Dear Tasmin,

My birthdays seem to appear at shorter intervals as the years roll by, but at least in April, the days grow longer and less irritable. This latest one was blessed with soft spring sunshine, breakfast on the balcony, messages from friends and the climax of the BBC’s five-day homage to Delius, illuminated by your thoughtful commentary and insightful performances

One message I received came from the father of one of my pupils who is a shepherd in Angus and was unable to drive his daughter to Edinburgh for her horn lesson because of the lambing that occupies him day and night at this time of year, so I was able to listen to your great programme.

While I listened I remembered my first thrilling discovery of the music of Delius through the crackling and whistling of an ancient radio, and years later when I saw Ken Russell’s wonderful “ Song of summer”, I was amused to see that Eric Fenby had the almost identical experience.

I was privileged to be able to talk to him many years later in 1982 when he came to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra.

He was (as you and Julian said in your tributes) a fine musician. He had an acute ear and was a master of chromatic harmony, a fine pianist, and a skilful and sympathetic conductor, all of which allowed him to understand perfectly, and to bring to fruition, what Delius was desperately trying to do in defiance of his illness

Meeting and talking with Fenby when he came to the LSO IN 1982 and encountering his dedication to Delius’s work at first hand, confirmed and revived all those early adolescent feelings for me, and. Fenby’s personal modesty, his selfless devotion to his task, his humility and his faith that had co-existed with Delius’s frustration, self-will and vehement atheism in those difficult days at Grez, was a vivid parallel and example that reminded many of us of our real purpose as working musicians, after the powerful distractions of a .very difficult period in British music.

The BBC had made a savage attack on the profession in 1980, with their intention to abolish five of their house orchestras; and the resulting strike that took place left a residue of difficulties and discomfort that affects us all to the present day.

Fenby’s devotion to Delius had extended beyond the great physical and mental task of the amanuensis, the “old autocrat” having become a great friend and fellow traveller as they gave life to this unique work together, and the composer’s painful and inevitable death came as a crippling blow to him.

Nearly fifty years later, the battle-hardened LSO, after the strike and on the verge of yet another financial crisis, welcomed him with great warmth and we all took immense pleasure in the work that we were able to do, and after rehearsals and a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London, the last verse of our song for that summer of 1982 was sung sweltering in Florida, where much of the music had been conceived nearly a century before.

Great music like this is so perfectly understandable, but impossible to describe except through its own language. It MUST be performed and the three of you have celebrated it, and done it such great service!

My own celebrations are over now. Mussels crabs, ice cream and all kinds of delicacies were eaten accompanied by the sounds of the waves and family laughter by the Forth, while she shed her winter woollies, but tomorrow will be just another day, and in Angus normality will return and horn lessons will resume just as soon as the lambs have found their feet.

Warmest thanks and best wishes

Terry Johns

Dear Roger,

I wish you could be here to see this.

The Forth estuary reaches over to Fife from beneath my window, and the sky that on other days hangs heavy and dull as pewter, today is filled with sunlight and hordes of herring gulls in a fantastic aerial ballet.

Halfway across, Inchcolm lies on the water like a giant whale, and the walls of the ancient abbey that she has carried since the twelfth century, stand splendid in the midday sun.

The music is ready at last and shines like brass, my having polished it after breakfast, ready for your recording that I anticipate with childish delight, and I’m sitting here looking out to sea with coffee from faraway Java, and memories of Cardiff from last week.

On Friday the friends of the National Youth Orchestra of Wales held a fundraising lunch at the golf club in Cyncoed and I was asked to read a few extracts from “Letters from Lines and Spaces” and I signed some copies, mostly for old friends, brimming with Welshness, music and wisdom of the fifty intervening years.

There was live music too, effervescent, fresh and youthful from members of the orchestra, and Welsh lamb, turkey and roasted ham, pink and succulent with parsley sauce, followed with bread and butter pudding and ice cream that was as welcome as the spring sunshine after our 4 am departure from Edinburgh with no breakfast.

