From 1956 to 1959 I was teaching at the Central Foundation Boys’ Grammar School in London. Half the boys were Jewish (such was the admissions policy) and the other half were ‘non-Jewish’ (which has prejudiced me against ‘non’ classifications right through to the present day).
I’d been appointed to set up a Music Department where none had existed before. I found an excellent series of course books at the Oxford University Press. These were provided, along with music, LPs, and instruments by an ever-generous London County Council.
In my first year at the school there were not enough music classes to provide me with a full timetable so I had three pleasurable terms teaching history to the 2nd Forms. Apparently, at least according to Messrs Carter & Mears, European History began on Christmas Day in the Year of Our Lord 800. An interesting thought.
It soon became apparent to me that the music I was to teach was quite an alien species to my boys. Yet it was the only kind of music that really counted as ‘Music’ in those days. I reckoned that if the pupils could cope with Algebra, they could cope with Music and I ploughed on regardless in the hope they might some day return to Chopin’s nocturnes, Bizet’s Carmen, and the other snippets we shared. Their own music came to the surface in the one lesson period each year when they were encouraged to bring their own records. They turned up with their well-used 45s. That was the year I first heard Little Richard.
Meanwhile, outside the school and the BBC Third Programme, ‘popular’ (demotic) music was undergoing a quiet revolution. On some summer evenings, in one or other of the LCC’s parks, there was a semi-professional dance band playing from the standard Boosey & Hawkes arrangements of big band hits. A few couples valiantly breathed last gasps into foxtrot waltz or quickstep while one or two pairs of two girls jived in a corner.
There were, by contrast, full-house audiences for George Melly and Humphrey Littleton on the stage of the open air theatre in Battersea Pleasure Gardens. Jazz, real Jazz, was there for the aficionados. Something to listen to. Seriously.
The semi-professional members of the Musicians Union who played in the dance bands grew fewer and fewer with each public appearance. In their place, young people were creating their own thing. Any boy who could make a bass line with a tea chest a broomstick and a length of thick string, needed only a friend with a side drum and another with an acoustic guitar and there was a skiffle group ready to reach out to an eager young audience. The Six Five Special was there on the telly to highlight the trend and Lonnie Donegan with Rock Island Line and My Old Man’s a Dustman was there to show what a pro could do.
They were great days, part of the Soho basement café scene with the new Gaggia machines imported from Italy burbling away in the background with the insouciance of new arrivals in a new found land. London was not yet ‘Swinging London’ but it was well on the way.
© francis cameron
oxford, 7 may 2009
