to claim that this was the moment I knew my destiny was to write music. But the truth is, it wasn’t. Music was an increasingly important part of my life, my safety valve in fact, but it wasn’t my overriding passion. Equal first was still architecture, with art a close third.
My love of ruined castles and abbeys must have started very young because I have a scrapbook put together when I can’t have been more than six. It is stuffed with guidebooks and postcards and very childish writing about the abbeys and castles around Southampton and Portsmouth. This figures, because my father’s sister Marley lived around these parts in one of those twentieth-century houses which, like most of the sprawl on the English south coast, should be demolished forthwith.
I am pretty sure that my passion for architecture kicked off at Westminster Abbey. A few years ago I was invited to a meeting about some very exciting plans for the Abbey’s future. The Dean of Westminster produced a letter that the Abbey archivist had found which he proceeded to read. It was from me aged seven offering my pocket money to the Abbey fabric fund. “Precocious brat” was written all over the faces around the table. I have had many discussions about getting involved with the Abbey subsequently but they always stall over my insistence that the utterly inappropriate chandeliers that were hung in the church in the 1960s are sold to a hotel in Vegas.
I shall forever have a debt to my parents for indulging my childhood obsession. Every family holiday was somewhere in Britain where there were buildings I wanted to see. One summer the family found itself in a rented house near the massive steelworks of Port Talbot in Wales because I wanted to be near a place called Margam Abbey –which, by the way, has a great orangery. The best holiday was in Yorkshire. You have to be made of Yorkshire granite not to be moved by the stunning evocative ruins of Fountains Abbey. My favourite was Rievaulx. What did the abbey look like before Henry VIII’s minions did an ISIS job on this medieval masterpiece? The imagination runs riot. The vistas to the abbey from the glorious mid-eighteenth- century park on the hill above Rievaulx are England at its Arcadian best.
What emphatically was not Arcadian was an incident still embedded irrevocably in my skull. My parents took me and Perseus the cat to Richmond Castle. The place was pretty empty, so Mum let Perseus off his dog lead. Out of the blue a bunch of cadets from the local army camp tramped into the castle courtyard as noisily as their boots would allow, caught sight of our terrified cat and chased him up the spiral staircase of one of the towers. Dad, of course, ran for cover. Even today I have a real paranoia of the army. Certainly it fuelled my childhood fear of conscription, which was still in action in Britain at that time, and ten years later heightened my sympathy with the pressganged US conscripts of the Vietnam War. That incident and the constant fearmongering headlines in the press about war over the Suez Canal throughout that hot 1955 summer led me to the dark thought that forces I could never control would some day destroy me and my little world of theatre and medieval buildings. It was during that otherwise idyllic holiday that I first prayed at bedtime.
VERY SOON THEATRES JOINED the list of abbeys, cathedrals, country houses and the like that so dominated my childhood. The 1950s saw the arrival of television. Soon the variety theatres that were so much a part of pre-war British life became sad, redundant, twitching corpses. Theatre after theatre succumbed to the wrecker’s ball. I found their plight irresistible. Some theatres literally had become ruins. I remember prising my way into the derelict Bedford Theatre in London’s Camden Town, a theatre memorably made famous by the early twentieth-century artist Walter Sickert who painted it brimming full of vibrant life. Rain was pouring through a gaping hole in the roof. Two years later it was a memory.
Some of the lucky ones had a stay of execution by being turned into TV studios. The Chelsea Palace was one such. I was taken to a transmission of a then massive TV comedy series, The Army Game. The stalls had been raised to the level of the stage to create a huge flat floor on which the dinosaur TV cameras ducked and dived around teeny little sets. In the late 1950s that sort of show was broadcast live. For a brief period, the Harrington Pavilion was turned into a TV studio with a similar flat floor, but mercifully common sense prevailed and live theatrical performances resumed PDQ with a massive hit musical called The Weird Sisters based on Macbeth. Now the Chelsea Palace is yet another Kings Road shopping centre. What would a theatre producer give for such a wonderful building in that location now?
HOWEVER THE TV PROGRAMME that really game-changingly gripped me was a Saturday night rock’n’roll show called Oh Boy! It thrillingly made a virtue of being filmed in a theatre, a wonderful old variety house called the Hackney Empire, which intriguingly was designed by the same architect as the London Palladium, Frank Matcham. It was directed by Jack Good who went on to helm Catch My Soul, the rock Othello. He used the auditorium as if it were part of the set. Cameras swooped onto the stage over hysterical girls screaming at Brit male stars who all had surnames like Wilde, Eager or Fury. Equally great was the backing band Lord Rockingham’s XI with their intriguing choreographed instrument moves. I moaned to my mother that Brahms would be much enhanced if classical orchestras would only do this sort of thing. Years later Cliff Richard confirmed to me just how staged each show was and how he had been directed down to the last camera eyeball.
Oh Boy! made a most profound impression on me. From then on the words rock’n’roll were synonymous with musical theatre and the Harrington Pavilion was soon ablaze with rock shows.
BY THE TIME I hit double figures my brother Julian was becoming a star on his half-size cello. The word “prodigy” was bellowed above the traffic din at 10 Harrington Court and unsurprisingly Mum’s main interest switched to my younger sibling. Notwithstanding this, we both entered the Saturday morning junior school at the Royal College of Music, me toting my shiny french horn.
But, as far as Mum was concerned, I was at best a conundrum and so she gave up on my academic career and, buoyed by events at the school concert, I gave up on it too. Thoughts of my being the youngest ever Queen’s Scholar at Westminster Great (i.e. senior) School evaporated. I wasn’t even entered for the scholarship exam called “the Challenge.” Mum’s sole consolation prize was that I entered Westminster aged twelve, a full year earlier than usual. Meantime I was getting closer and closer to my deliciously naughty Aunt Vi.
1. A uniquely British theatre entertainment for families that goes back to the nineteenth century, its appeal is wholly inexplicable to non-Brits.
2. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Williamson Music was represented by Teddy Holmes at Chappell’s. As well as being Rodgers and Hammerstein’s publisher, he was also my father’s.
A quick reminder. Auntie Vi was mother Jean’s elder sister. She married Dr George Crosby, the dumpy somewhat pompous doctor for whom Granny Molly had once worked as a secretary. Vi called him “Potto” which was really rather appropriate. That glorious word “panjandrum” could have been invented for him. Vi and George plus a marmalade cat named Cooper lived in a top-floor flat in Weymouth Street above his medical practice, close enough to the centre of London’s medical hub Harley Street, but the location was cheaper and actually rather nicer. I used to escape there as often as possible. The flat or maisonette, as George puffed it up – seemed impossibly glamorous (my aunt would have said “chi-chi”) after the seldom cleaned haven for traffic noise addicts that was Harrington Court.
There was an upstairs drawing room which had been knocked into the room next door by means of an ever so “chi-chi” arch. Therein lurked a stereo record player on which Auntie played those Fifties Latin American records which showed off the marvels of stereo with question-and- answer bongo solos panned left and right only. There was a dining room with a bar underneath and a wine rack containing George’s collection of Barolo. Up to that time the only wine bottles I had seen had candles in them. There was Vi’s kitchen where there were herbs, onions, garlic and wine and where she cooked her recipes for the modern woman. In 1956 she had written and had published a hit recipe book The Hostess Cooks, under her maiden name Viola Johnstone. Its premise was that in the Fifties no one could afford home help any more. The recipes were designed so that our hostess could emerge from the stoves, mascara intact, to entertain out front as if an