To have finished the music brings relief, not because of the deadline but because the notes and phrases that were flying around in my head for a month have at last organized themselves and found a home of their own.

I’ll come to the recording and promise to stand on the touchline and behave myself.

Jenners’ customers  are already whispering less about independence and more about the Festival as the eternal tramlines plough up the streets and divert the traffic, but nothing could ever dampen the annual Edinburgh euphoria.

Come and see me should the orchestra cross the border.

Yours Ever,

Drac

The beginning of 2011 and the perilous condition of the western economy brought great difficulties to orchestras and arts organizations everywhere. In the USA, orchestras had been dependent for many years on private donations, and the consequences of that dependence were becoming increasingly difficult in times of economic restraint. There was a wide debate that was taking place in American society, as to the importance of the “difficult” arts

Dear Friends

We are nearly in the month of March and near the end of the long Scottish winter. The snow, wind and rain from the Forth estuary, have been growling and moaning outside my window for months. This morning, sunlight filled the room as I opened the door, and the breeze from the sea, gently lifted the curtains and my spirits. I don’t take part in the rough and tumble of orchestral life any more but your predicament is, of course, a familiar one that is becoming more widespread in these troubled times.

When I was a young man, I travelled with a chamber group to give a concert in a village in one of the affluent southern counties of England. Having finished our afternoon rehearsal, we all went into the church hall for a pre-concert meal that was meant to have been organised by the local music club. The trestle tables were bare and the room was empty except for a dramatic scene that was being enacted in the corner, in which the central tragic character was a lady, in cashmere, pearls, and considerable distress, who was being attended to, and consoled, by a small group of people. Eventually her sobbing incoherence, and anxiety to communicate the reasons for her disquiet, culminated in the loud anguished cry, “ But what sort of food do musicians eat!!!”

This hapless lady, sobbing and squeezing her sodden handkerchief in the heart of rural England, had been too frightened and bewildered to perform the relatively simple task allotted to her, of providing food for us, apparently because it would have involved some understanding of the mysterious and unknown dietary requirements of itinerant musicians.

Mistrust and semi anonymity have been constant companions in our countless disputes with managers, critics and agents for many years here in Britain.

At one point in the sixties, the Royal Philharmonic orchestra officially did not exist, having been excluded from performing at the Royal Festival Hall and deprived of its Royal status. On the death of Sir Thomas Beecham the RPO’s players were informed that they were not entitled to any benefit from his musical legacy, and that the orchestra should disband. The British Arts Council, the Royal Philharmonic Society, the music critics of the London newspapers, the heads of the major record companies, and the international agents were by and large in agreement with that view.

That was the beginning of a long winter for us, and there were to be many more to come, and I was reminded yesterday of those unhappy times, whilst reading about your current and depressingly familiar travails. Our enemies did retreat eventually, but that did not happen without a protracted struggle accompanied by a torrent of libel, slander and antagonism that was directed at us as a penalty for daring to ask for some degree of control over our own lives.

During one newspaper exchange about players’ salaries, a retired army major from Cirencester was infuriated to discover that orchestral musicians got paid AT ALL! and somehow managed to connect the whole thing with the battle of El Alamein!  But embattled as we were then, that eminent orchestra is now still very much in existence, as you will know, and entertains the public of most countries of the World to this day, having control of its own affairs under the guidance of a board of directors, elected from and by the orchestral players themselves. This is of course, by no means a perfect system, but it offers the players SOME degree of autonomy. How else can music be made?

We are the music makers

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams; -

World losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world forever, it seems.

The doors and windows are wide open to the sea. The sun is shining at last, and the gulls are cheering you all on to victory.

Very best wishes, huge admiration and good luck.

Terry Johns

P.S Every orchestra here in Britain, has at one time or another in its history been crippled by the excessive fees charged by conductors, agents, and management, and they have been threatened, cheated, misrepresented or lied to, but I can only say that for myself that this has been a small price to pay for the glittering gift that I was given.

But we, with our dreaming and singing,

Ceaseless and sorrowless we!

The glory about us clinging

Of the glorious futures we see

Our souls with high music ringing:

O men it must ever be

That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,

A little apart from ye.

