N o .123
T he T rusty S ervant
Inspired by Win Coll music (cont’d)…
James Steadman (Coll, 51-56) also
remembers:
David Wilson’s mention in TS122 of
the performance of the Messiah in the
Cathedral, in which the soprano soloist
was Isobel Baillie, inspired me to write
to you with my own recollections of
the event, and of choral singing at Win
Coll and afterwards. Incidentally, Isobel
Baillie was then 56 and had been one
of the top British sopranos between the
wars, so I suspect Winchester could only
afford her because she was nearing the
end of her career.
I was on the 1951 Election Roll and
arrived in College that September, so I
was a contemporary of David, although
I don’t remember him and I would be
surprised if he remembers me. I had
had music lessons at prep school and
could read the treble clef, but I had
never taken part in any choral singing.
However, I had a voice test and was
conscripted into Glee Club as a treble, to
start rehearsing Messiah, although, after
three weeks of struggling to reach top
As, I was allowed to sing alto instead.
Messiah was my first public concert:
I have since sung it in many other
performances, sometimes as a tenor,
mostly as a bass, but alas never as a
treble! My voice broke after about a year
and I was allowed to leave Glee Club,
later rejoining as a bass. Collegemen who
rang Chapel bells were allowed to sit
in the gallery for services, giving us the
chance to sing the harmony parts from
the hymnbooks, which is how I learned
to read the bass clef.
When I went up to Oxford, a
Hungarian refugee from the 1956
uprising, who had been a student of
Kodaly, arrived at my college at the
same time, and started a choir, which
I joined. 30 years later, I heard he had
been appointed musical director of the
Royal Choral Society, so I auditioned
and was thrilled to be accepted. I sang
with it for 20 years, in most of the big
London venues and many others around
the country and abroad, and with top
orchestras and conductors. I also joined
my local choral society in Hertford 40
years ago, and I’m still singing with it:
we perform concerts with professional
orchestras and soloists and have covered
most of the choral repertoire in that
time. So I too owe a huge debt to the
School, and to Glee Club in particular,
for stimulating an interest that has been
an important part of my life for 65 years.
As does Malcolm Borthwick (F, 52-56):
I would like to add my tuppence-
worth to David Wilson’s inspirations; we
overlapped by a couple of years. How
sad that he mentions only music, and
ecclesiastical music at that: I hope it
wasn’t his sole inspiration. The school at
the time was rather akin to a university
for 15 year olds, as it was before the
gymkhana-like rounds of state exams
were superimposed on the curriculum:
GCEs and A Levels were taken when
one had progressed sufficiently. In my
case, I seemed to languish in JP for most
of my time, with the Damoclean sword
of being firked for ever present. Games
and Gerry Dicker saved me and so did
the wonderful teaching, much of it
extempore, by the likes of Jack Parr and
Harry Altham. I eventually accrued 4
GCEs.
So what did the school mean to me?
I agree with music, but would like to
add a love of architecture, which leads
one down the byways of history and the
arts, if only to understand the building
being admired. Moreover, my love of
poetry and literature was developed
by Hubert Doggart, who set up a small
clique of us laggards to study particularly
the 20 th -century poets. I met Hubert
over 60 years later and he remembered
my enthusiastic input into those classes.
8
Bunny Dowdswell developed my love of
ornithology, which years later I honed
as an upland ecologist and owner of the
largest SSSI in its day. With this broad
cultural base at Win Coll, I left after
four years and have considered myself
extremely lucky.
Henry Havergal was pivotal to this
development. Up to house, we had a
system of record purchasing which was
split between pop and classical, both
of which had their time slot: Hopper’s
appears less democratic or eclectic in
its tastes as my enduring love of both
was fostered here. Choir practice would
be enlivened by HH striding up the
aisle asking the organist for the result
of the house vote for pop of the week.
Yes, it was Frankie Lane sometimes,
Alma Cogan at other times, etc. So
John Beecham (G, 53-58), Sir Thomas’s
grandson, would belt out on full swell
the song, ‘She had a dark and a roving
eye and her hair hung down in ringlets,
a nice girl, a proper girl but one of the
roving kind.’ This way HH warmed
up our voices before half a minute of
compulsory coughing and thence settled
down to the practice so aptly described
by DW. Years later I met Nina Havergal
and told her this story, which brought
tears to her eyes: Henry had just died.
This pop diet proved especially
useful for me later when I got a job as
a singing waiter in the Yukon Bar on
Lexington Avenue, New York City in
the early 60s. Exchange controls meant
money did not go far, but the 99 days
for $99 Greyhound bus ticket could at
least be purchased in the UK. By that
time five years as a Gordon Highlander
had polished up my repertoire from
Lady Nairn’s Scottish song book, Harry
Lauder’s inimitable favourites and a
passable rendering of the Doric songs
of Aberdeenshire such as ‘Muckin o’
Geordie’s byre’.