartet in E minor. She had no knowledge of the work but would do her best if I provided the music for her to practise, which I could do on the spot because we had recently added it to the Merton Music catalogue.

Spohr composed four chamber works for eight strings, which some commentators claim to be the inspiration for the Mendelssohn work. There are however fundamental differences reflected in Spohr's own title of Double Quartet. They were written for his own use and quartet 1 was intended to be played by his own quartet with himself leading. The first violin part consequently contains virtuoso passages with which few amateurs can contend successfully. Madeleine made light work of them, and we and our friends enjoyed a memorable morning of a thrilling intensity.

Birthdays Our birthdays are just four days apart at the end of November, so in the 1980s we developed the custom of arranging on an adjacent weekend a party of three quartets. By taking all the furniture out of the guest bedroom and rearranging the machinery in the office we could provide three acoustically separate spaces each large enough to seat a quartet. We drew a programme of three sessions, leaving cellists undisturbed but moving the other players around them to ensure thorough mixing, prepared a cold lunch and entrusted a hot evening meal to the timing mechanism on the gas oven.

When I reached my sell-by date in 1990 we decided to spread the celebration over two weekends, one being a Saturday for the God-fearing and the other a Sunday for the infidels. It is a measure of the vigour of the musical life around KDCMS that we could call on 20 competent chamber musicians to help us celebrate our birthdays.

Amateur Chamber Music Players (ACMP) This admirable American institution publishes an international directory of chamber music players to enable members travelling abroad to make contacts in the countries they visit. Kitty and I had been members since the 1950s. A quirk of circumstance meant that we have probably enjoyed more than our fair share of foreign visitors. Entries are grouped geographically and our surname meant that we appeared at the very end of the London list where the passing eye could quickly grasp that we were already half-way to a quartet and had instruments to borrow. These foreign visitors added a touch of spice to our normal diet of quartets with faithful old friends from KDCMS. A selection of these encounters are described below.

Maud Goldberg Mrs Maud Goldberg of New York visited us in June 1961. She was a member of a group which specialised in arrangements for eight hands at two pianos. She particularly wanted to play Beethoven's Piano Trio Op.1 No.1 which she had played with this group. She found that this had been inadequate preparation for delivering with two hands what the arranger had shared among six. She was charming and we enjoyed her visit. Without it we would never have realised arrangers arrange simple piano trios for four pianists and that publishers publish it.

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Bill Selden Bill was not short of money, having, before retirement, owned his own garment business. He was on the ACMP Board, and was involved with and may have chaired the committee set up to advise on how ACMP should use the $7 million bequest it had received. He visited us every time he came to London. He was immensely proud of owning the only Gasparo da Salo viola in the world which had not been cut down.

Gasparo was primarily a maker of viols and his violas, being adaptations of the tenor viol, were very large. We never saw this instrument which stayed in a bank vault when Bill came to London with a large and powerful modern viola. On the one occasion the Gasparo did come to London it remained in the custody of The Strad magazine who were photographing it for a special article devoted to the instrument.

David William-Olsson David is the slightly aristocratic and highly respected chairman of the Swedish chamber music society which dates back to Beethoven's time. On the first occasion he played with us we were all sat ready to start, the rest of us with our eyes on Kitty who was leading, when from the second cello desk he started counting 1,2,3,4.

The response from the rest of us was gratifyingly unanimous – total silence. I had to explain as gently as I could that in England, among experienced amateurs, leaders are expected to acquire the technique of conveying their intentions with subtle movements of the instrument and the bow, and that counting-in is a fauxpas.

Odd and Sigrun Sollesnes Odd was a lawyer employed by the Norwegian state oil company Statoil who had been seconded to London for two years. The family were living in an enclave round the Norwegian school at the top of Wimbledon Hill. It was they who contacted us, perhaps having located us through the ACMP register. Their arrival in April 1994 marked the beginning of a particularly exciting and fruitful two years.

Odd was an excellent amateur viola; his wife Sigrun was a professional violinist who led the second violins in the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. Odd had not brought his viola with him, so throughout his two years he used our Chinese viola which we had bought from Mr Cummings' Wimbledon music shop for £25 including bow and case. We had spent the same amount to re-string it with a Pirastro set, and Odd made it sound as if it had cost £25,000.

The diary runs out before their return to Norway but in the first year of their stay records 15 playing sessions at Wilton Grove, and we played at their place as often as they did at ours.

It was Odd who introduced us to Erling Dahl, Director of the Eduard Grieg Museum at Troldhaugen. who in turn introduced us to Levon Chilingirian who entrusted to Merton Music the setting and publication of his performing edition of Grieg's incomplete String Quartet in F. Odd and Sigrun joined KDCMS and we appeared several times there with them. One particularly memorable event was a performance of Mozart's Horn Quintet with Cormac O'Haydauns. We have already met Cormac's mother, Marion Doherty, who was first a student and then a tutor at An Grianan. She married Bernard Hayden, a fellow student, and Kitty and I had first met Cormac as a toddler playing perilously on the stairs of the Horticultural College at An Grianan. He had since then graduated in horn in Ireland and adopted an Irish version of his surname for professional purposes. He lodged with us for a few days while auditioning for a post-graduate course at one of the London colleges, and was resident in London during the first year of the Norwegians' stay. He subsequently won the Irish equivalent of the BBC's Young Musician of the Year, obtained another post-graduate year at the Royal Northern College and then a place in a London orchestra.

The Lady with the Rocca I think she was referred to us by Bill Simmons of Boston, but I have forgotten her name. She brought with her an instrument which could have passed as the identical twin of Kitty's instrument. She had bought it many years before as a genuine Josef Rocca from a very reputable dealer in the US, and she clearly regarded this very substantial investment as part of her pension pot, the instrument to be sold when she could no longer play and the proceeds used to help to fund her life in retirement. Every time the insurance ran out the dealer certified a suitably increased value for the insurance company. Then the dealer died. When the insurance needed renewing she took the instrument to one leading dealer after another. All declared it to be a copy. She

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had now come to London to seek the opinion of Charles Beare, the only dealer whose verdict had any chance of being accepted by the insurer as overriding those of US dealers. We played quartets, Kitty and the visitor occasionally swapping instruments. Not surprisingly, neither preferred the other's instrument. The next day she rang us to say that Charles Beare had also declared it a copy.

Kitty's violin was a really beautiful instrument, worth, in terms of playing quality, every penny of the ÂŁ10,000 that it eventually fetched at auction. From the fact that it increased fifty-fold in value while in our ownership, you can draw two conclusions: that some people have all the luck; and that investment in string instruments is risky and best left to those who already have a pension pot.

Arnold Reif A cancer specialist from Boston attending a conference in London. A pianist who arrived at 9.30p.m. He introduced us to a Telemann trio sonata we did not know; we introduced him to Bach trio sonatas. He left at 12.30, missed the last Tube from Wimbledon and was last seen setting out to walk to his hotel in Gloucester Road.

Easter Chamber Music This annual gathering was for around 40 years one of the highlights of our musical calendar. It started in two coastguard cottages in Westward Ho! belonging to the Skeaping family. We think John and Roma Lear were involved from the start and we know it had been going for three or four years before we joined it in 1971 at Swanage. Thereafter it was an unmissable commitment until we could no longer play.

It was initially a family holiday built around the Lear, Garner, Simpson, Brooks and Wyatt families. Clifford Garner, a mathematician with a head for permutations, drew up in advance a programme for the evening sessions so as to ensure a thorough mixing of participants, and allocating playing rooms to avoid flats housing non-players.

Apart from communal coffee at 10.30, the morning and afternoon were entirely free. On a normal seaside holiday they would have been spent supervising the children on the beach; here the children spontaneously formed themselves into beach parties with the older supervising the younger, and disappeared until lunchtime, leaving parents to form themselves into groups from trios to octets. This made it possible to cover a surprising amount of musical ground in seven days. In 1972 Kitty made a note of the works we had played either severally or jointly and found that we had each clocked up 39 works.

The event led a somewhat nomadic existence as it searched for the perfect accommodation. This was not easy to find, even in the period immediately after Easter, well before the start of the summer season. What was needed was a complex of self-catering flats of exactly the right size for the intended party. Too large and the unoccupied flats would be impossible to let if surrounded by others filled with amateurs playing string quartets morning, afternoon and evening. And among the flats there had to be a sufficient number of rooms to accommodate a quartet or quintet and one room large enough for communal coffee.

In its search the event moved from Swanage to Ilfraconbe, Lynmouth and Barbrook in North Devon, to Docklow in Herefordshire, briefly to Dunwich on a crumbling East Coast cliff top and finally to the Isle of Wight, where it seems to have found a permanent home at Woodcliffe Holiday Flats at St Lawrence near Shanklin.

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Chapter 7 Post-Retirement Activities – Including Publishing My decision to retire early was prompted by the need to care for Kitty's mother Janie. Just a month after I left work she was standing at the French windows in what was then still our dining room watching activities in the garden when she lost her balance, slid gently to the floor and stayed there in pain and unable to move. She had broken her hip. At St George's Hospital they pinned her hip together, but she was totally confused and more paranoid than ever, convinced that her meals were poisoned and refusing to eat. Kitty and I were called into the Almoner's office to discuss arrangements for her eventual return to Wilton Grove. Matters were left unresolved until a few days later when we got a call from the hospital to tell us that in the night she had had a cardiac arrest and died.

