In this year of celebrations of what would have been the 150th birthday of Sir Edward Elgar, it’s good to read that rare footage of the composer has been unearthed.

The BBC website reports, “Rare footage of Sir Edward Elgar conducting the London Symphony Orchestra is to be screened at the climax of a music festival in Powys. Some of the clips, including home movie shots of the composer at home with his dogs, are thought to have never been seen in public before.”

The hour-long film compilation was shown on June 24 at the Gregynog Festival, near Newtown, Powys in Wales.

Shots of Elgar conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, playing Land of Hope and Glory, are believed to have been filmed by British Pathe news at the famous Abbey Road studios in 1929.

W. H. Reed’s Elgar As I Knew Him – Part 3

Throughout Billy Reed’s book Elgar As I Knew Him, first published in 1936, we get superb insights into the composer’s life, from how - with Reed’s own skill as a violinist — he managed to “organise” his magnificent Violin Concerto (a piece, for some reason, we seldom hear these days), with Reed trying out the difficult passages to see if they could actually be done. We also see Elgar as a man of many passions, one of which was for chemistry (with resultant explosions) with a fully equipped laboratory set-up in a garden shed; in fact Elgar patented an apparatus for producing sulphurated hydrogen known as the “Elgar S.H. Apparatus”. The shed (known as “The Ark”) was also used by Elgar and Reed to hide, from Lady Elgar, bottles of India Pale Ale they’d smuggled in from the local pub in a sack – all very Ealing Comedy, all very English.

And when you learn that Elgar, after a dinner party, liked nothing better than to entertain his guests with toys bought from Woolworth’s, you are suddenly very close to the heart of the man: to a man of fun (and childhood fun at that), fun that can be heard in all his music, but often darkened by periods of black depression that often accompanies the fun at a discreet distance.

All of this is in Reed’s book, and Elgar’s love of dogs, which was something he was only able to indulge in after Lady Elgar’s death in 1920, with Mina, a Cairn Terrier (he wrote a lovely piece of music named after her), and Marco, a Spaniel – plus, at one time another Cairn Terrier - becoming his inseparable companions, whose constant love, along with Bernard Shaw’s badgering, may have given Elgar the courage to accept the BBC’s commission to write a third symphony.

On page 169 of his book Reed gets round to the subject of the 3rd Symphony…

Before entering upon the description of this work, let me quote a letter I received from Bernard Shaw, which may act as an additional deterrent to anyone who may think that, after all, it is a tragedy that this symphony should remain unperformed, and that some other composer should take fragments and build them into some sort of practicable coherence: in short, as Elgar said, tinker with it.

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