Archive item of the month: February 2023
The results are in!
A huge thank you to everyone who supplied thoughts, ideas and information on last month’s archive item (above), which has now been identified as a result of your collective detective work.
Many helpful responses were received, some which noted the image displayed on a commercial website, dated to the 1930s, and some noting the presence of female musicians which indicated it could not have been a London-based orchestra.
The occasion has been identified as the rehearsal (N.B. the performers’ attire) of a performance by the London and North Eastern Railway Musical Society at Queen’s Hall, London. On learning this we checked the two programmes in the archive relating to this Musical Society and, found that the programme from 29 March 1924 contained a slip of paper reading “L.N.E.R. Musical Society, Rehearsal at Queen’s Hall, 20/12/24” which was likely to have once been with the photograph and was erroneously tucked into the (in)correct programme. The conductor of this occasion was William Johnson Galloway, the organist was Stanley Marchant (1883-1949, Member 00429) and the two lady soloists were, on the left, the soprano Lilian Stiles-Allen (1890-1982) and, on the right, Dorothy Clark.
Two reviews of the performance, kindly supplied by Member Roderick Elms, from unidentified newspaper cuttings, read:
“This was the 126th concert of the L.N.E.R. Musical Society, of which one of the directors of that railway company, Colonel William Johnson Galloway is the honorary conductor. The star piece of the evening was the new cantata, “Christmas Eve”, specially written for the occasion and dedicated to the Society by Dr. Stanley Marchant. This proved to be a composition of much charm and beauty, and it had a great reception. The solos were attractively rendered by Miss Lilian Stiles-Allen and Miss Dorothy Clark, whose contributions to the programme provoked great enthusiasm”.
“… choir of 300 male voices, and their wonderful orchestra, comprising over a hundred instrumentalists … A fine combination are these railwaymen singers and musicians drawn from all sections and grades of the services, and picked from the various big centres which connect up this great line …”.
Marchant’s Christmas Eve, for soprano solo, male voice chorus & orchestral accompt ad lib. was composed and published in 1924. It was composed for this particular occasion and, despite the number of performers involved, a quick search of international online catalogues reveals only two copies of the vocal score to be found in public libraries (the British Library, and one copy in Canada).
The London & North Eastern Railway was formed in 1923 through an amalgamation of various railway companies including the Great Eastern Railway. The musical society of the Great Eastern Railway, which appears to have been formed by William Galloway in 1908, also changed its name to London & North Eastern Musical Society in 1924; Galloway was a director of the LNER.
Galloway, in addition to having been an MP, was a writer and his publications include The Operatic Problem (J. Long, 1902) and Musical England (Christophers, 1910). Upon his death in 1931 a bequest came to the Society through Galloway’s will. The Minutes of 1 March 1931 note that the introduction to the RSM came through the organist Stanley Marchant “as the member who had brought the Society to the notice of Colonel Galloway”. Two newspapers of 14 April 1931 reveal the likely extent of Galloway’s bequest to the RSM with The Times detailing “After various other bequests, he gives – £10,000 to the Benevolent Fund of the Foundling Hospital. And the ultimate residue to the Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain” and the following unidentified newspaper cutting from the RSM archives noting:
