Malcolm Riley, a great
Whitlock champion who has performed
his music on disc, was responsible for
Percy Whitlock – Organist and Composer
published in 1998 and issued in a revised
edition in 2003. It offered the first
real opportunity to study Whitlock’s
life and his work in a comprehensive
and cogent way. And for most people,
even British Music lovers, Whitlock’s
name was just that. His sadly brief
life may have been lived mainly on the
fringes in Bournemouth but as the appendices
to this new volume show he was an active
broadcaster, recitalist and appeared
at one Prom. This in addition to his
daily duties.
The volume covers correspondence
to and from Whitlock, a series of articles
written by him for certain journals,
those valuable BBC broadcast programmes
and his recitals for the Organ Music
Society. There’s also a recently discovered
short story called Country Holiday
and an even more recently discovered
Song of Bournemouth – just in
time for publication as well as it only
turned up in January 2007. There is
even an article on The South Eastern
and Chatham Railway written by the
fourteen year old Whitlock in 1920 and
though I’m now all at sea on the subject
of bogies and heating surfaces it’s
good to be reminded of boyish enthusiasms.
Riley and The Whitlock
Trust have clearly taken pains to ensure
that there is no unnecessary duplication
between the two volumes and thus they
are properly complementary. As Riley
notes in his introduction the correspondence
is primarily Organic. There is great
emphasis on organs played or wondered
at, at specifications and sound quality;
at meetings with visiting organists,
great and small. Correspondents eagerly
tell Whitlock of organs they’ve played
or heard. The bulk of the correspondence
is between Whitlock and his friend Leslie
Barnard, still alive at the time of
writing, and their knowledgeable bantering
gives a spine to the surviving letters.
There are letters about
royalty payments (to Hubert Foss) and
commissions, on choirboys’ pay, concerts
and recitals anticipated or described
– mostly done in a light, airy tone
in his letters to Barnard. There’s one
letter that reveals an anxiety in his
relationship with O.U.P. who were his
principal publishers. His 1937 reply
to a letter of Foss’s makes for interesting
reading [pp.120-21] beginning, as it
does "…I am not such a fool as
not to realise under what obligation
I stand to the Oxford University Press…I
think also you are mistaking the type
of person I am, if you think I am wanting
in gratitude." This was in reply
to an earlier letter of Whitlock’s noting
he’d been approached by Novello and
Boosey and Hawkes for contributions
and asking O.U.P for advice. Its terse
and biting tenor comes unexpectedly
in a collection of much more clement
and everyday correspondence.
The minutiae of things
organic actually include details of
fees and percentages, voltage details
– true! – specifics of specifications,
rebuilds, and the practicalities of
a working musical life. There’s a notably
pragmatic letter to Norman Peterkin
of O.U.P. in 1945 regarding Whitlock’s
submission or non-submission of things
to the firm and the reasons why. His
war service is alluded to as well –
a secondment to the Records and Checking
department of the Food Office in Bournemouth.
We can also follow the deterioration
in Whitlock’s health, his increasing
blindness and miserably early death
when he was only in his early forties.
The text has fortunately
has been well illustrated though surely
a better photograph of Dan Godfrey could
have been acquired. The appendices offer
much in the way of repertoire information
and this will prove invaluable to researchers.
And one final thing; try to hear Amphion
PHI CD 147 which has examples of Whitlock’s
organ playing – I’m sure finance was
a consideration but what a pity that
a similar disc wasn’t included as a
bonus. Reading about his playing leads
one inevitably to want to hear it. But
his now stilled written voice comes
across intimately in this handsomely
produced volume.
Jonathan Woolf
