BOOK REVIEW
THOMAS DUNHILL: MAKER OF MUSIC by David Dunhill with introductory essay
by Lewis Foreman, Thames Publishing (London, 1997); xxiii, 126pp, 6pl.
£12.50. ISBN 0 903413 83 3.
AmazonUK
Thomas Dunhill belonged to an overcrowded generation of British composers
of quite exceptional talent that began with Bantock and ended with Bax. In
between we find Vaughan Williams, Holst, Coleridge Taylor, Rootham, Tovey,
O'Neill, Brian, Hurlstone, Quilter, Gardiner, Holbrooke, Boughton, Scott,
Ireland, Bridge, all born within a year or two of each other and all coming
to maturity at about the same time. Small wonder that in such company a composer
like Dunhill, so unassuming and as dedicated to the promotion of his fellow
composers as of himself, should have become a forgotten figure in British
music. True, his name lives on as the author of Chamber Music: A Treatise
for Students, published in 1913 and still a seminal work on the subject.
The entries he contributed to Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music
(1929) continue to be read with the greatest advantage. His short study of
Mozart's String Quartets, published by OUP in 1927, is a yardstick by which
future commentators will always be judged. Yet this is but a fraction of
his legacy. The extent to which his reputation has dwindled is reflected
in the last (1980) edition of Grove's Dictionary when the substantial entry
of previous editions by G.S.K. Butterworth and H.C. Colles was reduced to
a few paltry sentences of no value.
It is greatly to be hoped that on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of
his death, or perhaps more happily the 120th of his birth, this timely and
absorbing biography, written by his younger son, David, will do much to rekindle
interest in the music and inspiration of this truly extraordinary musician,
and who better qualified to undertake the task than David, who was witness
to all of it everything that went on from the early 1920s up to the time
of his father's death in 1946 and present at the birth of so many significant
compositions. From the age of 16 in 1893 right up to the time of his death
Tom Dunhill kept a day-to-day diary, sometimes frustratingly vague on detail
but nevertheless an accurate chronology of everything he did. On the basis
of this and his own personal recollections, David has been able to compile
a full and totally gripping account of his father's life in a way that a
more distanced biographer would have been quite unable to fulfil, allowing
us to enter into the day-to-day triumphs and tribulations of the Dunhill
household as a fly on the wall so to speak, while also providing us with
some rare family photographs.
But first his book opens with a lengthy introductory essay by Lewis Foreman
"writing what I could never have written: his perceptive and highly skilled
appreciation of my father's music." as David generously puts it. This essay,
written one suspects, under some difficulty with so much of Tom's music remaining
unpublished and inaccessible for detailed analysis, nevertheless highlights
in masterly fashion his most significant works which traverse a wide field
from ambitious early chamber music indebted to Brahms or perhaps more accurately
to the teaching of Stanford; his splendid light operas the most significant
of which, Tantivy Towers, to a libretto by A.P. Herbert, is in real need
of revival; his considerable educational music, his songs, few in number
but of exquisite construction and his orchestral scores which range from
short occasional pieces such as the Chiddingfold and Guildford
Suites to the large-scale Symphony in A minor, not heard since 1935,
for which Mr Foreman makes out a strong case for revival. Among all this
neglected music one work at least has now enjoyed a modern CD recording,
the Violin Sonata in F Op. 50, a work dating from 1917 that must count as
one of Tom's finest compositions.
Tom's life was in some respects very prosaic, yet he played a fundamental
role in the musical life of this country for more than four decades and we
should be inspired by his achievement. Born in 1877 in north-west London,
the fourth of a family of five, his father was a purveyor of tarpaulins,
canvas and other requisites for horse-drawn vehicles. His brothers Alfred
and Herbert ( 'Bertie' ) went on to establish a successful tobacco business;
another, Harry, was mentally retarded. His sister Jane stayed at home to
look after her parents and married late in life. The family did not remain
long in London but moved to Canterbury where Tom spent his adolescent years,
attending Kent College for a time, but there began private music lessons;
in London with a Mr Kennedy and by the autumn of 1893 we find him entering
the Royal College of Music as a 16-year-old student, being taught piano under
Franklin Taylor and harmony with Walter Parratt and composition under the
formidable Charles Villiers Stanford. His contemporaries at the RCM included
Holst, Ireland, Hurlstone, Vaughan Williams, Bainton and Fritz Hart.
