Not Just the Music - 150th Anniversary of Ralph Vaughan-Williams
If you enjoy classical music you won’t have missed that 2022 has been the 150th Anniversary of Ralph Vaughan-Williams. His vast musical output includes operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces, orchestral compositions including nine symphonies hymns, folk-song arrangements and large-scale choral pieces. Less well known, however, may be his humanitarian work with refugees during WWll.
More usually associated with his childhood home, Leith Hill Place, from 1933 to 1953 he lived at The White Gates just off the Westcott road, Dorking (now a bungalow), and was much involved in the life of the town. Even before war was declared, he was very aware of the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. One early example was that of Dr Gerhard Pinthus, a noted musicologist, persecuted under the Nazi regime for his Jewish faith and communist principles. Arrested in 1933, he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment only to then be handed over to the Gestapo in July 1936 and sent to Lichtenburg Concentration Camp. It was suggested that a letter of guarantee from the renowned British composer Vaughan-Williams offering Pinthus asylum outside Germany might persuade the Nazi regime to sanction his release and amazingly, it was successful!
In 1938, together with novelist E M Forster, Vaughan-Williams set up the Dorking and District Refugee Committee to help people fleeing Nazi Germany. Refugees were housed at Clarendon House and at Fairhaven in Holmbury St Mary. Later the Duke of Newcastle offered Burchett House rent-free as a hostel; here the refugees were given health care, and helped to find work and housing. Once war was declared, he was active locally as a fire watcher, also helping with the collection of salvage for war material, whilst at the same time composing music for such wartime films as Coastal Command and 49th Parallel.
German nationals faced internment as enemy aliens re gardless of their status; the Committee helped them apply to Home Office Tribunals to remain at liberty. When journalist Erika Schmidt-Landry’s writer husband was interned in the Isle of Man, she was faced with putting her three small children into an orphanage; Forster and Vaughan-Williams successfully took up her case. Vaughan-Williams was also chairman of the Home Office Committee for the Release of Interned Alien Musicians and assisted Dame Myra Hess with the organisation of her daily National Gallery concerts.
It’s perhaps a fitting tribute to his untiring work that the BBC commissioned a work originally titled Thanksgiving for Victory. First recorded in 1944 while the war was still ongoing, it was actually broadcast once victory had been achieved. Retitled A Song of Thanksgiving it is a pow erful and moving work that celebrates the Allies’ victory.
Southwater Local History Group
Mon 5th Dec 2022 – 7.30p.m. William Avenell - ‘Why was the Shepherd Delighted?’
Monday 2nd Jan 2023 – 7.30p.m. Tony Harris – ‘Cardinal Wolsey’ In Costume
The Village Hall, Church Lane, Southwater. Parking is now available at the Village Hall Please do not attend if you have any Covid-19 symptoms
Contact Jeremy Senneck 01403 731247 for any further SLHG information.