Our responsibility for Kitty's mother had seemed likely to limit quite severely our ability to pursue joint activities away from home such as attending courses at the centres belonging to the Field Studies Council of which we had just purchased life membership. Kitty had continued teaching throughout this period but realised that her employment would inhibit joint activities and retired at the end of the school year.

The musical activities which filled most of our free time when in work continued substantially unchanged, but I was now able to devote more time to other interests which had previously been confined to the margins. One of these was microscopy.

Microscopy I had long known there were wonders to be seen under a microscope. Around 1960 I spotted in a local junk shop a pre-war German toy microscope with a magnification of about x 50 and bought it as an educational present for Margaret, then aged 8. Naturally I had to demonstrate how it worked. On the mantelpiece of the girls' playroom was a large jar which had once held pickled onions but was now home to a population of sticklebacks brought back from a weekend at Salisbury with my sister Evie's family. I scraped a little of the green algae coating the inside of the jar and put it on a slide under the microscope. There were two wondrous transparent creatures brightly illuminated with two mouths where their head should have been, each surrounded by a rotating windmill of cilia. They were rotifers, found in standing water everywhere; and I was completely hooked. I had to get a real microscope for myself.

I bought Exchange & Mart each week, and there a few weeks later I spotted “For sale by tender: three microscopes. Lambeth Group Hospital Management Committee.” I walked over to Lambeth Hospital in my lunch hour. Two of the instruments on display were just what I wanted – simple black Leitz machines from the 1930s. I thought I had a reasonable chance of getting one of them if I bid £25 for each. The third was a museum piece in shining brass, bristling with massive knurled knobs, some performing functions I could not discern. I was frankly frightened of it and feared I should never be able to learn how to control it. I nevertheless risked a £10 bid and a week later it was mine. It was a Watson Edinburgh stand made in the 1890s. I subsequently owned more modern and more sophisticated microscopes but I spent more hours with and got more pleasure from that old brass instrument than any other.

While still at the Board of Trade I heard of a course of evening lectures on lichens given at the Natural History Museum by Peter James, author of the standard work on their identification, a task for which a microscope is essential. Would you believe that studying these lowly plants could be exciting? It was, because we were allowed to handle and examine under the microscope specimens brought back on the Beagle from South America by Darwin and labelled in his hand.

We had also joined the Merton Scientific Society and there had become friendly with Arthur and Hilda Wyatt.

Arthur – no relation – some years older than us, was a retired hospital technician and a passionate fossil hunter whose collection was donated by his widow to the Horniman Museum and is on display there. Arthur gave me a lot of useful advice on microscope technique, but it was another contact made through the Scientific Society who converted microscopy from a passive spectator sport of rotifer-watching into an absorbing creative hobby.

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His name was Eric Simpson, the nearest thing to a polymath that I ever encountered; there seemed to be no subject on which he could not provide convincing information. He showed me how to make crystal pictures for the microscope, a skill which he had used when briefly unemployed in the Depression to make slides for sale to the microscope shops in London.

He was also an obsessive hoarder as we discovered when, after the death of his wife, he left his house in Poplar Road and went to live near his son on the South Coast. His son asked if we would help to clear the garage at Poplar Road before the house was put on the market. The door from the garden opened on to a winding canyon, just wide enough for human passage leading to the centre of the garage between walls of boxes and cases stretching to the roof. It did not take us long to discover that most of it was rubbish. We had however to be careful because among the rubbish were some treasures. There were four working microscopes. Three of them were brass instruments contemporary with my Watson. I sold these for him to a dealer through Exchange & Mart. The fourth microscope was an apparently unused Zeiss stand in its box. I bought it for myself because it incorporated a rotating stage, a facility which I had not seen on any other stand and which I fancied might be very useful in making crystal pictures, as indeed it proved to be.

More exciting to me than the microscopes were the cardboard boxes containing more than 100 little bottles and tubes, all meticulously labelled, containing samples of chemicals, some familiar like DDT, some so esoteric that I could not find them in the large chemical dictionary I had inherited from my years in the Chemicals Division of the DTI. Eric had said that he liked to keep samples of all the materials that passed through his hands, and here they were waiting for me to experiment with.

Crystal pictures The Victorians knew that a thin layer of a crystal substance seen down a microscope between crossed polarising filters produced interesting colour effects, and amateur microscopists have continued to experiment.