It was during his time there that Parry took over as Principal. In 1899,
while still at the College, he was unexpectedly invited by Dr Harford Lloyd
to join the music staff at Eton as an assistant master teaching piano. There
he had occasion to teach George Butterworth. He remained at Eton until 1905
but then took up a teaching post at the RCM and he more or less continued
there on the staff in one capacity or another for the rest of his life with
a constantly busy round of teaching, examining, adjudicating at music festivals
and competitions both at home and abroad and, of course, composing. One thing
that strikes one quite forcefully when reading these pages is that the long
years of teaching, adjudicating and examining that preoccupied so much of
his time seem never to have become a grind, only a fulfilment of his mission
in life.
Tom undertook a remarkable examination tour of Australia and New Zealand
as early as 1906 for the Associated Board and on his return he inaugurated
a notable series of chamber concerts to provide a second hearing for British
chamber music compositions that were in danger of remaining on the shelf
- including some of his own - which were to continue for many years. Yet
another tour of New Zealand followed in 1908 and in 1910 a trip to Jamaica
and Canada. With so much activity it is not perhaps surprising that Tom's
health was occasionally undermined and he suffered from gastric problems
throughout his life but rarely allowed such inconveniences to interrupt his
routines for any length of time.
It was in 1913 that Tom met and a year later married his first wife Molly
Arnold, a pupil at the RCM and a great-great granddaughter of the famous
Dr Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby and a daughter of the well-known publisher
Edward Arnold, the owner of a large house on Pook Hill, at Chiddingfold,
a rural village near Godalming in south-west Surrey, where Tom was destined
to spend considerable time amid a much expanded family circle.
Based in London, Tom's early years of marriage were disrupted by the outbreak
of World War I. He joined the Artists Rifles on a part-time basis but was
later conscripted as a bandsman in the Irish Guards based at Wellington Barracks
and eventually ended up with a much less congenial occupation as an orderly
clerk. By then he had become a family man. Robin was born in 1915, David
in 1917 and with the household comfortably settled in Lansdowne Road and
the war over he was soon able to resume his full-time schedule at the RCM
and his creative work. His daughter, Barbara, was born in 1921 and from this
point the more personal memories of Tom's life begin to intrude on David's
narrative with holidays at the seaside and visits to Pook Hill.
The Symphony in A minor, begun in 1914, received its unlikely but very successful
premiere in Belgrade in 1922, thanks to the efforts of his erstwhile Serbian
pupil, Bratza and Dushko Yovanovitch who, incidentally, but not related in
the book, still championed his Violin Sonata in F deep into the 1950s. Alas
his wife, Molly was far from well and suffering from the first manifestations
of tuberculosis, in those days an incurable malady. The family were eventually
obliged to uproot from the unhealthy environment of London to seek cleaner
air and settled into a house at Guildford, not far distant from Pook Hill
and it was here that David spent his childhood, by all accounts a very happy
time, but eventually Molly succumbed to her illness in 1929 and died at Merano
in the Italian Tyrol where Tom's brother Bertie had a house, while Tom was
back in England, heavily involved in the preparation of his opera Tantivy
Towers in collaboration with A.P. Herbert, a work that was destined to
enjoy immense success and to establish his reputation.
The trauma of being left a widower with three young children to support would
have been horrific for someone as preoccupied as Tom but for a remarkable
nanny, Wendy Moon, who took over the running of the Dunhill household and
remained with the family for 18 years, enabling Tom to continue with his
work without interruption, but the strain of commuting induced him to sell
the house in Guildford and to move back to the hub of things in London in
what the children found much more cramped conditions in Platts Lane, off
Finchley Road.
