Beer, sweat and jockstraps: the real history of the CBSO

In childhood, the theme tune to The Box of Delights was the sound of Christmas. The melody was ‘The First Nowell’ but that wasn’t what cast the spell. It was the way the harp glinted and pealed, and the eerie wisp of the ‘Coventry Carol’ that drifted through on muted violins: a masterclass in orchestration for a BBC teatime audience. After inquiries at Circle Records in Liverpool (this was pre-Amazon), my father established its identity: the Carol Symphony, by a composer with the pleasingly Edwardian name of Victor Hely-Hutchinson.

And that was that, for me anyway, until three decades later, rifling through the archive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, I noticed the initials ‘VHH’ on files from the 1940s. It turned out that Hely-Hutchinson had come to Birmingham in 1933 to work for the BBC and when, during the war, the City of Birmingham Orchestra’s (‘symphony’ came later) conductor Leslie Heward succumbed to tuberculosis, he’d practically rescued the whole outfit. He booked musicians, planned rehearsals and conducted concerts, all unpaid. He also commanded the university cadet force, performed all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas from memory, and served nightly as an ARP warden. When he died of pneumonia in 1947, obituaries in Birmingham newspapers promised that he would always be remembered.

The horn players would stash still-burning cigarettes in the crooks of their instruments

Until, of course, he wasn’t. Anyone who’s poked around in an archive knows how personalities, lives and whole cultures can disappear into manila folders in climate-controlled vaults. Look at an orchestra dressed in tailcoats and evening gowns, and you assume you’re seeing a 19th-century tradition. Not so: the CBSO only adopted white tie and tails in 1955. ‘Dear me, what next?’ mocked John Waterhouse of the Birmingham Post. ‘Blue Hungarian outfits for Viennese concerts? Jolly false noses for the Saturday pops? Tiny cupid wings for “Music You Love”?’

The CBSO’s conductor in the late 1940s, the former racing driver George ‘Whacker’ Weldon, got through so many cigarettes in rehearsal that he used a chamber pot as an ashtray.