Some took it quite seriously. Two members of the Quekett Club had rigged up two projectors at one of the Club's meetings so as to present their crystal slides as a continuous display with one picture fading into the next. It was apparent that this was a practised routine which they presented to many audiences. Compared with the pictures I was producing the show was quite dull. This was because the crystal substances they were using were those found in the home such as salt and bicarbonate of soda. These can produce colour but the pictures themselves were chunky and quite unlike the magical fairy landscapes that Eric Simpson's little bottles produced for me.

For a year or two I spent a lot of time in the absorbing creation of these pictures, trying one chemical after another, carefully scanning the resulting slide for any element of pictorial interest, and when I found it, resizing it if it did not fill the frame; changing the background colour by introducing another polarising element such as sheet cellophane into the optical train, and adding light and shade by rotating the stage. The most successful results I mounted in glass and used in slide shows to local societies and to fill vacant hours in the programmes of my various music courses. They were always the subject of enthusiastic comment; but I am fairly certain that the quality of the pictures I produced is unique simply because there can surely have been no other amateur microscopist with the good fortune to fall in with a mentor who not only had access throughout his career to a wide range of exotic chemicals but was eccentric enough to keep a carefully labelled sample of each of them.

Natural History In the first few years of our retirement we made good use of our membership of the Field Studies Council (FSC) attending courses at the centres at Orielton, Nettlecombe, Preston Montfort, Malham Tarn and Flatford Mill. I stuck fairly strictly to lichens and fungi; Kitty ventured briefly into mosses and ferns but mostly patronised less specialised courses on painting or on exploring the Pembrokeshire coastal path.

All of this activity came to an end when in 1983 I found a way of printing music cheaply and started Oriel Library.

Publishing Oriel Library When I retired from the Board of Trade I had a clear idea that part of my retirement leisure would be devoted to publishing some of the arrangements that Ken Kenworthy had made for the Oriel Consort or that I had

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made for my own conducting or teaching purposes. But when I looked into the economics of getting the music set, printed, collated, distributed and advertised through normal commercial channels I realised that it could never be profitable. I have since learned from the lips of commercial publishers themselves that despite what seem to us players like extortionate prices for their music, none of them makes a profit on its sale. Only performance royalties keep them solvent. The Performing Rights Society distributed £168,000,000 in the UK in 1997. The idea of publishing was put on the back burner and I devoted my time to microscopy and lichens.

Then around 1983 the man in charge of reprographics at Morley College, who had done some music printing for me in the past, asked if I had ever considered duplicating music, and when I protested that I believed it to be impossible, offered to produce a trial copy. That opened my eyes to a technology I had never encountered – the rotary electronic scanner. At its heart was a steel cylinder about 2ft. long. Around one half you wrapped an A4 original and round the other a plastic stencil. The drum rotated at 100rpm and as it did so a light beam and a detector, moving slowly across the original, caused a series of sparks to be fired through the stencil from a wire trailing round it wherever the detector received no reflection from the original. It was desperately slow taking 25 minutes to make one A4 stencil. But the results were perfectly readable.

Although unknown to me, the technology was already approaching obsolescence and I found that I could buy a used scanner and duplicator for around £300.

The second piece of the jigsaw fell into place a few months later on a weekend course at Belstead where Bill England, a bank manager from Sale and a regular on my courses, had handed out to his group beautiful manuscript copies of an arrangement he had made of a 17th century Intrada. Over afternoon tea I asked if he would be interested in joining me as a copyist in a publishing venture. He would, and the seeds of Oriel Library were sown.

Having got to this point I decided that I would try to dispense entirely with professional or commercial input and demonstrate that it was possible to run a successful business with nothing but amateur help.

I devised a profit-sharing formula under which 50% of annual profits would be divided between contributors in the ratio of one share per page for copyists, two shares for arrangers and three shares for composers.

I decided that with the mouth-watering prices that this business model made possible I could defy all commercial conventions. There would be no advertising and no discounts to anyone - so no retail sales. I reasoned that recorder playing was an essentially social activity and that all recorder players must of necessity have friends among whom the news of a really cheap source of enjoyable music would spread by word of mouth. If I sold cheaply enough and succeeded in establishing some reputation for musical quality, players would take the risk of buying unseen music by post knowing that if they did not like it they had not lost a fortune.

I declared my intention of setting the price at a uniform 3 pence per page of music. The outcry from friends and family was unanimous and deafening; nobody would take me seriously if I sold at a price bearing no relation whatever to commercial levels.

