Henry Handel in Lyme Regis

We went away for a few days last week – to beautiful Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast. Joyfully, I started reading a proper book for the first time in several weeks (since my sojourn at the John Radcliffe).

I found the book itself in the tiny but excellent second-hand bookshop down on The Cobb – The Way Home by the Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson. It’s the second part of her triple-decker, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

It opens in Lyme Regis. Her house and garden, Westfield in Cobb Road, still stands, rather neglected. She was so rude in the book about the snobby natives in the town. No wonder she's not much celebrated there. One wonders how much things have changed in that department in the intervening century.

Born Ethel Richardson in Melbourne in 1870, she was educated at Melba’s old school, the Presbyterian Ladies’ College, before going to Germany as a young woman to study at the Conservatorium of Music in Leipzig. She was to write a damning novelised version of her schooldays at PLC, The Getting of Wisdom, .

Deciding that she was not going to make it as a musician, she went on to become Australia’s first really significant novelist.

By the way, she wanted to be judged as a writer, not as a woman writer, so Ethel was ditched in favour of Henry Handel (which she borrowed from a cousin).

Exploring the “founding myth”

The school that I went to had an extraordinary musical culture which went back to the earliest days of its establishment as a boarding school in the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1864, the pioneering headmaster of Uppingham, Edward Thring, was looking for a new director of music. The English composer, Sir William Sterndale Bennett, was commissioned by Thring to find him. He went to the place in Germany where he had studied, the Leipzig Conservatorium. There, amongst others, he asked the advice of the violinist leader of the Gewandhaus orchestra, Ferdinand David. David had given the premiere of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, and was a close friend and associate of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms.

Ferdinand suggested that his own son, Paul David, would be appropriate for this new post. Paul was just 25 years old with little or no English. He travelled to England in company with one of his father's most gifted pupils, Joseph Joachim, who was by this time already one of the most famous violinists in the world. (Joachim was to give the first performance of both Brahms’s and Bruch’s first Violin Concertos.)

Paul David inspired high standards of music at the school - a tradition which persists to this day. By no means an outstanding composer, nevertheless he was a fine violinist, and he wrote much music for the school. He continued to teach at Uppingham for some 40 years.

Joachim (above, by Adolph von Menzel), who frequently made concert tours in Britain, would always go to the school deep in the English countryside to visit his friend and to do some coaching. He even played in the back row of the violins in the school’s string orchestra. He had made his debut in England in 1844 playing the Beethoven concerto under Mendelssohn - and his final performance of this same work was given at Uppingham in 1905 at the opening of the new concert hall.

Fittingly, Paul David was succeeded as head of music at Uppingham by William Sterndale Bennett’s grandson, Robert, who continued to maintain and develop musical standards for a further four decades.

Among the many distinguished musical pupils who have emerged from the school are the folklorist Cecil Sharp, the composer EJ Moeran and the violinist leader of the Lindsay String Quartet, Peter Cropper.

When I work with established organizations who wish to create change in some way, I always encourage them first to re-examine their “founding myth”. So often it has a profound influence on the current situation, usually quite subconsciously. At Uppingham, it’s not so hard to find.