Fritz Theodore Albert Delius was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, into a family of wealthy wool merchants. The Delius’ originally came from Bielefeld, Westphalia, where one of the previous Burgermeisters, Ernst Frederick Delius (Fritz’s grandfather), was a retired army officer who had served proudly under Blucher during the Napoleonic Wars.

In the early 1850s three of the old soldier’s sons moved to Manchester, England, where the thriving wool industry gave great opportunities. The Delius brothers were successful from the start, with Julius opening a second factory in Bradford in 1855, where he also took out naturalization papers to become a British citizen. The following year he returned to Westphalia to marry Elise Kronig, who was fifteen years his junior, and the beautiful piano playing daughter of another prosperous Bielefeld family.

Fritz ( Delius anglicised his name to Frederick in 1902), was Elise’s fourth child and grew up in the company of two brothers and nine sisters. Although two of Elise’s children had died in infancy the Delius’ home, “Claremont”, was a happy, music filled house just a few minutes walk from Bradford Grammar School where Delius spent some of the unhappiest years of his life.

Delius’s father, a tough no-nonsense businessman (with an accent that kept slipping from upper-class English, with a hint of aristocratic German, to broad Yorkshire, as would his son’s in later life) was a great music lover and an early financial supporter of Manchester’s Halle Orchestra. He encouraged his son’s musical talents; but under no circumstances would he countenance Delius taking-up music as a career, insisting his son join the family wool business. But as a twelve year old schoolboy - and an already accomplished violinist and pianist - Fritz Delius knew his destiny was in music, whatever his father might think, or say.

As Fritz settled down to his first term at grammar school, a couple of hundred miles to the south of Bradford, in the spa town of Cheltenham, another accomplished pianist and music teacher, Adolph Von Holst, was pacing the parlour of his Georgian townhouse awaiting the birth of his first child.