Friends and family were all wrong. Oriel Library took off and flourished. Then I had another piece of luck. Bob Horsley was an active member of the London Society of Recorder Players, had a classics degree, had had a series of office jobs and having recently left a job teaching classics at a girls grammar school had time on his hands. He offered to lend a hand with the new project and was welcomed aboard. For the next 20 years Bob spent one and sometimes two days each week collating the single duplicated pages into sets of parts and stacking them in boxes on the shelves. It is work of mind-numbing tedium, but Bob developed an extraordinary speed which was exciting to watch. There is no question that without his help we could never have built up a business of the size that Oriel Library attained.

By 1995 it had representatives in France, Germany, Holland, USA, Australia and Japan, all enthusiastic amateur players who airmailed the printed order forms (the internet was in its infancy) and banked customers' cheques, remitting the proceeds twice a year after deducting a commission of 7.5%. It had an annual turnover in excess of £20,000 and had sold around 3 million pages of music.

I then handed the business over to my daughter Cathy, having had a triple coronary by-pass which I interpreted, wrongly, as a sign that I should slow down. I could not, however, expect her to take over the complicated profit-sharing scheme which would halve her income from it and which I felt had in any case, served its initial purpose. So I devised and persuaded all the copyists, arrangers and composers to accept a compensation formula by which, in return for a lump sum from me they renounced their entitlement to a share of the profits.

I had been fortunate in applying for publisher membership of the Performing Right Society (PRS) when it was

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free; there was now a substantial fee which would have made membership uneconomic for its new owners, so I retained the copyright of all the works registered with PRS and passed to its composer or arranger any performance royalties received. Most were trifling sums but there were occasional windfalls. One lucky composer received a series of payments totalling several hundred pounds.

Merton Music The bypass operation in fact gave me a new lease of life and in no time I was itching to get my hands on a printing machine again. This time I turned to string chamber music, my first love, and set up Merton Music, so named because I live in the London Borough of Merton and because in Oxford, Merton College is next door to Oriel College. Although my friends and I were never likely to tire of the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, I knew that the output of these masters was only a small fraction of the total heritage of chamber music mouldering in the libraries of the world. I knew that audiences and players in the 19th century had rated music of Spohr and Onslow - to name but two - alongside that of the acknowledged masters, and I knew that I and my friends had enjoyed playing the works of such unfashionable composers from the very few modern editions that were available.

Over the twelve years of Oriel Library we had moved on from the second-hand machinery with which we had started, and had graduated to a Roneo Scanprinter which scanned a single original page in seconds and fed the resulting stencil automatically on to the duplicator drum. It accepted A3 paper but could not scan anything larger than B4 (257x364mm). It had greatly speeded up Oriel production but would not do for Merton Music where we were going to have to produce multi-page booklets on A3 paper and to scan originals often larger than A4.

I already had part of the solution. I had been offered an old Canon A3 photocopier on its way to the scrapheap which had reduction and enlargement facilities. It would make A4 copies of over-sized originals. With these two machines and with Bob Horsley back on board we started out.

I managed to assemble a collection of 24 works from my own collection or borrowed from the Westminster Central Music Library and the Benslow Library at Hitchin and we launched. Then something totally unexpected happened; as news spread that I was publishing neglected chamber music the world started to beat a path to my door bringing offers of vast quantities of material. The first to arrive was Martin LincĂŠ, a former member of my Morley College classes, who cycled over from his home in Wandsworth bearing a catalogue of the Hawkins Library of which he was curator and offering to bring anything from it that I wanted to publish. It had been bequeathed to the South Place Concert Society in 1929 by Frank Hawkins who had been the Society's Treasurer for many years. It contained a total of around 2000 works including 350 string quartets. Its contents had all been meticulously re-bound for use as a lending library, but showed no sign of ever having been used for this purpose. It provided the bulk of string chamber music in the early Merton catalogues, and was laid under contribution again when we expanded Merton's range to include works with piano.

Next to turn up unannounced on a motor-cycle was Martin Eastick, a pianist, who came offering the loan of bound volumes of all Onslow's string quartets from Op.4 to Op.36 which had been included with a lot of piano music he had bought at an auction. The offer was eagerly accepted because there were no Onslow quartets at all in the Hawkins Library.

The next big collection to come my way was assembled by Harry Brown, a somewhat eccentric viola player known in amateur circles as Uncle Bulgaria from his close resemblance to that Wombles character. I met him only once when invited to take part in the Raff Octet at his house in Wandsworth, where he kept his hoard of string chamber music in the rather damp cellar. In his will he left it to the Westminster Central Music Library who refused the bequest. It was going for auction but John Humphries, a violin teacher and organiser of chamber music events persuaded the auctioneers to sell it to him at the probate value. A friend stored it to dry out for two years in her empty garage while John built a repository for it in his garden in Ealing. Over a period of two or three years he brought me a steady stream of rarities to copy. It was a much quirkier collection than the Hawkins Library, being apparently the result of browsing in second-hand bookshops, and it added, I felt, rather more excitement to the Merton catalogue.

