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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2025
The letters sent by the English composer Michael Tippett from Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where, a conscientious objector, he spent two months in summer 1943, form a remarkable and important sequence, illuminating not only Tippett's life and compositions but the experience of a gaoled objector to the Second World War. Four prison letters had been thought to survive, documenting in detail his imprisonment, which included turning pages for Benjamin Britten during a recital in the chapel, and conducting the prison orchestra. In 2023 a fifth letter was found, its discovery reported in the national press.1 Its publication is intended to complement the previously released documents, completing what is now a series of five until such time as a collected edition of Tippett's letters, of which only a fifth has seen print, can be undertaken.2
1 Dalya Alberge, ‘“Fascinating” Tippett Letter Reveals Composer Changed by Prison’, Guardian, 8 July 2023, p. 29.
2 The letter is printed by kind permission of the Trustees of the Sir Michael Tippett Will Trust, to whom I extend my thanks, as also to Alice Nissen and the late Stella Maude, and to Christopher Scobie at the British Library. At the time of writing, the Library, home to Tippett's manuscripts, was suffering the effects of a cyberattack in October 2023, making both the manuscripts catalogue and many of the documents themselves unavailable; it is to be hoped the manuscripts under discussion here will soon be available, and I am grateful to Alice Nissen for sending me photographs. The sole volume of Tippett's correspondence is Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, ed. Thomas Schuttenhelm (London: Faber, 2005). For an outline of the archival history of Tippett's music manuscripts and correspondence, see Soden, Oliver, Michael Tippett: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2019), pp. 4–5Google Scholar, 721–24. The archive marked ‘Nicholas Wright private collection’ has since been deposited at the British Library (uncatalogued, as of August 2024).
3 A fuller account of Tippett's life in the Second World War can be found in Soden, Michael Tippett, pp. 237–340, and Kemp, Ian, Tippett: The Composer and his Music (London: Ernst Eulenburg, 1985), pp. 40–49Google Scholar. For the most recent study of conscientious objectors to the Second World War, see Kelly, Tobias, Battles of Conscience: British Pacifists and the Second World War (London: Chatto and Windus, 2022)Google Scholar.
4 Dated 15 August in Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. 308, and in Michael Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues (London: Hutchinson, 1991), p. 153, but clearly marked 16 August in manuscript (British Library), tying in to the Monday routine.
5 Covent Garden Gallery, A Man of Our Time (London: Schott, 1977), pp. 41–53.
6 Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues, pp. 145–56; Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, pp. 299–310.
7 Alice Nissen, personal communication, 23 June 2023.
8 Christopher Scobie, ‘New Tippett Acquisitions’, British Library blog, 6 August 2023, https://blogs.bl.uk/music/2023/08/new-tippett-acquisitions.html (accessed 22 August 2024).
9 Walter Bergmann (1902–1988), lawyer and musician, specialist in recorder and early music, who escaped Nazi Germany for England, where Tippett, Director of Music at Morley College in South London from 1940 to 1951, invited him to join the music department.
10 John Amis (1922–2013), arts administrator and broadcaster, friend and unofficial assistant to Tippett while working for the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
11 As soon as he was released from prison Tippett holidayed in Mevagissey, South Cornwall.
12 Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), composer and lifelong friend of Tippett, who with his partner, tenor Peter Pears, collected Tippett from prison at 7.30 a.m. on 21 August 1943 and went with him to a concert at the Wigmore Hall that evening. Britten was then living at 45A St John's Wood High Street, London.
13 (Brean Leslie) Douglas ‘Den’ Newton (1920–2001), poet and museum curator, who began an affair with Tippett in 1941.
14 (Enid) Francesca Allinson (1902–1945), musician and writer who maintained a passionate though platonic friendship with Tippett in the 1930s and 1940s, ended by her suicide, in 1945.
15 If not a restaurant or hotel (unidentified) perhaps a picnic lunch at the Shaftesbury Avenue offices of the newly established Society for Promotion of New Music, where John Amis was working as Secretary.
16 Thomas Weelkes (1576?–1623) was among the many English Renaissance composers programmed by Tippett's choir at Morley College.
