Author: Harvey

When Lilian Clarke came home to Hatch End on ‘furlough’ in 1957, she brought me with her, this time I was able to sail through the Suez Canal and back to England through the Straits of Gibraltar, but unlike a previous occasion, my owner didn’t meet any musicians on board ship! Lilian told her mother… Read more

The loneliness in my basement didn’t last long. Would you believe it, in the autumn of 1946, another member of my Richardson family arrived at William E Hill’s London store!  Maud Clarke (nee Richardson, one of John Richardson’s daughters) was looking for a violin to give for her daughter Lilian, a missionary teacher currently home… Read more

To my astonishment, Hans now seemed to lose interest in violin playing, and one dark and rainy day in 1943, he took me to the London store of the well-known Violin Makers, William E Hill & Sons, in New Bond Street, and asked them if they might be interested in purchasing me and my Tubbs… Read more

On English-German music: ‘Music, the most romantic, metaphysical, ‘sentimental’ of all the arts reaches its highest watermark in Germany…..German listening to music always bears a creative, active character, whereas English listening to music is entirely passive.’ ‘Everywhere we look in English intellectual life we find clear, intelligent, original minds and observant eyes……Here, in England, you… Read more

Young Walter Harrison had looked after me for about 6 years, and he had progressed with his violin playing to such an extent that his parents James & Helene had decided they would change me for another instrument which had been bequeathed to Helene by one of her aunts, who recently died in Vienna.  Helene’s… Read more

In his final days, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was pursued by technical musical theories of counterpoint, polyphony and ‘cantus firmus’ while pondering ultimate concerns about God and the Christian religion. I do wonder if he might have resonated with this?  “………. We know that the modern world is a violently disenchanted swirl shaped by the speculative flux… Read more

We had to leave Africa for good, rather hurriedly and rather unexpectedly.  We were in Rhodesia, it was early 1933, and Raymond was caught up in some rather ‘shady’ business deals – and he was expelled from the country, and deported back to England!  We were escorted to Durban, South Africa, and put on a… Read more

You will hardly believe the next thing that happened to me!  It was 1928, and I was enjoying an evening of ‘new music’ in one of Frankfurt’s night clubs, where Fritz Hoffmann was obviously appreciating the freedom and variety of new post-war sounds!   Kurt Weill was particularly popular.  Into the bar came a young man… Read more

I now changed hands yet again, when Nelly Barth decided to lend me to one of her cousins, Fritz Hoffman, a member of ‘das Frankfurter Rundfunk-Symphonie-Orchester’. I was aware of the intoxicating strains of jazz, the Charleston rage, and the sounds of the ‘roaring twenties’, the music now filling my body and frame was an… Read more

We now need to go to the historic German town of Marburg, the place from where my rescuer Hans came. Soon after the devastating attack which caused my neck to be shattered and broken (for the second time), the German officer Hans Hoffman, who took pity on me, took me home with him; he was… Read more