Having assumed that my touring days were over, I was invited by the BBC Scottish symphony orchestra to tour the USA, Latvia, Estonia, China and South America

Dear John

The tour is nearly done and my diabetes has survived a week in China and the severe test of a diet of eels, snakes, prawns and rice so I’m glad to say that tomorrow we’ll go to Taiwan for one more concert before going home. The atmosphere in the streets of Guangzhou feels quite threatening, and professional ladies and drug dealers surround the hotel after dark, so after the concert I decided to stay out of harms way in my room and write some letters and Christmas cards.

I hear Christmas music everywhere here, in restaurants and lifts and the presents of silk and jade I have bought to take back are lying in my hotel room gift- wrapped for Christmas and make me feel homesick when I see them. How are things in Brecon? Will the family be visiting you at Christmas?  I imagine Brecon will be glowing with lanterns and log fires by now. I want to get home to the family. Our journey from London seemed interminable, and we had to wait more than three hours in the bedlam of Hong Kong airport for our connection to Shanghai but it was all worthwhile, because it has been a remarkable experience. During the last hour of the flight I think I was the only person apart from the cabin crew who was still awake, after a great deal of complimentary wine and brandy from the airline had been served with dinner and, as you know I haven’t had an alcoholic drink for a good while. I enjoyed the best of clear-headedness and watched the sun rising as, everybody was sleeping, approaching Shanghai, when the party in the cabin was over and there was only the whine of the engines. The dawn appeared as a faint purple line along the horizon and soon, I could see outlines of the hills and valleys below us stretching away from the wing of the plane for miles with no trace of civilization. Then some activity began in the cabin with gentle waking, murmuring, breakfast and hot coffee.

The grand new airport at Shanghai was all but deserted when we arrived, and there were very few cars on the city streets. I don’t know how many tours I‘ve been on over all these years, and when we owned the Bull’s Head, I told myself I didn’t miss travelling, but I still find different countries excite me, I enjoyed exploring the city when we didn’t have to play on the first day and we could visit the Yuyuan garden, the city temple and the reclining Buddha.

Near the hotel, there’s a restaurant that serves every kind of fish and shellfish, all kept in tanks and aquariums that decorate the walls, and so I went there with the trombones, in search of eels. My twenty years, living in London has given me a real taste for them, and I’m always surprised that so many people find the thought of eating them disgusting. The Chinese chef came to our table, and showed us the wriggling eels before chopping them alive and throwing them into a flaming wok, with pungent garlic and black bean sauce. I could feel the effects of homesickness and the long journey ebbing away and China began to beguile me at last. Later I slept like Methuselah and the next day’s concert was a real joy. The audience were wild about it, especially the Scottish eightsome reel we saved for the end.

Good luck John and the merriest Christmas ever.

Terry

“The life of a musician is a privilege” – Alice Hertz Sommer.

My musical life began in the valleys of South Wales, where our local postman gave piano lessons in the evenings, for five shillings, and the Tower Colliery where my father worked, had a brass band that practiced in an engine shed. Once or twice I had dreamed, wildly, of being a professional player.

My boyhood dreams had not been wild enough!

Park Sheraton Hotel, New York

18^th Dec1966

Dear Mr. Evans

I’m waiting to be taken to Carnegie Hall for our second concert in New York. The whole of the city is wrapped in snow now, and glittering with Christmas lights. Outside our hotel, horse-drawn carriages wait in a line to trot the tourists around Central Park, and the bellboys in their purple and gold livery are hurrying across the soft carpets under the chandeliers. I feel as if I’m in a film!

‘The Royal Philharmonic is magnificent’ said the New York Times this morning. They really are too, and I’m a part of it now, which is hardly believable, because they’re so nonchalant about it all, having been here so many times before, and I feel just as if I’m running along behind. I can’t sleep if we have an early start to make, for fear of missing a train or an aeroplane, so I go out and roam the city streets.