17 Antony Hopkins (1921–2014), composer and broadcaster who sang in the Morley choir, professing Tippett as his mentor and unofficial composition teacher.
18 Peter Warlock (1894–1930), pseudonym of Philip Heseltine, British composer. The version of the Corpus Christi Carol with tenor solo was Peter Pears’ first solo recording, made in 1936; Tippett may have intended to invite Pears to perform the piece at Morley.
19 Walter Goehr (1903–1960), German conductor, recruited by Tippett to the staff at Morley College, who on 17 July 1943 led a performance at the Wigmore Hall of Tippett's Concerto for Double String Orchestra, at which it was announced that ‘circumstances beyond his control prevented the composer from attending’.
20 Henry Walter Legge (1906–1979), English record producer associated with EMI and Head of Artists at HMV; Legge could have given any recording wide circulation by making it part of HMV's cheap ‘Plum Label’ sequence of recent English music. Walter Goehr in fact recorded the Concerto at Levy's Sound Studio in August 1943, supervised in Tippett's continued absence by Benjamin Britten.
21 Rose Mori, Tippett's secretary at Morley College.
22 Presumably a choir temporarily conducted by Tippett at Tolworth, Greater London.
23 Gerald Cooper, concert promoter and curator associated with the Wigmore Hall.
24 Tippett attended the Wigmore Hall concert on the evening of his release, 21 August 1943; the programme included his String Quartet No. 2. Evelyn Maude, at Tippett's request, placed an advert in the pacifist magazine Peace News: ‘Michael Tippett's release from Wormwood Scrubs Prison will take place on August 21st, coinciding with a performance. He hopes to make this concert the occasion for reunion with many of his friends.’ Peace News, 13 August 1943, p. 6.
25 Peter Pears (1910–1986), tenor, Britten's partner and muse, who on Saturday 7 August 1943 gave a performance of Tippett's cantata for tenor and piano, Boyhood's End, accompanied by Britten, at the Wigmore Hall. ‘The composer,’ wrote Scott Goddard in the Daily News (9 August 1943, p. 3), ‘detained on other duties, could not share the applause.’
26 Presumably Rose Mori (see above), although Tippett had been fending off amorous advances from Rose Turnbull, daughter of the signalman in his home village of Oxted, Surrey; it is possible that Mori was her married name. Fletcher, and the involvement of Tippett's mother, Isabel Kemp, are unsolved. See also Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. 309.
27 Early plans for what became Tippett's Symphony No. 1, which he began in earnest in 1944 and completed on 20 August 1945; prior to the withdrawal of his Symphony in B flat (1932–33), Tippett considered the symphony his second, and premiered it, in November 1945, as ‘Symphony 1945’.
28 Tippett would be joined on the Cornish trip by John Amis and Antony Hopkins; Portloe, on the country's south coast, is some ten miles south of the cathedral city of Truro, reached by train from Paddington. In the end the troublesome room reservations were made redundant by the RAF, which commandeered their lodgings, a fact the travellers were alerted to when on board the train. The holiday took place a little way along the coast from Portloe, at Mevagissey and St Austell. Hopkins and Amis had vivid memories of the trip; see Antony Hopkins, Beating Time (London: Michael Joseph, 1982), pp. 115–16, and John Amis, A Miscellany (London: Faber, 1985), p. 175.
29 Alison Purves became Antony Hopkins’ wife in 1947 and joined the Cornish holiday.
30 David Ayerst (1904–1992), journalist and lifelong (heterosexual) friend of Tippett.
31 On Tippett's friendship with and support for younger conscientious objectors, see Machin, Arnold, Artist of an Icon: The Memoirs of Arnold Machin (Kirstead: Frontier Publishing, 2002), pp. 75–78Google Scholar.
32 Having suffered something tantamount to a nervous breakdown in 1938, after ending a troubled love affair with the artist Wilfred Franks, Tippett channelled his political and sexual turmoil into an extended period of Jungian dream analysis.
33 Whitegates Cottage, Oxted, Surrey, Tippett's home since 1938.
34 Finch, Edith, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 1840–1922 (Oxford: Alden Press, 1938)Google Scholar, a life of the English poet and writer.