Young Vaughan Williams: the childhood that shaped Britain’s favourite composer

No composer is woven into the affections of the English as much as Ralph Vaughan Williams. The evidence is all around us. Every Sunday, the hymns he collected or actually composed for the English Hymnal of 1906 are sung in parish churches. His Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis regularly top polls of the nation’s favourite works (they currently stand at numbers 1 and 3 in Classic FM’s Hall of Fame). His symphonies, after a period of neglect, are once again staples of the orchestral repertoire. 

More than that, the ruggedly unfashionable meditative nature of the music resonates with these troubled times, which is ironic given that for so long he was dismissed by modernists as an irrelevance. And it retains a power to summon up a feeling of Englishness, which seems to become more and more potent as those things become more contentious.

Now, 150 years after his birth, I realised I knew nothing about the young Vaughan Williams; his upbringing and the things that shaped this celebrated and much-decorated composer. Which is why some months back on a breezy grey Autumn day I made my pilgrimage down to his own country in the Surrey Hills, where he lived from the age of two following the death of his father. My first port of call was Charterhouse, the public school where he made his debut as a violinist and composer, and where an exhibition of VW memorabilia is now on display.

Wandering round Charterhouse, which was opened in new buildings in 1872 in a luxuriantly neo-Gothic style, it’s easy to see why VW kept his affection for English liturgy and church music despite his unwavering agnosticism. The Chapel designed by Gilbert Scott dominates the scene, and VW must have heard the words of the Book of Common Prayer countless times, and also absorbed its musical traditions when he played the organ there. But he was no cloistered musical swot. The school’s archivist Catherine Smith shows me some fascinating things in the exhibition which reveal that in most respects he was robustly normal. “I would say he was a happy chap, not at all sporty, which was admittedly a drawback in a school where sports were dominant,” she says. “He was in the school Rifle Corps, where he was promoted to a corporal. He was in a French debating society, and in the Carthusian magazine he comments in French on the merits of horse-riding as compared to football, and whether or not building a Channel Tunnel would be a good idea.”

But not all VW’s extra-curricular activities were so intellectual.  He was quite capable of getting up to mischief, as is shown by various detention sheets which explain why he was kept in after school. “That one says “ill-behaved”, but on other occasions he was kept in detention for being “noisy” and “playing the fool”.

But what about the music? Well, music was not part of the curriculum at Charterhouse, though as with the other great public schools there was a busy schedule of extra-curricular musical activity put on by the boys and masters, sometimes playing together. So it’s not surprising to see concert programmes showing VW playing duets, but one exhibit does reveal something extraordinary: the programme of a school concert on August 5 1888, when the 15-year-old VW’s Piano Trio received its world premiere, between sentimental songs by Sullivan and Gounod.

“There was a series of concerts with music from the four nations of the UK,” explains Smith. “Vaughan Williams was asked to organise the Welsh one, and composed a little march to open it. His parents said he could learn organ because being an amateur organist was acceptable.”

In fact, the career of church or cathedral organist was the only musical career open to someone of Vaughan Williams’s class, which is why he practised the organ so doggedly. It was only later, at the Royal College of Music and Cambridge, that the possibility of being a professional composer opened up. 

Next stop was Leith Hill Place, the family home. It’s a handsome but austere Palladian-style villa, with a spacious hall where an organ was installed so that Vaughan Williams could practice during the school holidays. A huge Victorian kitchen with rows of gleaming copper pans and a spit is a reminder that the composer was born into a privileged world, which later in life could be a source of discomfort to him. 

He was always aware that his closest friend Gustav Holst came from a poor background and had to work in a touring orchestra as a trombonist and as a teacher (at St Paul’s Girls’ School) in order to make ends meet. This partly explains why he devoted so much time to things beyond his own career, such as his huge labour on the English Hymnal, collecting folk songs, and proselytising on the need to found a school of English “classical” music.

But he also loved the place and its surroundings. When his sister Margaret founded the Leith Hill Music Festival in 1905, he agreed to become the conductor of the festival orchestra, a position he held until just before his death half a century later.
Vaughan Williams’s biographer Simon Heffer feels that he remained at a deep level a countryman, despite living in London for most of his life. “I think the fact that he was able to grow up in a pastoral environment was very important,” he says. “It created a sense of atavism, a deep awareness of the past. The landscape around him was one that had remained unchanged for centuries. That was a big deal to him.”  

“But,” he continues, “I think even more important was the sense of community he got from that area. He always kept a link with Leith Hill Festival, which he loved because it encouraged music-making among local people. For him, music wasn’t just men in tails conducting orchestras with internationally celebrated soloists, entertaining people, it was also something people should do for themselves because it makes them happy. It’s why the festival was so important to him, and apart from the corpus of music he left behind it’s actually his most important legacy.”

Landscape, the Anglican tradition, folk-song, the importance of community, even the gleeful sense of humour: the roots of Vaughan Williams’s art can all be found tucked away in this small and beautiful corner of England.

RVW150 is launched by The Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust in association with the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé Orchestra at the Bridgewater Hall on February 26. For details see: vwct.org.uk/rvw150. 

BBC Radio 3’s extensive celebrations include a complete cycle of the nine symphonies performed by the Hallé and BBC Philharmonic orchestras between March 2 and May 12. 

Investec International Music Festival celebrates VW’s 150th anniversary with a special performance at Charterhouse on Saturday March 19, see www.iimf.co.uk/ for tickets