This morning I went to Eddy O’Connor’s twenty-four hour diner, where you can be comfortably anonymous, with only the bartender and the empty chairs and tables for company. I sat for a while, with my coffee, contemplating Christmas in Wales, until two city cops came stamping in out of the snow to get a bowl of Irish stew against the cold, and brought me back to reality and the reasons for my being here.

Last night in all my excitement the Beethoven symphony seemed to pass in an instant, leaving me awash with applause and disbelief. My life has changed beyond recognition in these few months just as you said it would, the most astonishing thing about it all being the pace of everything.  Before we left London I played as an anxious guest with the London Symphony Orchestra performing Britten’s War requiem with Fischer Diskau, Peter Pears, and Britten himself conducting. We played a marathon Wagner concert at the Festival Hall with Leopold Stokowski and Birgit Nilsson, and recorded a Tchaikovsky symphony with Antal Dorati; all that in two weeks! . I had no idea what to expect from a life in music, even after all you had told me, but the pace of everything is exhausting. Tomorrow we’ll play in Baltimore and on Saturday, Philadelphia.

The audiences in America are full of enthusiasm and they applaud and cheer like anything. After our concerts people wait in the street to talk to us and some of them imagine that we all know the Queen personally, and live in Buckingham Palace. My new friend Pat is an Irish violinist, who has been here many times before, and lies to them mischievously with intimate details of the Queen’s sumptuous life style and her sordid private life. He tells them that because we play in her orchestra we are all exempt from income tax, and that we borrow her yacht for our holiday trips. — It’s astounding how far he can go, without being found out.

With regard to the music, hardly anyone here reads the reviews in the newspapers, and they don’t appear to listen to anything that conductors say to them, but at a performance where they have some freedom to play, the world looks on in wonder.

There is considerable uncertainty about the future of this orchestra, which was all explained to me when I was invited to join, that has to do with the recent death of Sir Thomas Beecham and the fact that neither the Arts Council nor the Royal Philharmonic Society wants the orchestra to continue without him. This has led the players to take over the running of it themselves in the form of their own company, of which I am now, by invitation, a shareholder.  The men, by and large don’t seem over anxious about their situation though.  Most of them say that they’ve seen it all before and that music in England is always in some sort of crisis.

I know you’ll say this is my old problem of self-confidence, but I can’t help feeling that they may have been having some difficulty filling this job that I’m so excited about.  Nevertheless it is exciting, and tonight we’ll be playing the seventh symphony of Beethoven and Ida Haendel will be playing the Brahms violin concerto.   After that we’ll go to Jack Dempsey’s restaurant and then to the Half Note to hear Sonny Rollins.

I‘ll be in Wales for Christmas and that’s the most exciting thing of all. I’ll play carols with Tower band on Christmas morning and at midday there’ll be a concert with the choir in the Miner’s Club. Can I come and see you on Boxing Day? It’s a lovely walk in good weather. I’ll bring my father’s dog and promise not to talk about myself all the time, but my life has changed so dramatically which is largely due to you, who taught me almost everything I know about music, and for that I’ll always be grateful.

It’s time to go now, out into “subzero” New York. Through the window I can see the snow falling through the trees in the park. I’ll go down to the lobby and wait for the transport to the concert. Once again, thank you for all this and please give my best to Mr. Griffiths (English) who taught me to write a letter and that being hopeless at rugby is not such a terrible thing.

Yours ever

Terry Johns

P.S. Before we left for the US I was at Denham studios for a few days playing on the soundtrack for the “Blue Max” starring George Peppard, James Mason and Ursula Andress that comes out next year. Jerry Goldsmith wrote the music with lots of “flying” horn writing for the First World War Luftwaffe story.   Playing for films is fascinating.   I’ll tell you all about it one day.

The City of London Corporation opened The Barbican Arts Centre in 1982, after a great deal of pre-publicity. The concert hall, which was built on a German bomb site became the permanent home of the London Symphony Orchestra, who gave the opening concert on the 3^rd of March of that year.

Dear Pat

Did you enjoy the concert? How marvellous it was to see you after all this time, and looking so well!

