HISTORY
The ‘Beeb
A backward glance at a BBC career and sketches of th My colleagues held a memorable leaving party for me following the afternoon recording session of my last working day before Christmas 1998. It was memorable for many reasons, one of them really irritating. In nearly 30 years of playing in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, I had never done overtime to get a programme in the can, but Vernon Handley managed it with some obscure pieces by Delius and I arrived late at my own party. Chris Mowat and Henry Hardy had invited my family plus a crowd of orchestral chums and jazz mates, who could not be expected to hold back, and I joined them after the fun had already started. Obviously a speech was expected and I had done some research in readiness. Having reached the compulsory BBC retirement age of 60 (things have changed in the meantime) and seen players in the trombone section come and go, it was clear that I must have been among the longest serving. In the appendices of The BBC Symphony Orchestra by Nicholas Kenyon, there is a list of personnel and their dates from the orchestra’s formation in 1930, and it turned out that I beat Bill Teskey by a week, both of us putting in more than 28 years of service. It isn’t until you’ve got a fair old number of decades under your belt that you can track how seemingly random events have formed a discernible thread through your life. Very recently, while clearing out loads of personal clutter that seemed to have stuck to me for a very long time, I found the programme of the first Promenade Concert I ever attended on 7 September 1957, a couple of weeks before I rolled up to the Royal Academy of Music to find out what the world of music was all about. I knew very little about music then and was overawed by the whole thing. The trombones were Bill Teskey, Jack Pinches and Bill Coleman. A matter of days later, I nervously showed up with my B&H Emperor at a room at the top of the Academy for my first lesson with Sidney Langston, principal trombone of the BBC SO from its formation to 1947. I needn’t have had the jitters as Sid was a very friendly man, always smiling, with a fund of stories and, if I’m being honest, not the greatest inclination to pass on his knowledge and experience. But
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I liked him, and although he never played a note in lessons, there’s no doubt that he was a master of the instrument in the days of the peashooter trombone. It is hard for young players of today to understand that at that time there were no foreign-made instruments in the shops. The reason was that, post-war, the government imposed a ban on the import of foreign instruments to protect Boosey and Hawkes and other British makers. Some contraband instruments crept through the net, like the German Grönitz that I acquired from I can’t remember where, but I only got my first Conn 88H in 1961 after trade laws were relaxed. The Polish trombonist, Alfred Flaszynski, left the Philharmonia in 1965 to become principal of the BBC SO at a time of huge programme policy changes, devised by Sir William Glock and a new young French composer/ conductor, Pierre Boulez. Alf’s career, his style and his personality are legendary among my generation. He was the subject of the first article I wrote for BTS in 1986 and it is available online. Also in 1965, John Iveson walked straight from the Royal College of Music into the newly created position of co-principal trombone. He joined John Fletcher on tuba and Peter Harvey (bass trombone) at exactly the time when the orchestra was moving away from the traditional programming style of Malcolm Sargent’s days, which had been all Brylcream, Jerusalem and carnations, to a policy that embraced the avant-garde. If you didn’t like that you could always leave and freelance, or join one of the other four London orchestras that lived off the old warhorses. There was a lot of mobility in those days and changes of personnel took place among many BBC SO sections, usually younger men coming in for older ones (some of them really big names) who didn’t like the way the winds of change were blowing. John Iveson moved to principal of the RPO, I got his job and my contract with the BBC began in January 1970. Of the trombone section I had heard at my first Prom, Jack Pinches remained. He was a proud Yorkshireman, very kindly and cheerful, and
he owned a Rolls Royce car. Not many second trombonists can brag about that (or firsts), but from the coal mines to solo trombone of Black Dyke Mills Band to the BBC, to teacher at Eton College, it meant a great deal to Jack. He looked after me in my first principal job and warned me of things to look out for. But a great deal of this new repertoire we all had to find out for ourselves. I still didn’t own an alto; there were so few in the country. Alfred had a Lätsch, acquired when he worked for a while in Hamburg, a classic German design which he left to me, and which I still use. But I needed one of my own if was going to get anywhere near the Berg Three Pieces, Opus 6, and hang onto my job under the demanding gaze, and ears, of Boulez. Luckily, John Iveson’s Grönitz came on the market. It only had six positions, but the way I worked it out I’d only need seventh once and I reckoned that even Pierre probably wouldn’t notice one