Cobbler’s son had a love of music
William Alwyn
Not too many counties can boast giving birth to three major composers and being the “workshop” of a fourth. Here in Northamptonshire we can claim this with no risk of contradiction.
The most famous is of course Sir Malcolm Arnold, hotly pursued by the two other Northampton-born greats, Edmund Rubbra and William Alwyn.
The man who worked here so successfully was Sir William Walton, who spent the war years here at Weston Hall, near Towcester, years that were among his most creative.
The two knights, Arnold and Walton, are well-known enough, so on this occasion I want to concentrate on one of the two other Northampton musical heroes, William Alwyn.
He was born in 1905 in Northampton as William Alwyn Smith. He dropped the Smith, adopting the first two as his professional name. A good move because, good as Bill Smith is as a name, it doesn’t quite have the ring of an international composer about it
His was a working-class family from London and his grandfather, who was a shoe-maker, moved to Northampton to find better work.
Alwyn’s father married Ada Tomkins whose father owned a grocery shop in Wellingborough Road. Thanks to Ada, business boomed and they moved to a larger shop at 52 Kettering Road and it was over that shop that the composer was born.
Though poorly educated, Alwyn’s father had developed a love of literature and especially Shakespeare so he re-named his shop The Shakspere Stores, carefully using the spelling the Bard himself used!
Such an esoteric move may be fine for QI viewers, but probably meant little to residents around Kettering Road!
Alwyn had a happy childhood and in his own words, “developed an early passion for music roused by the Sunday afternoon military band performances in Abington Park” and his earliest ambition was to become one of those uniformed bandsmen.
He was still a child when his parents gave in to him as he pleaded for lessons on the piccolo, of all things!
In 1915, after four years at a council school, he started at Northampton Grammar School and during those school days he was chums with our other fine, but underrated composer, Edmund Rubbra. Rubbra, in fact, went to a different school but they remained friends for many years.
Alwyn was taken to hear music of all sorts, not always strictly classical, at the New Theatre and the Royal Theatre & Opera House. He heard a variety of big names ranging from the Royal Artillery String Band, through the D’Oyly Carte opera company to the great Marie Lloyd!
At 14, he had to leave school to help his father in the shop, something he hated. He continued with his music and by now had become proficient on the flute as well as the piccolo, plus the piano and weekly lessons on the church organ.
Then at 15, miracle of miracles, he was accepted by the Royal Academy of Music and by the age of 16 he was in the academy’s orchestra.
By 18 he’d composed his first opera called Derrybeg Fair and during his lifetime he composed another five operas and hundreds of major orchestral works.
During the war he became involved in composing music for a staggering 103 wartime propaganda films like Desert Victory, The Way Ahead and The True Glory, all regarded as exceptional scores in their own right.
After the war came major commissions for British and Hollywood movies, the first being Sir Carol Reed’s celebrated film, Odd Man Out, the film Roman Polanski counts as his all-time favourite. This was the first of an amazing 73 major box-office hits and award-winning feature films.
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