Part One - Before the Music Programme

Summary

When in 1960 William Glock, the BBC's newly appointed Controller, Music, was in search of younger people to help him enliven things his eye fell on me; after a wholly friendly, un-competitive interview I was recruited. This book's chapter on ‘The Making of a Music Producer’ may offer some clue as to why he took it into his head to do any such thing; the worldly reader will wonder straight away how it was that a departmental head in a notoriously Civil Service-style organization could simply haul a young man in off the street with no such formality as an ‘appointment board’ and the presence of an allsupervising Personnel Department. In fact Glock was allowed to offer a few such people strictly-short-term contracts, keeping an eagle eye on how they performed and giving no assurance of continuing employment. ‘Established’ we weren't (nor was there for many years any suggestion that we should do anything about it); had there been a sudden financial crisis, as there had been in the not-so-distant past, it would have had to be ‘last in, first out’. A good friend working for a rival publisher to my own declined an offer from Glock on precisely those grounds, going on to become a university professor. The insecurity weighed not at all with me; I happily began work, aged not yet twenty-eight, in May 1960.

My very first impressions, after inductions by Harry Croft-Jackson and Hans Keller, two strong personalities to be met pretty soon, were of an office in the outer and upper reaches of Yalding House, 156 Great Portland Street, previously occupied by Bernard Keeffe, who had left to pursue his conducting career. Yalding was and is halfway down Great Portland Street, between the tube station of that name and Oxford Circus. In terms of internal BBC organization, I was a member of the Music Programmes Department (Radio) of a larger entity, Music Division. When I arrived I found I was one of the Chamber Music group of producers, which briefly disappointed me since so much of my promotion work for my previous employer had been on behalf of the Universal Edition orchestral catalogue. But a few minutes with my first boss, Hans Keller, saw to that.