So far the story is of the almost miraculous appearance of these collections out of the blue. I must now add the rather sad story of one that got away. Some time around 2007 Michael Bryant brought me a catalogue of the Chester Hire Library. In the 1920s and 30s it used to boast that it contained every work currently available in print, but by 1939 it had ceased to be profitable, was closed, and its entire contents sold after the war to the Music Faculty of the newly-established University of Sussex. Through my son-in-law Tony Binns, who was then a lecturer there, I was able to establish that the University had not yet got round to cataloguing its

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purchase which was still packed in cardboard boxes in a warehouse in Lewes. Nevertheless I was able through Tony's good offices to borrow two sonatas by Hurlstone that a Merton customer was very keen to have. Before I could return them Lewes was hit by a flash flood which inundated the warehouse and soaked the entire collection in a mixture of diesel oil and sewage. The insurance claim would cover only a small fraction of the cost of restoration and the University chose to spend it on Russian piano music. Very sad, but at least we rescued two valuable works which are still in the Merton catalogue.

I must not conclude this account of acquisitions without mentioning the role of friends, many in the KDCMS, who provided from their own collections some of the most popular works in the catalogue by composers including Volkmann, Vanhal, Ignaz Lachner and Spohr.

The result of all this generosity was that within about 12 years our puny first catalogue of 24 items had grown to 1300, which we could claim without fear of contradiction was the largest catalogue of string chamber music in the world. And perhaps even more miraculous was that its acquisition had not cost us a penny; the originals from which the archive had been copied had all been freely loaned or given. I find that very heartening, and I think it was because the owners of these collections could see that Merton Music was actuated not by commercial motives but by a simple desire to make music more easily available – an aspiration which they could share.

Machinery As soon as orders started to come in it was obvious that the Scanprinter with its restriction to a B4 stencil would have to be replaced. Fortunately a new machine had just come on to the market which would make an A3 stencil and print it at 90 copies a minute. It was the Ricoh Copyprinter and it cost ÂŁ3,000. We took a deep breath and bought it and it turned out to be worth every penny. Cheap to run and extremely reliable. Eighteen years later, with 9 million copies on the clock and only two visits from an engineer in its medical records it has only just gone, fondly remembered, to the scrap yard.

It was not however the ultimate machine because Merton Music was turning out to be very different creature from Oriel Library. What we could not have foreseen was that its catalogue would be many times larger; what we might have foreseen but did not was that a typical string quartet would be five times as thick as an Oriel title and so need five times as much shelf space, and that nobody would ever order two copies because string quartet players never play in groups of thirty like recorder players. The uncomfortable truth was forcing itself upon us that the duplicator, which in 1983 had opened a door to cheap back-room printing, was never going to cope with our new need for one-off copies. It was going to have to give way to the photocopier.

For a year or more with invaluable help from Bob Horsley we staggered on with the old Canon copier, making and storing single-sided A3 masters on 80gsm paper which we then fed into the copier in two stages to make the double-sided sheets needed to make an A4 booklet. It was desperately slow.

All this while copier technology was progressing and digital laser printer/scanner/copiers were appearing which would scan a page, store it internally or on a CD, and send it back on demand to the printer. I came a little late to computers, treating myself to an Amstrad WPC for my 65th birthday. I moved up to an Acorn on which I installed an early version of Sibelius, and when that programme was rewritten for a PC I moved with it.

That was the point we were at in 2003 when the lid of the old Canon copier broke in two from plastic fatigue.

After intensive discussion I ordered a Ricoh Aficio 2022 copier/scanner/printer with automatic document feeder and duplex facilities at a cost of ÂŁ2500.

Its installation was fraught with frustration. At first it would not scan. Apogee, the suppliers were clueless, blamed the computer's operating system and were on the point of changing it when a chance visit from a computer-wise friend discovered that communication between computer and scanner was blocked by a firewall that Apogee had overlooked. When it did scan the printer placed the resulting text 7mm to the right of its position on the original. Since many of our originals occasionally had margins of 7mm or less this was going to lead to unacceptable loss of text. Apogee had no idea what to do, so I wrote to Ricoh HQ asking them to refer the problem to Japan, which they did. All to no avail. Ricoh were also clueless and, I felt, nonchalant into the bargain. Some slight misplacement of text, they said, was inevitable and one just had to put up with it.

I was on the point of refusing to accept the machine and demanding my money back when I discovered a way round the problem. I found that the computer contained provision for varying the scanning area, and that if I started the scan 7mm to the left of the edge of the page the resulting file would print correctly. Orders were piling up; if I rejected this printer Heaven knows when I would get another. I decided to keep it. It was a decision that was to cause enormous problems for my successor.