I wonder if you think London has changed a lot since you left, and do you go to concerts in Ireland? I haven’t been to one for years, but we’ve have played a hell of a lot of them in the run up to the opening of the new hall. There have been a few grand dinners too, hosted by worshipful companies in the City of London, and all sorts of pre – events. At one of these we played some brass quintets at a party in the roof garden while a lot of rich and famous people were drinking champagne.

When we’d been playing for what seemed like hours, and watching enviously while the elegant assemblage stuffed themselves with smoked salmon and fine wine, Ted Heath and David Jacobs suddenly appeared at the bandstand!

“Sounds awfully good”, Heath said through his trademark grin.

“It’d sound even better if we ‘ad a f***ing drink” said Maurice Murphy, which shocked one or two innocent bystanders. People weren’t aware of course, that Maurice and Heath had been well acquainted for years, and understood one another perfectly, so we started the next number, which was a particularly awful arrangement of William Tell.

When we got to the galop, I saw from the corner of my eye, the crowd of people smiling, applauding, and making way for the ex Prime minister who was striding towards us, still grinning, and carrying a tray with three bottles of Cordon Rouge, followed closely by David Jacobs with five glasses!

We’ve had a lot of fun recently, and you arrived at the funniest part. The concert you came to was just great, maybe even the best one of all!

Someone told me you would be there, and eventually, I spotted you in the audience, laughing helplessly at George Burns. He really enjoyed himself too, cracking jokes backstage with the brass, in a backstage tableau that should have been recorded for posterity. Tony Bennett didn’t want to rehearse much, which annoyed the television people. David Frost would have run the whole thing a dozen times if he’d been allowed to, and Harry Rabinovitz kept it all together, relishing all the theatrical mayhem and bonhomie. It was the perfect finishing touch, to see you sitting there splitting your sides.

On the following evening, at the real opening concert, I felt a little disappointed that the “fun” part of the week was at an end, and I fully expected that the presence of our gracious Queen, the Lord Mayor of London, a good number of noble Lords and Ladies, and a “live” television relay, might bring a stiff reminder of the importance of the occasion and some propriety to the proceedings. However, Tony Chidell was born without any trace of deferential or ceremonial genes, and could be heard whispering at convenient moments, that “Die Meistersinger” was “Hitler’s favourite piece”, and that its inclusion in the programme was probably in honour and gratitude for his “having cleared the site!”

My priorities, and the tradition and importance of humour were restored, and we had a lovely evening in our new home. It was wonderful to see you again. It’s such a pity everyone had to rush off afterwards to somewhere else. When was it ever any different for us?

Yours Ever

Drac

Eric Rogers composed the music for most of the “Carry On” films, and he provided the arrangements for the stage show of Lionel Bart’s “Oliver” at the “New Theatre” in St. Martin’s Lane. I played in the orchestra there when I was still a student, and I met him again in the early seventies, when he had written the arrangements for “Merman sings Merman”, which we recorded with the great lady herself, for Decca Records and Stanley Black.

Eric lived close to the Denham film studios, and regarded the “Swan” public house in the village as his own. Musicians visiting the studios were never allowed to pay for their own drinks.

The London Symphony Orchestra provided soundtracks for “Things to Come”, “Henry V”, “The Man who knew too much”, “Dangerous Moonlight”, “The Music Lovers”, and many more.

In 1977 the orchestra returned to the film studio, in a film that was to change the course of cinema history.

Dear Pat

How is Dublin’s fair city?

Knowing you as I do I’m certain that you thank God every day for Ireland, and to be there and home again. What a blessing it is for your mother to have her family together once more!

I am so grateful that my own family is together more often, now that I’m freelancing here in London, and every day, for a little while at least, I can be with them, instead of hurtling across the Atlantic Ocean, or sitting on a Greyhound bus ten thousand miles from home.

It’s a wonderful stroke of fortune, that almost every musician in the World wants to come to London now, so I am able to play for Giulini and Barry White on the same day, without leaving the city, or I can take the train out to Denham as I did last week, to play with the LSO, who are venturing into the world of the cinema again.

