I remember as a child taking part in a country dancing competition put on by a handful of Warwickshire schools as part of the Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations in Stratford, a competition judged by Vaughan Williams, who I remember as a large elderly man slumped in a chair on the Bancroft Gardens outside the Memorial Theatre. I also remember that he tapped his walking stick in time to the music being played by a motley bunch of local musicians from several Morris Dancing groups. The point is he actually seemed to be enjoying himself, which is more than could be said for me. All I wanted was for it to be finished so I could get home and see that evening’s episode of The Cisco Kid. But the image of that old man - who had a much younger woman at his side - tapping his walking stick in time to music I now realise he must have known intimately, has remained with me.

And the abiding image we have of RVW is one of an old man, it is an image we have come across on LP and CD covers eversince his death in 1958. Much less often do we see images, or remember him, as a tall young man with passion and vision, a young man who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, travelled the countryside collecting English folk songs whose melodies and constructions he used again and again. Seldom, if ever, are we reminded that he was the musical director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1912 at the height of Benson’s fame, or that he risked his life along with millions of others ( including Benson) in the trenches of France and Salonika during the First World War, an experience that changed his music forever after 1918, filling it with irony and even more humanity, but also with a new sound: that of the very bloodied early 20th century quite literally on the move.

All of this was in the future. In the 1880s, the decade after RVW’s birth, one of the most respected principles of living at Leith Hill Place - and something RVW the child learned very early on - was that you would never, ever, show disrespect toward the servants - and there were many servants - plus, you must always be direct in your conversation (no lies or gossip), have an independence of spirit (and be prepared to argue your corner), and always be extremely industrious, attributes that should nevertheless also be mixed with charm and dignity (all traits of the Wedgwood, Darwin, Williams, and Vaughan families), which the young RVW inherited and learned by the bucketful.

As an eight year old he also taught himself to play the organ, a great beast of a thing that lived in the hallway of Leith Hill Place (which was no semi), persuading the servants to work the bellows as he filled the house with music, and this was usually around five in the morning, so no one slept late. Some biographers of RVW have suggested that his upbringing was no different from other children of his time and class. I don’t really agree. I think RVW’s home life was an extraordinary in its freedom, and for its time, extremely happy and unrestricted whereas most artists and writers of his generation seem to have been brought up in dreadfully restricted homes, with parents who either ignored their children completely, or tried to destroy whatever spark of creativity they had with corporal punishment.

In 1882 the already tall RVW was sent to a preparatory school in Rottingdene, where he learned piano under the forward looking educationalist C.T. West who, as James Day reminds us, “…introduced him to the music of Bach, and continued his violin lessons (which he practised in the evenings, so there wasn‘t much sleep in the Leith Hill Place household) under the Irishman, W.M. Quirke, a well known Brighton teacher of those days…” with the high light of the young RVW’s school musical career coming when “…Quirke’s young charge performed Raff’s Cavatina…”, ‘double- stops and all’, as Vaughan Williams insisted in later life.

He was a born musician.

To Be Continued…

Steve Newman