I first saw David Willcocks in St George’s Hall, Bradford, Wet Yorkshire, my home town. He was conducting the Bradford Festival Choral Society in their annual performance of Messiah. One of my school teachers was accompanist to the Society and she encouraged me to join the choir. I never got to meet David Willcocks during my time as a member, but by the age of fourteen I had determined that I was going to be an organ scholar at Cambridge, where he was then Director of Music at King’s College.
I duly sat the trials (a very apt term!) and, much to my surprise, was awarded the organ scholarship at Sidney Sussex College. I still remember the part of the audition where David Willcocks and George Guest asked me to improvise, periodically telling me (at short notice) to modulate into another key. I managed to get in, despite – I suspect – being too slow on the uptake for Willcocks’s liking.
At Cambridge, I had relatively little to do with Willcocks in my first two years as an undergraduate. In my second year, I attended his score reading classes where I observed how kind he was to even the weakest students. ‘A little chink in the armour there, Mr Baker’ he once said to me when I had completely misread an orchestral score, assuming that the Clarinets were in B flat and not A.
I sang in CUMS (Cambridge University Music Society) Choir, which he conducted, and I never missed an opportunity to go to Evensong at King’s when he was there. It was said that he always accompanied the psalms himself, and what brilliant accompaniments they were too! You can get a flavour of this on the Psalms of David disc (pun very definitely intended!) that he recorded with the choir.
The third year of the degree allowed students to specialise in various aspects of music history, composition or performance. One of the ‘special subjects’ that I elected to study was simply titled ‘The Organ Music of JS Bach’., led by David Willcocks. I jumped at the chance to work with the great man. Unexpectedly, I was one of only two students taking this particular option, so I had a wonderful opportunity to get to know him better.
And it was a privilege as well as a pleasure to work through JSB’s organ music with David Willocks. The high point of the course came for me in May 1973 when he asked me what I was doing the Saturday after next.
‘Nothing’, I replied, quizzically.
‘Then would you like to give the Saturday evening recital at King’s for me? You don’t have to play all Bach, of course!’
I could hardly contain my excitement. I remember the thrill of playing the mighty Harrison, especially when the note on the console telling people practising to play no louder than Swell 4 and Great 3 had a footnote saying ‘this rubric does not apply to visiting recitalists’. You would have heard me back at Sidney Sussex College by the end of my rehearsal slot…
After I left Cambridge I lost touch, other than seeing him on television and listening to him on radio. It was a great pleasure to read the book A Life in Music: Conversations with Sir David Willcocks and Friends, and to learn so much about his life. I was intrigued by the references to his time in the army during World War II, when he won the Military Cross. How could such a gentle man could have fought in the way that he did?
I remember Dr Richard Marlow, Organist and Fellow in Music at Trinity College and my Director of Studies while I was at Cambridge, once telling me that he had asked Sir David how he could have killed anyone. Apparently, Willcocks had replied softly ‘well, it was either Jerry or oneself’. He expanded on this very pragmatic approach in an interview that he gave not long before his death. I commend it to your attention – the discussion says a lot about the man. It can be heard at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tt5hs.
I met up with Sir David only once after I left Cambridge. It was in the late 1970s and I was working at the University of Leicester. I played the splendid Taylor organ in the De Montfort Hall for graduation ceremonies. It came to pass (as they say) that the University was giving Willcocks an honorary DMus for his work with the Leicester Bach Choir.
I thought little about this until I received a phone call one evening from the Lord Lieutenant of Leicestershire (LLL for short). He explained to me that he had been at the Battle of Arnhem[1] with David Willcocks (strangely enough, my father had also fought at Arnhem, but I doubt he would have met Captain Willcocks). Then followed one of the strangest telephone conversations that I have ever had.
The LLL explained that ‘the night before Arnhem’ David Willcocks had – typical of the man – composed and played (on the piano) a march to raise morale amongst his fellow fighters. The LLL had remembered this vividly and wondered if there was any way in which I could play the march as the honorary graduand walked into the De Montfort Hall to get his DMus.
‘Do you have the music?’ I asked.
‘No’, came the reply, ‘but I will whistle it to you’.
Which the LLL then proceeded to do. There was just one problem. For some reason, the Lieutenant’s whistling affected the phone line (this was 1970s BT, remember!) and I kept getting cut off. I nevertheless managed to take down the basic tune and promised to incorporate the march into my playing before the degree congregation.
The trouble was I was supposed to play Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture as the platform party came in. This was a long-standing tradition and could not be altered in any way. What would David Willcocks have done? I thought. Simple – combine the two!
So that was what I did. I was more than a little nervous, not least because I kept wondering what my erstwhile tutor from Cambridge would be thinking of my odd playing of the Brahms.
The ceremony passed off without incident, and Sir David looked impressive, resplendent in his doctoral robes. I played the platform party out to Walton’s Crown Imperial (another Leicester University tradition at the time).
The hall was empty by the time I had finished. I looked in the mirror to double check – only to see Sir David standing there, still in his robes. I turned around.
‘Hello, David. Good to see you! And thank you for Arnhem’, he smiled.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arnhem