1915 – War Music: Movement 1

Charles Woodhouse & I were aware that, during his stay in 1915 at Thomas Beecham’s Watford home, Frederick Delius came to know some of the teachers at the local Watford School of Music, and this has an interesting link to my latest owner Harvey Richardson. 

One of the piano teachers at the Watford School of Music, Wallis Bandey (who taught the later-to-become-famous accompanist Gerald Moore) was also the Organist at Queen’s Road Wesleyan Church, Watford, where Harvey’s mother Gladys (nee Pratt) and her family of siblings and parents had been worshipping (and singing in the choir) from 1910.  Gladys and Harvey’s father Leslie Richardson (my friend John Richardson’s grandson) married there in 1938.

Gladys was 6 years old in 1915, and her eldest brother Harold Ernest Pratt was soon to join me and my Charles Woodhouse at the Western Front to defeat those ‘nasty Germans’ (as the eight-year-old Gladys hopefully wrote in a letter to her brother two years later).

Another Richardson family connection came to light in 1915.  Edith & Harvey Watkins, now back in New York with Barnum & Bailey’s and The Ringling Brothers’ Travelling Circus, learned from the late Hannah Richardson’s father Frederick de la Bertauche, that my ‘Stimmung-friendly’ folk-song fiddler, John Richardson, had died on 6^th of September.

Eventually I was packed off from Folkestone with my Tubbs bow and sent to the Western Front, along with other professional musicians like George Butterworth, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Coles. Charles had insisted on taking me with him.

It was a surprise to me that there was a great deal of music-making in the trenches – mainly to alleviate the intense boredom.  I played in a full symphony orchestra on occasion, set out on a makeshift platform near Ypres, and then, more often, in a small band accompanying a raucous concert-party, alongside an elaborate stage, constructed not far from the infamous River Somme.  It was a very weird time.  The sounds all around me during the bitter and terrifying times of engagement – from German and British killing machines, and from soldiers’ agonised screams – often reverberated through my fragile body, not unlike those ‘crucifixion tones’ I felt at Samuel Wesley’s hands when he had played Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ with such frenzy.

On one occasion, when I was lying perilously close to the water-logged entrance to the Officer’s billet alongside the filthy cesspit of a trench, we came under a particularly devastating attack.

Our defences were overrun by German soldiers, and after a deafening and devastating explosion I was eventually rescued and ‘picked up’ by Karl Hoffman, a German officer who – I discovered later – came from a very musical family in Marburg, Germany.  Would you believe it – in all the confusion, among the gunfire, screaming, the bombing and the shrapnel –  my fragile neck had been completely severed for the second time of my life?  It was a miracle that the main part of my body remained intact, but my sound post, the small crucial spindle holding my belly and back in position, and through which my voice resounded through my frame, was dislodged.

(Cecil Coles)

Tragically, this was the time when I learned that George Butterworth and Cecil Coles, flowers of English music, were dead – their sounds silenced forever.

(Harvey’s impression of my broken body)

It’s impossible to convey the effect of the sounds in this hell.  Before the attack, I could hear the varied English accents reaching me from the shouts of the officers and sergeants, along with the abject fear and terror in the voices of the men.  All this was mixed with distant gunfire, the whining of aeroplanes overhead, and a kind of rumbling noise interspersed by intermittent screeching and sudden ear-splitting cracking. To this day, I’m not sure if this experience could ever be described as ‘musical’.   What I can say for certain is that these sounds have entered my frail body and soul forever, and as on so many previous occasions, my playing has been indelibly changed and affected by it………….I would go as far as saying that this terrible War changed me and my whole perception of music-making for ever.

The sound of fear was spine chilling and unmistakable – I heard it in the exclamations and expletives of the German soldiers as they overran the English barricades and trenches near me.  Throughout my life, and in some of my comments earlier, the duet played between all things English and all things German has become part of the very fabric of my being. Here it was in all its stark dissonant rawness.

I wonder if these ear-splitting sounds affected our perception of God-talk, also.  I know that mothers, wives and children along the Kent coastline heard the gunfire.  What matters of ultimate concern did they think about in that heart-wrenching acoustic clamour?  Could the agonised cries of a young man on a cross also be heard?