Son of an Oldham cotton spinner, I was delivered, aged ten in September 1950, to Chetham's Hospital School - a blackened, soot-smudged, war-knocked cross between a barracks and a monastery above the stinking Irwell. Cold reveille was at 6.30am, path-sweeping by torchlight at 6.50, orchestra practice at 7.10, hand and knee inspection and breakfast at 8, choir practice at 8.50 and school, with its secondary modern curriculum, from 9.15. Readers of Mrs. G. Linnaus Banks' 19th century classic "The Manchester Man" would have recognised a direct line of descent. That I could leave eight years later with licentiate piano skills, viola NYO membership, a decent crop of 'O' and 'A' levels and a choral scholarship to read English at St. John's College Cambridge was some measure of what happened at Chets during the glum fifties.
Three remarkable men laid the foundations during those years for the excellence of today. "House Governor" (Headmaster) Harry Vickers, charity-boy, son of the pre-war regime and 1st class graduate of Manchester University, returning with a zeal to renew his old school; Gerald Littlewood, arts and crafts Loughborough trained, yearning to create orchestra and choir; Norman Cocker, organist and choirmaster of the Cathedral, with time and enthusiasm to tailor-make ten Chetham Symphonies. This was the triumvirate that would affect the transformation. Vickers made an imaginative pact with the Cathedral chapter which brought a stream of able resident choristers as the nucleus of the first musical and academic "elite", soon to be capable of mounting ambitious annual concerts in the Free Trade Hall. As one of them, I often watched "Norman", islanded in an angle-poised haze of tobacco smoke in his cathedral organist’s room/choirboys’ snooker and table-tennis room, wafting away stray ping-pong balls as he meticulously penned a cello part for Basil or the first draft of "Chetham’s Blues" for me. Arthur George (Maths, swimming and general subjects) would later photograph, develop and print multiple copies which he'd hang out to dry and which Gerry Littlewood would hand round at orchestra practice on Saturday evening, Sunday afternoon or Thursday periods 3 and 4. Soon those practices would be taken over by Halle violinist Eric Davis and visited by such celebrities as "Uncle" John Barbirolli, German conductor Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, American violinist William Primrose and harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler.
As a boy in the early fifties I was always hungry. Post-war austerity and poor kitchen staff meant food was scarce and ill-treated. I remember a gagging gelatinous confection that may have been rice pudding, or custard, or porridge. I recall granite rock cakes and baked beans mantled with and ochre skin of death. I yearned for Saturday when Dad brought a cargo of bacon sandwiches which I made last until their abrasiveness took the skin off my teeth.
"Trades", a mean remnant of the apprenticeship days of earlier centuries, obliged every boy to take some part in regular "housework", of which there were multiple doses on Saturday mornings: path-sweeping, pig-swill emptying, wash-house tidying etc. School homework which was strictly assigned and sometimes ruthlessly exacted, as when I was pitched out of bed at 10pm in a November smog to retrieve my Maths homework from the terrifying shadows of the Victorian schoolroom for which I first had to beg the key from the formidable Housekeeper. The novels of Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens still have a lively resonance for me.
On the other hand, with "Norman" we choristers had our first glimpses of perfection. Even now, aged 69, I give thanks for him every day of my life. From Gerry Littlewood, despite his musical limitations, we imbibed enthusiasm as he battled to beg, borrow, make and mend orchestral any instrument he could lay hands on. From Donald Clarke (science master and house master) I learned a critical and structured approach to piano playing and I was grateful for the occasional tomato sandwich which fell from his plate! Over-seeing all of this was the keen, strangely illiberal genius of Harry Vickers who, I wasn't able to know how, eleven years after I left (as Head Boy) in 1958, made the momentous change to Chetham’s School of Music.
Keith Jones
Former Student