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I ran the Aficio 2022 for five years until in 2008 a vital electronic component of the scanning circuitry burned out and proved irreplaceable. I gave the machine away to a church in need of a copier, and was not entirely sorry to see it go. I spent another ÂŁ2,500 on its replacement, a Ricoh Aficio 3025 which has proved almost entirely trouble-free.

I was now 88 with macular degeneration nibbling away at my eyesight. I had had three heart attacks and could hardly expect to survive a fourth. Merton Music had been extraordinarily successful because of the generosity of the donors who had provided its massive catalogue; I felt I owed them a duty to ensure their generosity was not wasted by my allowing it to disappear with me. I needed to find a successor. That will be the next part of the story, but I need now to sum up what Merton Music had achieved.

The 12 years were really quite hectic. The 1300 items that found their way into the catalogue in that period were nearly all on loan and had to be copied and returned reasonably quickly. But the copying was very far from simple. Almost without exception the originals being copied were substantially larger than A4, and usually with a ratio of margin to text which would look wildly extravagant when the page was reduced to A4. And the only tool we had to adjust page size and margin ratio was the percentage reduction figure we could select on the old Canon photocopier. The only way to produce a narrower margin was to position the original page with its edge overlapping the edge of the exposure glass, and all by memory and guesswork since the text was upside-down and invisible; and there was always the risk that the page would shift when the copier lid was lowered on to it. All this copying had to be fitted in with printing, folding, packing and posting the orders which were coming in at a rate of ÂŁ15,000 a year, which translates as 150,000 pages. Meanwhile Kitty on her computer was churning out Sibelius files of works which had come to us in the form of scores or which were of such poor print quality that copies would have been unsaleable. Once every two years we had to prepare a new catalogue and print and distribute it. This was where the old Copyprinter came into its own, effortlessly turning out 3,000 for the UK and a similar total in smaller quantities in local currencies for the agents in USA, Germany, Holland and Australia, which we sent out in bulk with a supply of printed address labels for them to post. It was hard work but it was a team effort and it was exciting and rewarding.

It was rewarding because from scraps of evidence filtering back to me it was clear that it was making a mark on the amateur landscape. Friends returning from summer schools in Europe told of finding almost universal familiarity with its blue covers among the contacts they made; and a visitor from the USA told me that when he and his friends met, the first question was whether to start with Haydn or a piece of blue music.

It was rewarding also because of the enthusiasm of our customers. I remember two in particular, both American. One was Vincent Lionti, a viola in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, a job which you might imagine would stifle any desire to devote your leisure to playing. In his case it only sharpened his appetite for unfamiliar music. Every time a catalogue reached him he ordered every new work in it and wrote long, glowing letters of thanks declaring that the catalogue had provoked the sort of excitement he had last felt as a child opening his Christmas presents.

The other customer was Bill Simmons of Boston who was less effusive but more practical. He ran a campaign to persuade Amateur Chamber Music Players (ACMP) to introduce an award for outstanding services to chamber music, and when they at length did so, naming it after their founder Helen Rice, he suggested Kitty and me as its first recipients. ACMP's main function was to facilitate contacts between players to which end it publishes an international directory. We had been members since the 1950s and had enjoyed many evenings of music with musicians from overseas visiting London. We greatly admired its work and felt at least as honoured by an award from it as by one from Buckingham Palace. We were visited by a member of its Council who brought a tuning fork mounted on a resonator base bearing our names. I took it as confirmation that our project really had made a memorable difference.

Ourtext I had begun thinking about finding someone to take over Merton Music when I got a phone call from John Harding. John was some fifteen years younger than me, retired from the BBC World Service, and an amateur viola player. He had acquired Sibelius, had found it rather addictive, and now found himself with several hundred string arrangements of music by Bach, which he felt ought to be publishable. He had also been working on teaching material for use in Sarah's chamber music evening classes at City Literary Institute and had already set up with Sarah a limited company for the purpose which they called Ourtext. Uncertain how to proceed further Sarah had suggested he approach me as someone with practical experience of music publishing. I realised that I was unlikely to find anyone with better credentials as a successor, and he, I think, saw in Merton Music a moderately profitable business which would support his other publishing ambitions. So

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we agreed a phased takeover, and he proceeded to purchase a Ricoh Aficio 2022 matching my machine on which the Merton TIFF files had been created, but with the addition of collating and stapling attachments (which he christened Kitty) to replace the extra pairs of hands available at Wilton Grove. Unfortunately, in the period between my purchase and John's, Ricoh had corrected the fault they had failed to diagnose in mine.