I stepped down from the early morning train on the first day and there on the platform was Harry Nathan!

He showed me to a footpath that led us away from the busy road, across some open farmland and up to the studio. What a joy it was, just a few miles from London, to hear the birds singing in the hedgerows, and to feel grass under my feet for a while.

The spring air and the walk gave us a lovely start to the day, and almost an hour before the recording was due to begin, still touched by country quietude, I sat down in the studio to share Harry’s kichel cookies and coffee.

“It’s some kind of space film”, Harry said, shrugging and munching. “I don’t know — Battle for the Stars, or something”.

As the musicians and Americans arrived, the conversation we overheard was about a plan for eight of these films (“Star Wars” it’s called) that would take thirty years to make, and people were saying that a million pounds had already been spent on the sessions for this one.

Besides a huge orchestra, there was a posse of technical people that included Ernie “eyeshade” of course, with his team of copyists, and Lionel Newman, who supervised everything and conducted some of the rehearsals.

John Williams’ orchestral writing is better than ever! This score, particularly the way he uses the brass and horns, seems to add another dimension to the film, and with six horns we were able to get across the rich orchestration without strain or overblowing, and we got the wide-open sound that he wanted.

The opening sequence is a big Hollywood fanfare that dissolves into some brilliant Waltonesque music, and a dramatic pursuit in space, of the Rebel blockade-runner, by the immense Star Destroyer of the Evil Galactic Empire.

The mixture of music and effects, draws you right in to the drama of war in deep space. It had an astonishing effect on everyone in the studio, and when the lights went up after the first playback, there was a spontaneous burst of applause, that I can’t remember happening at any film recording before.

The LSO has enjoyed a golden era since Previn came here to remind them, what a great orchestra they are, and people have a new transatlantic confidence to match. It’s hard to imagine them getting over-enthusiastic about anything, but there was a real excitement in the studio that lasted all week.

At one point, George Lucas got so excited, he called his pal Spielberg in Hollywood, to let him hear the opening fanfare through the telephone, and during playbacks, with the studio in darkness, the orchestra were cheering for the “Jedi”, and booing the evil “Darth Vader”, just like the kids in the “Rex” cinema in Aberdare!!  – George was delighted of course—to have had an early preview! So there was a tremendous buzz going around as we headed off to “The Swan” to get lunch.

Eric Rogers was in the pub when we arrived. — I should have known!! — And within minutes there was not an inch of elbowroom in the bar, and some people were standing outside on the green.

Not many of the LSO players had encountered Eric before, so they didn’t know that they weren’t allowed to pay for any of their own drinks, and most were shocked to silence and acquiescence by his loudness and generosity, that went into overdrive when someone told him that Maurice Murphy had just completed his first session with the LSO as principal trumpet.

Maurice was forced to drink Veuve Clicquot with his Ploughman’s lunch!!

It really turned out to be quite a day, and there was relief and a lot of smiling faces in the studio, when we finished playing at 5 30.

Harry and I hitched a ride back into London with Jack Steadman, and Harry sat in the back of the car, still munching and talking about the film music that he remembered recording at Denham.

He played on “Vertigo” in 1958, with Bernard Herrmann, when I was still at school. That got me thinking about the smoky old “Palace” cinema in Hirwaun, where I first heard the soundtracks of the “Big Country” and the “Vikings”. I was enthralled by the sound of those orchestral horns – reaching out, and shining like a broad highway to somewhere or other – I followed it all the way to Denham!

What a thought – “We are the dreamers of dreams”.

You and your family have your dream at last, and the tenacity and self-belief of our old RPO friends has finally brought them some real hope. All this change for the better makes me feel so good, but I miss you all the same, and I often think about your Irish humour and optimism that helped to keep us all going in those dark days.

Karin loves and personifies motherhood, and has thrived on London life for a long time. The children reflect her joy and delight.

My musical life could not be better now, mainly because I’m working with arrangers or composers and I don’t see many “conductors”. I’m still depressed at the thought of one walking in to a rehearsal, with Beethoven under his arm and a professional smile on his face, like the vicar on the doorstep.

