Songs the BBC spoilsports might not let you sing
It is good fun to imagine historical conjunctions. Suppose, for example, Winston Churchill had done Desert Island Discs. What would he have chosen? His favourite song of all was ‘Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes’ from The Gondoliers. This is a tenor aria but can be done by a soprano. Dorothy, the wife of his doctor, Lord Moran, used to sing it for him, and that sentimental ditty from The Mikado, ‘Tit-Willow’. Churchill also liked that weird music-hall favourite, ‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay’, and the first world war soldiers’ songs, ‘Tipperary’, and, especially, Ivor Novello’s first great hit, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. I expect he liked the Boer war songs, too, especially one sung to me in the late 1950s by old Clem Attlee, when I gave him a lift in my studio limo. It mentioned many of the generals, and went (I think) like this: Redvers Butler and Kitchener, Baden-Powell and Grey.
Forty thousand horse and foot Going to Table Bay.
Churchill liked ‘Daisy, Daisy’, and could sing it. But his real love was for the Harrow songs, and if possible he went there every year to sing them. They are the best school songs ever written, and I wish the school would put out a little brochure giving the words. In the 1930s an old man there for the reunion told him he could remember Palmerston coming there in 1864. Churchill did not shine at Harrow, but it was important to him because he spent three years in the bottom form and there thoroughly learned how to write an English sentence and enjoy the art of prose. It is a skill few schoolboys, then or now, possess. It provided Churchill with his livelihood for the rest of his life, and won him the Nobel Prize for literature. It also, on one occasion, got him a top job. Old Etonians have provided many more PMs, but Harrow has produced some of the best: not only Palmerston and Churchill but Peel and Baldwin. When the last took over No. 10 in 1924, he swore: ‘I shall construct a Cabinet of which Harrow can be proud.’ He called in Churchill, who was out of favour with the Tories and was not expecting anything, and said, ‘I want you to be Chancellor.’ Churchill, glumly: ‘Of the Duchy of Lancaster, I suppose.’ Baldwin: ‘No, of the Exchequer. Can you do it?’ Churchill: ‘Can a duck swim? I still have my father’s robes which he had made in 1886. I will do everything in my power to serve you in this splendid office.’ And indeed he did his old school credit, for his five budget speeches, 1925 to 1929, are the last series on the grand Gladstonian model, treating the day as the greatest parliamentary occasion of the year, and the speech itself as the supreme test of clarity, wit, apophthegm and oratory. They still read superbly today.
Churchill was too sensible to look down his nose at Eton, however. Indeed, he sent his son there, and loved to sing its boating song, especially the bit about ‘Twenty years, thirty years, forty years on’. I wish I liked my school song, ‘Stonyhurst, Oh Stonyhurst!’ but I have always found it feeble. The late Bron Waugh, whenever he got the chance, used to do a vicious parody of it, replete with Benedictine malice and monkish venom. (Despite this, and other outrages, I miss him keenly.) If I was again asked to do Desert Island Discs, I would be faced by a hard choice because I have so many favourites. I would not put in any classical stuff, for the excerpts are too short. But I might squeeze in 40 seconds of Siegfried, in the scene with the Rhinemaidens, hitting the high C. The man who did this to perfection and with tremendous aplomb was the enormous Danish Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, who was not only of vast size but had a voice of such power that he could fill the Garden or the Met without a mike and made every fibre of your body tingle.
Virtuosity of vocal skill and tricks is the ideal quality for such a programme, because it can be displayed if only a single verse is played. The greatest popular disc ever made, in my opinion, is Patsy Cline singing ‘Crazy’. This amazing display of musical noises is a combination of the girl’s imaginative projection of her voice, in which even the intakes of breath are part of the magic, and the technical brilliance of the recording engineer. Almost equally good is Hutch’s singing of ‘These Foolish Things’. The range of his voice, from high tenor to bass baritone, was unique in the genre, and he could equally move from a dark tone to a moonlight timbre at will. Hutch sang his way into many a rich girl’s bed. He must have slept with more women than any other coureur of modern times. I discount, of course, Simenon’s claim of 20,000 both because it was clearly exaggerated but also because a high proportion of the total were tarts. Whereas Hutch fairly claimed: ‘I never paid for a woman. On the contrary, they pay me.’ But, of course, like all such Lotharios, he came a cropper in the end.
I’d also like Marlene Dietrich doing ‘See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have’, from Destry Rides Again, which was Lord Beaverbrook’s favourite, played countless times at Cherkeley. Then there is the soundtrack of Sam playing and singing ‘As Time Goes By’ from Casablanca. I can sing this myself, and once did a duet version, on a cruise liner, with the beautiful wife of John O’Sullivan, a songstress who is by way of being den mother to the young neoconservative elite. I would also include a song by Gracie Fields, ‘Sally in our Alley’ perhaps, or better still, ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’. She came from Rochdale, and as my great-aunt Gussie used to say, ‘has made more money than any girl from Lancashire ever. Where’s it gone then? Men!’ By contrast, poor old George Formby, whom I used to talk to, as a boy, on the sand-dunes near Ansdell where his house was, had to hand over all his earnings to his authoritarian wife Beryl. He had a saucy song which my mother would not sanction: Nobody will believe the things I’ve seen When I’m cleaning winders!
Finally, two tenors, almost forgotten now but vividly remembered by me: Richard Tauber, really a specialist in Mozart, especially Tamino in The Magic Flute, but who loved to belt out the idiotic ditty ‘In a Shady Nook, by a Babbling Brook’. Great stuff! And finally, the voice of all Catholic Ireland, before it became the rich harlot of Brussels, Count John McCormack singing the impossible ‘I Hear You Calling Me!’ I would like to sing that one on my deathbed, like a swan, and would die happy.
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