A 200th GARLAND OF BRITISH LIGHT MUSIC COMPOSERS
Our 200th bouquet is mostly concerned with
song writers of various types. Bruno Huhn (1871-1950) is best
remembered for Invictus, a rousing solo for brass; other titles
were Behold the Labour, Courage, First Spring Advancing, Love’s Retreat,
Seafarers and The Song of Morning. Ralph Greaves,
active especially in the 1920s, produced piano music (e.g. Pastorale),
songs for Twelfth Night and ballad-like songs such as I Arise
From Dreams of Thee, Yellow Wine, Once Very Long Ago, A Poplar and the
Moon and Lady When Your Lovely Head. From about the same
period, William Hargreaves was more of a music hall composer,
his most popular being Burlington Bertie From Bow. Others were
We All Went Marching Home Again, They Built Piccadilly For Me. Delaney’s
Donkey and Give My Regards to Leicester Square. His It’s
The Old Army Game was interpolated into the originally American
musical Poppy when this reached the London stage in 1924. John
Guest, composer of I Hope I Don’t Intrude, Shoulder to Shoulder,
Certainly Not and The Tattler may come from the same period.
From a little later but writing songs in similar tone
was Cecil Harington with The Blue Eyed Blonde and The
Boy Friend (1943), Your Dog’s Come Home Again, The Spelling Bee
Song, The Song of the Birds and The Song of the Links. Dick
Henty, spanned the period 1920 to 1950. Early in the 1920s he contributed
songs to the musicals Tonight’s The Night (an amusing confession
of murders) and Faust On Toast (1921: That’s How I Was)
and his separate titles included I’m a Cornish Man, The Lazy Shepherd,
The Modern Philosopher, Nothin’ At All, Vendettas and Drake!
dated 1948.
Phyllis Harding’s ballad style songs date mostly
from around the 1950s: Hills of my Desire, In the Sweet Loneliness
(1952), Come My Sweet Pretty Maid (1951), God Bless Me
(1949), Sittin’ in the Cornfields (1952), The Leafy Lanes
of England (1950), Where Green Rushes Grow and The Magic
Waltz (1957, known in vocal and purely orchestral versions). I have
not been able to discover whether she was related to Wallace G. Harding,
composer of the orchestral Suite, Days of Romance (in five movements:
Morris Dance, Gavotte, The Woodland Glade, Barcarolle,
Moonlight on the River, Valse - Alluring and The Hunt
and Finale, Tarantella), or to Eric Harding, composer
of the songs Aylesbury Duet, Out of the Twilight, Down a Quiet Little
Street and Onward!
Philip L Scowcroft
June 2001
Philip's book 'British Light Music Composers' (ISBN 0903413 88 4) is
currently out of print.
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