Tom's subsequent works never attained the same success as Tantivy Towers
but he had a passing success with his ballet Gallimaufry which
was put on in Hamburg in 1937 and later broadcast by the BBC. By then he
was heavily engaged in writing a book on Elgar, a composer whom he greatly
admired, for the Scottish publishers, Blackie & Son. It is interesting
to discover that while holding Elgar in the highest esteem, he could not
abide the music of his contemporary Vaughan Williams but had a warm and close
relationship with John Ireland. In 1938 Tom embarked on yet another Associated
Board examination tour at the time of the Munich crisis, this time to India,
not returning home until Christmas. It proved to be his last overseas excursion
with World War II just round the corner.
It was during the last years of his life, at the time when David was away
serving with the RAF in the Middle East, that the present reviewer, albeit
as an adolescent schoolboy, may lay claim to have come into contact with
Tom Dunhill. Late in 1942 after what appears to have been a brief courtship,
he married for the second time. He met Isobel Featonby, a piano teacher,
at an examination in Scunthorpe. She was 38, he already 65, but they were
destined to have a wonderfully happy life together. By this time he had returned
to Eton College at the invitation of the Precentor, Dr Henry Ley, to rejoin
the music staff at first to take occasional piano pupils but later also to
teach theory and to coach the school orchestra while at the same time leaving
him free to continue with his other duties at the RCM. Belle also joined
the staff as a piano teacher, the only female member on the teaching staff.
She was still quite young, but prematurely grey, a warm and charming person,
adored by her pupils, who brought a breath of fresh air to that austere monastic
institution.
Tom was a tall, thin, commanding personality who entered very fully into
the life of the school but it must have been a daunting prospect for someone
used to conducting large professional orchestras to find himself having to
train a school orchestra full of enthusiasm but of very limited talent into
some kind of shape. True, one student of the period went on to become a
distinguished professional viola player and another could have become a brilliant
violinist had he not chosen to divert his talents to the cause of politics
and yet another made a name for himself as a light tenor, but music was regarded
as very much an extra-curricular activity in the Eton of those days, offering
no music scholarships to attract pupils of obvious musical ability. Yes,
Tom had many frustrations transforming cacophony into harmony yet managed
to coach the orchestra through the challenge of Beethoven's first symphony
to create a commendable public performance of a work that may well have been
heard on that occasion for the very first time by the youthful school audience.
The infectious enthusiasm in everything he did seemed to overcome all
difficulties for Tom during those years. Nor did he cease to compose. The
Triptych for viola and orchestra, written for Lionel Tertis, was premiered
to great acclaim, at the 1942 Proms, while his overture, May-Time,
due for the 1944 season and his last significant work had to be postponed
because of the bombing until 1945. Tom relinquished his position at Eton
at Christmas 1945 upon the retirement of his boss, Dr Henry Ley. When news
of his unexpected death at Scunthorpe reached the pupils he had left behind
in March 1946, a feeling of loss and grief engulfed us all. He was truly
a Maker of Music wearing many hats; an uplifting figure never to be forgotten.
All this and so much more comes vividly into focus as we read this absorbing
biography in which David Dunhill has brought his father's life, work and
personality most lovingly to our attention. It is a very good read and I
was particularly touched by the photograph of father and son together which
must have been taken in the mid-1920s and which graces the cover of his book.
I noticed one or two minor slips in the text, perhaps worth correcting The
New Grove Dictionary (last edition) is in 20 volumes, not 11 (p.11); Schooltime
at Eton is known as a Half, never a Term (p.20 et seq) but my only complaint
is that while there is a good index of works discussed in the text, no definitive
worklist and bibliography is provided which would have greatly enhanced the
book as a source of future consultation and reference, but we are told in
David Dunhill's introduction that an accompanying book about the musical
aspects of his father's life and work by Beryl Kington "will follow in due
course". Hopefully this lacuna can then be rectified.
Richard D.C. Noble
see also
Biography and CD reviews
Article by Philip Scowcroft
