The Little Book of Dorset by David Hilliam

Author:David Hilliam [David Hilliam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752462653
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

BRITAIN’S FIRST MUNICIPAL ORCHESTRA

As a town, Bournemouth grew from a single wayside inn on bleak heathland in 1810 to a thriving and fashionable health resort of about 20,000 in the 1880s. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, published in 1891, Thomas Hardy gave the new town the name of ‘Sandbourne’ – ‘This fashionable watering-place … was like a fairy place suddenly created by the stroke of a wand, and allowed to get a little dusty.’

In 1876 the Italian Band – a group of sixteen Italian musicians who had served in the Italian Army – were performing regularly for the entertainment of residents and visitors. Led by a Signor Bertini and supported by the town authorities, they increased their number in 1892 to twenty-one musicians to form the first Corporation Military Band.

The Italian Band was so popular that the town council made a bold decision – to found a full orchestra. It would be the first municipal orchestra in the entire country and to run it they decided to invite none other than Dan Godfrey, an enormously famous bandsman of the day, known to all as one of Britain’s leading musicians.

Dan Godfrey, however, had other commitments, and was not at all interested in settling down to found this new orchestra so far from the capital. He neglected even to reply to the offer.

Luckily for Bournemouth, however, his son, also named Dan, chanced to read his father’s mail. The younger Dan Godfrey, aged twenty-four, had recently returned from South Africa, where he had been musical director of a touring opera company. He was young, newly married, ambitious, and urgently in need of a job. Swiftly he applied for the post offered to his father. And naturally enough – he got it!

This appointment was the beginning of the great success story that eventually led to the world-famous Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

Under Dan Godfrey’s leadership, the orchestra played three times a day from Whitsun to October in the Winter Gardens. This was a large building which resembled the glass-houses at Kew. The musicians hated it because it was noisy when it rained, it was ferociously hot when it was sunny, and the foliage of the plants got in the way of their instruments. They called it ‘The Glass-house’ or ‘The Greenhouse’, or ‘The Cucumber Frame’ – this last name was a clever pun, because the designer of the Winter Gardens, Mr Cumber, had also designed buildings at Kew.

In 1929 the orchestra gained a brand-new venue for its performances when the Bournemouth Pavilion was opened.

In 1947, because of the poor acoustics of the Pavilion, it was decided to move to a refurbished building originally built as a bowling alley – the Winter Gardens. To everyone’s delight, its acoustics proved to be amazingly good, and the orchestra gained worldwide fame under a succession of great conductors: Rudolf Schwarz, Constantin Silvestri, Charles Groves, and many more.

Despite protests and a petition with over 28,000 signatories, Bournemouth Borough Council demolished its once-famous Winter Gardens in 2003. The site is now a car park.

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