Beginnings

Recently I was on holiday near Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, and saw a sign for the whimsically named village, Heath and Reach. Having spent far too long rootling through the William Alwyn Archives, I immediately thought "William's mother!", for Ada Tompkins was born in rural Buckinghamshire at Heath and Reach, the daughter of farm workers.

The village of Heath and Reach, Bucks. The home of William's maternal grandparents.

Life on the land was tough, and William's grandfather gave up farm work looking for employment in industrial Northampton. William's father's family were also incomers to Northampton having moved there from London, probably hoping to make money in the shoe business. The Tompkins family bought a grocer's shop in the town, but they had difficulty making ends meet, and by the time Ada met Alwyn's father - William Smith (William's full name was William Alwyn Smith, he dropped the Smith at an early stage of his career) - both her father and brother had abandoned the shop, and she was struggling to keep it going.

William's father however could see that it had potential, and set about turning the shop into a success. Like his son, he loved literature, and the small grocer's shop was soon christened The Shakspere [sic] Stores. Even the small bags in which flour and other loose goods were supplied had quotations from the Bard printed on them.

In Alwyn's first unpublished attempt at an autobiography, Early Closing, he remembered the store, and its impact on a small boy:

"Imagine a Wesleyan chapel topped with pseudo-Greek pediments and festooned with Christmas hams or strung around with a necklace of dangling tin baths...

Once inside, the customer in Father's day could look above him to the full height of the building; but, halfway up, a circular, balustraded balcony was evidence enough of its purpose. He stands within the body of a chapel so disguised that all ecclesiastical vestments have been shed, and every nook and corner bulges with the bric-a-brac of trade: tins and saucepan lids, cardboard containers full of sauce bottles, condensed milk, cocoa, coconut, sacks, bags and boxes, printed advertisements and Father's hand-printed bills. In the darker recesses thick, dusty cobwebs out of reach of broom or duster cling to forgotten wares unsaleable with time. And, spilled around him on the floor, a piled-up litter of boxes, buckets and up-ended opened cartons displaying goods at bargain prices, and at least one open crate of eggs, make movement hazardous. Flanking him are two long counters, parallel to the walls, which narrow in a wedge-shape to the back. From here a broad, imposing staircase open to the shop, slopes upward to give access to the balcony where worshippers once knelt and listened to the word of God expounded by the preacher below. "

A very young Alwyn with his first piccolo.

If it was from his father that William got his love of art and literature, the music must surely have come from his mother, who impressed the young boy, with her tales of great-grandfather Tyler, ex-Cathedral choirboy and flautist. William was first given lessons on the piccolo (his hands too small to handle a flute), by Mr. Law, who ran the town's Silver Band. He was not the world's best teacher, but his enthusiasm for music was unmistakable, and fired William's own love.

William often went to hear the band play, and inspired by their sound, wrote his first composition, aged just eight years old; a work for piccolo called Sparkling Cascades. His first experience as a performing musician came shortly afterwards, and was to be oddly prophetic, as he joined Mr. Law's Picture Palace orchestra at the local cinema, where they provided the soundtrack to silent films - now, a largely forgotten area of musical employment.

Shortly afterwards worries over William's health led to his being removed to a small village outside Northampton to stay with some friends of his parents. His older brother, Tony, had died tragically young, and swiftly, a year or so before, from meningitis, and his parents were evidently concerned that William might also be sickening. It was an incredibly happy time for William, as it was here that he first encountered a piano, and with the kindly help of his foster-family learned to play a few notes. After that, and his early foray into composition, he was sure that music was going to be the life for him. He returned home excitedly to the family's neglected piano "a box of jangling, racketing wires and weights", and largely taught himself to play, even mastering how to cross hands at an early stage.

Sometime around his twelfth birthday, probably shortly after he had started at the local grammar school, he began to have piano lessons from a local chapel organist, Mr. Strickland. His teacher could see that the boy was talented, but at this stage, his family had very different ideas - he was, after all, the heir apparent to the Shakspere Stores.

Alwyn's father, William Smith,
lover of literature and amateur dramatics.

By the age of fourteen, he had left school to help in the Stores, though thankfully his parents (who, I suspect, may have been more supportive than he gave them credit for, at least as a young man) continued to fund his music lessons. He was miserable though, working in the shop, and imagining that he would be there for the rest of his life. Then one day Mr. Strickland came to see his father, with a suggestion that organ lessons might be useful.

Today this sounds rather fanciful, but in 1920 there was big money to be made from playing the organ. Every cinema had either an organ or a piano to accompany silent films, and as well as playing for the movies, there were extras to be made from playing during intervals, and also for accompanying concerts and memorial day services, often held at large cinemas.

William's father, ever the astute businessman, pondered this, and admitted that the lad was "A square peg in a round hole". Strickland pushed home his argument agreeing with William Snr. "Is he going to stick here all his life, or is he going to get his chance? It's no use beating about the bush; young William's cut out to be a musician, and neither you nor I can stop him! You'll never regret it...Send him to the Academy!"

Shortly afterwards, not long after his fifteenth birthday, Alwyn sat the entrance exam for the Royal Academy of Music, and became a commuting student attending regularly two or three times a week. Flute was his main subject, with piano as his second instrument. Life as a composer still seemed a distant dream. As John Blackwood McEwen, his composition teacher, friend, and mentor pointed out, it was a difficult job to do without money to sustain you, through the fallow period while a young composer was developing his technique.

When Alwyn's father died after a short illness in 1923, William was forced to leave the Academy. It must have seemed as though it was the end of his musical aspirations, but in fact it was just the beginning...

MAJ