And because all the files John received from me had been scanned 7mm to the left to sidestep this fault they all needed to be moved 7mm to the right before they could be printed. There are very few software programmes which will manipulate TIFF files, but John located one called AFTV and spent many hundreds of hours and much midnight oil making the archive usable. It was a truly dreadful introduction, and I think many less resilient characters would have thrown in the towel.

IMSLP It was at this juncture that I discovered IMSLP, the International Music Score Library Project. I was overwhelmed. Here was a body driven by exactly the same motives as had driven me for the past 25 years – to make as much music as possible available as cheaply as possible. I felt a very strong desire to be part of it, and one way of doing so immediately occurred to me. I would put the entire Merton archive on the site. This would have two benefits. It would mean that if Ourtext failed to keep Merton Music in print our work and the generosity of those who had made the original material available would still be preserved for posterity. The second benefit came from IMSLP's agreement to provide a link from each work to Ourtext's website. This would offer a chance of extra orders for Ourtext since the files we would provide would be those we used in the business, which could only be printed on an A3 machine with duplex facilities, a luxury not possessed by many IMSLP users. John was not entirely convinced by these arguments but went along with the proposal.

All the files on IMSLP were in PDF format whereas all the Merton files were TIFF and were moreover all 7mm off centre. I spent most of 2009 converting them and sent them off on a DVD to IMSLP where a team of their volunteers spent several months of 2010 uploading them.

Fortunately by this time I had discovered and bought a wonderful software programme called Cute PDF Professional which makes the manipulation of PDF files comparatively easy. At the beginning of 2010 I had completed the handover of Merton Music to John and had upgraded my computer to Windows 7 which had much improved magnification facilities which seemed to offer the promise of extending my usable eyesight for months or even years.

Petrucci-Merton Booklet Service I still got a thrill from printing and selling music. So after discussions with IMSLP I set up Petrucci-Merton Booklet Service (PMBS) to make copies ready for the music stand from any suitable file on the IMSLP site, all of which were in the form of single pages. I undertook to pass 20% of any profits to IMSLP who agreed to provide a PMBS page on the site with a link from all suitable works. The demand I anticipated from chamber musicians did not materialise and we made a small tax loss. Meanwhile IMSLP, without even telling us, removed all the links to the PMBS page so that demand dried up almost completely, mainly I think, because they were cooking up an elaborate system of advertising links to Amazon publications with which the PMBS links were incompatible.

An old and enthusiastic customer for Merton Music now gave me a new lead. He wanted to perform the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with a school orchestra but the cost of the orchestral parts was exorbitant. Could IMSLP help? I found, rather to my surprise, that the parts were available and I could supply the numbers he wanted for just £18. He was delighted. And I realised this was a niche worth investigation.

I ferreted around on the IMSLP site and found hidden away a list of more than 600 works for which parts were available. It was, like so many other aspects of the IMSLP dysfunctional indexing system, extremely userhostile. I spent a week or so completely re-writing it and adding IMSLP index numbers, and this list has proved an invaluable tool in building up a small but viable business in orchestral parts.

My next discovery was the website www.amateurorchestras.org.uk which might almost have been designed for my benefit because for almost every orchestra it provided an icon which, if clicked, opened a blank e-mail message form to an officer of the orchestra. You simply pasted your advertising message into it, added the list of IMSLP's orchestral parts as an attachment and clicked “Send”. With a few hours of intensive clicking you had your existence revealed to the great majority of UK amateur orchestras. Only a minority were receptive.

Most had a well-established routine of hiring or borrowing; some conductors would have liked to own parts which could be marked with bowings and dynamics, but lacked storage facilities. Nevertheless orders started

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to come in and in 2012 the turnover was just under ÂŁ6,000 and for 2013 only slightly less, and there are some 60 regular customers, many of whom are obviously enthusiastic. So the business is viable and moderately profitable.

My own ability to keep it going however is in doubt because of my worsening eyesight, so in December 2014, having reached the age of 94, I announced to about a dozen of my librarian customers my intention to retire and seek a successor. To my delighted surprise, three of them have expressed serious interest in taking over.

I am currently arranging for Jem Bradley of Cheadle Hulme to take over in April 2015.

Epilogue The discovery in 1983 that it was possible to run a small music printing business from a back room was one of the most fortunate of my life. All the other activities that gave significance to my life, whether playing quartets, teaching, running courses, or even DIY, were cut short by failing eyesight and loss of mobility in my early eighties, but printing has provided meaningful and enjoyable activity for a further 10 years. It would be an exaggeration to describe them as the best years of my life, but it would have been a poorer life without them.

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