A Visit to Eric Coates’ boyhood home in Hucknall (Nottinghamshire)
… and The Eric Coates Society
They say Nottingham lies at the heart of England. It is the
county city of Nottinghamshire located in England’s North-East
Midlands. Nowadays you can take a tram ride out from Nottingham’s
city centre eleven miles northwards to the town of Hucknall
located in what is termed Greater Nottingham. Hucknall was once
an important centre for framework knitting; then, later, for
coal mining. The Rolls-Royce
site is also located there, where engines were tested for vertical
take-off aeroplanes - indeed, in this context, one of Hucknall’s
pubs is affectionately known as The Flying Bedstead.
Nearby Eastwood is famous as the birthplace of D.H. Lawrence,
and Hucknall’s St Mary Magdalene Church is the resting place
of Lord Byron and his estranged daughter, the mathematician Ada
Lovelace.
For light music lovers Hucknall is also famous as the birthplace
and boyhood home of the composer Eric Coates who is remembered
as ‘The Uncrowned King of Light Music’.
In the early 1950s, I was a schoolboy living close to West Bridgford
where Eric Coates took music lessons. West Bridgford is a Nottingham
suburb, lying just south of the River Trent. As a boy, myself,
I was very much aware of Eric Coates’ music for it was often
played on the radio as signature tunes for numerous programmes
including: Calling All Workers that introduced the
BBC’s Music While You Work; By the Sleepy Lagoon
the piece that still opens Desert Island Discs and
the Knightsbridge March that was the stirring music
for In Town Tonight. Little did I realise,
then, that a young boy of about the same age had regularly made
the journey to West Bridgford from Hucknall, around 1898, to
study harmony with a Dr Ralph Horner. I was not to learn about
this until my late teens when I picked up a copy of Eric Coates’
autobiography Suite in Four Movements which I have
read and re-read so many times since then. Little did I know
then, that many years later, in 1983, I would meet the composer’s
son, Austin Coates, and interview him for a BBC local radio
programme and, later, collaborate with him to arrange a reprint
of Suite in Four Movements with a new Foreword, written
by myself, published in 1986, the centenary year of Eric Coates’s
birth.
During August 2012, I had occasion to visit Nottingham and having
some spare time I resolved to travel up to Hucknall to see where
Eric Coates lived as a boy – he left the town to study at London’s
Royal Academy of Music in the early Autumn of 1906, when he
was 20 years old - Eric was born in Hucknall in 1886. So I took
the tram up from Nottingham City Centre past Nottingham Trent
University, uphill past the Arboretum, through Basford to the
tram’s Hucknall terminus which is one of the three rail stations
that served the town in the days of Coates. There I was met
by two officers of The Eric Coates Society which was formed
quite recently in 2008: Mr Peter Butler, Hon. Secretary and
Mr Geoffrey Sheldon, Hon. Chairman. It is a short distance from
the railway station to the Coates family home at ‘Tenter Hill’
on Beardall Street which is now marked by an official commemorative
blue plaque. ‘Tenter Hill’ is a large establishment; it was
necessarily so to house the professional activities of Eric
Coates’s father, a local doctor whose clients included many
employees of the local coal mining industry – and to house his
large family of three girls and two boys - Eric being the youngest
child. In those days a doctor’s house commonly needed three
separate professional rooms to serve as waiting, dispensary
and consulting areas. Our hostess Mrs Debbie Connor, herself
a prominent member of The Eric Coates Society, kindly showed
us around the house and gardens and we spent a delightful hour
in the lounge discussing Eric Coates’ music and his early life
in Hucknall. Afterwards we visited the site, two or three streets
away, of a smaller house where the Coates family first lived
before they transferred to Tenter Hill. Before I returned to
Nottingham, Peter Butler showed me around the centre of Hucknall
including the Library where there is an impressive collection
of Eric Coates memorabilia including many music scores, and
the outside of the adjacent St Mary Magdalene church - a wedding
was proceeding inside.
I would highly recommend lovers of Eric Coates’ music to read
his autobiography, Suite in Four Movements
for details of his early life in Hucknall. The ‘First Movement’
of his story – Allegretto Pastorale – is an amusing,
breezy account of life at Tenter Hill. One reads of his early
musical experiences, his cycle rides, or rides in his father’s
pony and trap, through the Nottinghamshire countryside and photographic
expeditions with his father - a keen photographer who passed
on his enthusiasm to Eric - to places like the grand edifice
of Southwell Minster in the north of Nottinghamshire.
Ian Lace
The Eric Coates Society
The
Eric Coates Society, established in 2008, is based at the very
place where Eric Coates was born and raised - in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire,
England. The Society was formed to promote the composer’s life
and music.
The Society’s Chairman, Geoffrey Sheldon, commented, “Here in
Hucknall, we are active in being part of the ‘Light Music’ scene
that is slowly gathering pace in the country after many lean
years and Eric Coates’s music is a very important contribution
to that musical genre. In Autumn each year, we have been able
to mount concerts and hope to continue their successes; and
in Hucknall Library our historical advisor has established an
impressive collection of Eric Coates memorabilia including many
music scores”
The Society’s Secretary, Peter Butler, added: “ We have a growing
membership. Our President is the famous young conductor and
arranger, and champion of Eric Coates music, John Wilson. We
also have a number of keen and distinguished honorary members
including: Alan Titchmarsh, Rob Cowan (presenter, BBC Radio
3), Sir Michael Parkinson; Iain Sutherland (conductor and arranger)
and Dr Michael Payne (author of a new book on Eric Coates)”.
Ian Lace