You will love this film!

Write soon with Dublin jokes and violin experiences.

Yours ever

Drac

Edinburgh

10 April 1993

Dear Pat,

Your letters always cheer me and make me laugh. I never imagined that it could be so much fun, working in a violin saleroom.

Karin and I intend to come to Dublin for a weekend some time soon, She would like to buy some Irish linen and Waterford crystal to bring “ some lovely Ireland “ into the house, and I want to wander round the writers’ museum and come and see you. Could we meet? It’s been such a long time it seems since our weekend at the Bull’s Head, swimming in that black beer and Irish music.  I wonder if the weekends are a busy time for you. Will you write and tell me if it’s all right? We’ll most likely be there on the last weekend in June when the BBC orchestra is on holiday, which I’m looking forward to immensely.

Orchestras are nothing like what they used to be you know. Life at the BBC is just a round of mediocre performances, with the odd flash of brilliance that reminds you of why you took up music in the first place. But the most part, which I can’t get used to at all, seems to be one great fuss about third rate contemporary music, silly dress codes, personality clashes, and health and safety. I don’t think you would enjoy yourself much now. No one argues with conductors any more. It’s strictly forbidden, though nothing’s changed much of course, and many of them still don’t have the faintest idea what they’re meant to be doing. All that is all very well, but it’s very difficult to have humour with a lot of what we used to think of as badinage having been reclassified as “ harassment” and it’s humour that has always kept me going in orchestral life. I miss it a lot.

This will interest you! Do you remember Horace Naismith and that beautiful Guardanini he had? Well that violin had quite a history. I learned recently that it survived miraculously, when the Queen’s Hall burned down in 1941. The hall got a direct hit from an incendiary bomb at about eleven o’clock at night. Horace was in the orchestra there as you know, and the violin, which he had left in the bandroom overnight, came floating out like Noah’s Ark, on the flood from the fire hoses, only because it was in a flimsy old ply- wood box that he’d knocked up for it, Horace having sold its heavy and very expensive cedar wood velvet lined case to someone in the orchestra for money to put on a horse that was running at Ascot. Bill Naughtie told me all this in a letter, when Horace had died recently, in very reduced circumstances it seems.

Bill said in his letter, that the Guardanini had also been sold finally, for a great deal of money, although he couldn’t say to whom. Horace was quite a man wasn’t he? Imagine leaving an instrument like that in the band room in the middle of the Blitz!!!  No wonder so many people wondered how he had acquired it in the first place?

But he was a charming, English gentleman, typical of those people in the Royal Philharmonic in the seventies. When I started to play first horn there, I remember getting a particularly severe public roasting one morning, from a very rude and excitable French conductor, and after the rehearsal, when I was seething in the spit and sawdust of “Dirty Dick’s”, next door, Horace appeared in his perfectly tailored sports jacket, drink in hand. “I do like champagne in the mornin’s”, he said, smacking his lips. ”Don’t take it personally old boy”, he said.” He’s not listenin’ to YOU, you know —- Has his own ideas. Long plane journeys— Too much time to think. — You’ll learn!! — Just play the notes. Don’t give ‘em any music. That’s a mistake. I’m sure some actually find it offensive— They think that’s their department you see. Music’s too good for orchestral players you know —. Tommy Beecham was different”.

I learned such a lot there from people like him. He always said that all that recording was a bad idea, and that it would all end in tears one day, and he was certainly right about that.

I well remember you warning me, tactfully, on one of my first tours, about Horace and his winning, or should I say beguiling, ways, particularly with regard to borrowing money. I’m sure he still owes me ten dollars! . He’s welcome to it. It was worth it for the wise words.

I’m hugely looking forward to coming to Dublin for a few days. Though I enjoy myself immensely here in Edinburgh, visiting the galleries and exploring the city.

When I’m not doing that I drive around Scotland doing concerts with the BBC Scottish and the Scottish ballet company from Dumfries up to Orkney. Scotland is breathtakingly beautiful and Karin is so happy to be back at last.

