Lennox Berkeley Society links with Gresham’s School

On Friday 16 March Tony Scotland and I arrived at Gresham’s School, just outside Holt in North Norfolk, for the 8.30 a.m. Assembly, in the flint-and-timber Chapel, which was consecrated midway through my father’s time at the school during the 1914-1918 War. We were there to make a formal presentation of a gold-framed, fine-art facsimile of the John Greenidge portrait of Lennox in Paris in 1926 – the year he came down from Oxford and started his studies with Nadia Boulanger. This youthful image, showing Lennox working on an unidentified score, his pipe in his hand, seemed just right for his old school.

The picture is now hanging in the Sir Lennox Berkeley Room of the spectacular new Music School, which offers every conceivable facility for music teaching, with modern and comfortable practice, seminar and teaching rooms; a 140-seat auditorium; a fleet of Steinway pianos; a sophisticated recording studio; and even a café. I was able to visit the new Britten Building last year. It’s the culmination of a multi-million pound, five-year project to improve the musical provision at Gresham’s, and is the most significant addition to the school in twenty years. The intention is to make it available not only to the boys and girls of Gresham’s but to music groups throughout North Norfolk. Named after Benjamin Britten, who was a boy at the school from 1928 to 1930 – and Berkeley’s friend for forty years – the new music school was opened by the Princess Royal last July.

‘Music is the soul of Gresham’s’, the Headmaster, Douglas Robb, said at the opening ceremony, ‘and the school has a much-celebrated musical history and an exciting future.’ Mr Robb hoped the new building would allow the school ‘to nurture those with a musical talent, and help make a lasting difference to our community for many years to come’.

The Headmaster and the Director of Music, John Bowley, were keen that I should present the portrait to the whole school, gathered in the Chapel, before the informal picture-hanging in the Berkeley Room (beside a bust of Britten).

To open the ceremony John spoke about my father’s life and work. The Choir then sang the carol, I sing of a maiden, which Lennox wrote for the Cambridge Hymnal in 1967. This provided a suitable cue for me, in my own brief speech to the school, to explain how simplicity of musical line appealed to Lennox, and how the experience of being unexpectedly introduced to plainsong in that very chapel, by Walter Greatorex, the legendary Director of Music, planted a love of chant which was to remain an important influence throughout his life.

I pointed out that Lennox had taken on the challenge of writing for almost every conceivable instrumental and vocal combination, but his instinct for simplicity of line and clarity of texture – qualities further encouraged by Nadia Boulanger – remained evident in all his work. I expressed the hope that new generations of Gresham’s pupils would get to know his music – and might perhaps be inspired to compose, sing and play their own works in their magnificent new music school.

Walter Greatorex, or ‘Gog’ as he was affectionately known, was an important figure at Gresham’s for a quarter of a century. In 1916, to mark the opening of the Chapel, he wrote the vigorous hymn tune Woodlands, named after the headmaster’s house, and this was soon adopted as the school song. In view of the fact that my father owed Greatorex so much – and was fond of what was always known as ‘Gog’s Tune’ – it was entirely fitting that at the end of the short ceremony the entire school should have risen to give a rousing account of Woodlands.