I’ll be going to Wales tomorrow to see my mother, who is in hospital. She was admitted on Friday, but didn’t let me know. When she hadn’t answered her telephone for two days, I got a little anxious and called her neighbour, who told me where she was. I’ve become used to her eccentricities over many years, but things have certainly become more difficult and worrying since Father died.

How is your mother? I wonder if she would remember me. If she does please give her my best regards, I hope she still sings. I will never forget her beautiful voice, and all those Irish songs I had never heard before. Imagine yourself as a babe in arms, and that music being the first you had ever heard in this world!!! It’s not a bit surprising that contemporary music irritates you so much. The BBC would drive you mad in a week I’m sure.

I must go K is calling me for Friday fish.

Dreaming of Dublin !!!

Luv Ever Drac

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Royal Academy of Music                                                                                                      London

Nov 17 1963

Dear Bert,

I’m writing to you from the warmth and friendliness of the students’ common room at the Academy, and through the streaming rain on the windows, I can see the old Marylebone church, sheltering under the dripping plane trees. I’m presently homeless along with the four other music students who occupied the flat at Fortune green Road; the fragile tolerance of our landlord, and the tranquillity of West Hampstead having been shattered by a very loud and impromptu trombone recital, given at around six o’clock on Sunday morning by our new Bacchanalian sub-tenant. Our desperate pleas for mercy, on behalf of his youthful exuberance, the eccentricity of genius and even our renewed willingness to pay the rent, were met only with resolute indifference, so here we are, homeless and downcast, in the damp grey London weather. I’m longing for some home comfort and intemperance!

My auntie Queenie, whom you know, was the proprietor and grand dame of the “Golden Lion” in Merthyr, and her private parlour at the back of the pub, was a place where only friends and family were invited to drink, and was famous all over the town for its Saturday night concerts.

The room was filled with murmuring Welsh voices, cigarette smoke, heavy old leather furniture, and a Broadwood piano that stood upright against the back wall, under an ornate mirror from the brewery. Between musical items, trays of beer were passed through a serving hatch in the wall, that opened onto the Saturday night mayhem of the public bar.

I was the “official” accompanist for the old colliers and their euphonic renditions of popular songs, while my aunties, Millie, Maisie and Iris, decorating the room with their décolletage, permanent waves, and girlish laughter, lit cigarettes for me, between pouring out Worthington and excessive praise for my pianistic fumblings. Then at the end of the night, Queenie would appear in her platinum splendour, with folding money and Players cigarettes for me, and pork pies with pickled cabbage for supper.

I know from my local history studies, that Thomas Carlisle called industrial Merthyr a ‘vision of hell”, and there is a passage in Trollope that tells of a curate who faints when he is posted there, but for a fourteen-year-old boy taking his first strong drink, amongst adoring aunties, pickles and prurience it was as near to heaven as can be imagined, and at times like these I long for such celestial comforts.

Here in London, I play the piano on Saturday nights, down the road at the “Devonshire Arms”. This pub does most of its trade at lunchtimes, calming the nerves of anxious patients from doctors and dentists surgeries on nearby Harley Street with an atmosphere of gentile affluence, smoked salmon sandwiches with French wine, and pink gin in crystal glasses.

On Saturday nights, the customers are mainly local residents in soft shoes and cardigans, and mellifluous English actors, whose faces are as familiar as my family to me, but who I can never put names to, and no one ever sings of course. It’s considered antisocial.

Father often told me that I shouldn’t “ mess about” with brass instruments, and that playing the piano would one day save me from starvation, so having been rendered homeless by a trombone and gainfully employed by the Devonshire Arms, I should be attentive to his advice in the future.

But try as I might to inspire myself, this metropolitan malaise DOES depress me, and the dirty rain pesters the windows like self-pity, so please forgive my indulgence. I will write again when I have somewhere to sleep and London has become less hostile. Then I’ll be able to preoccupy myself with something other than my own irrelevances, and to thank you properly for your innumerable kindnesses to me.

Very best regards to you and Beryl

Terry

PS Can I play in the Christmas concert?

PPS Will you lend me a flugel?