Blasts from the Past: Christmas concerts

In December 1948, ‘nearly the whole School swelled the ranks of the choir...some 200 divers voices’, to perform in a concert in the Great Hall.

Although not quite the whole school – there were 644 in total by that date – it was the first time so many pupils had performed together. The programme was challenging: several movements from Handel’s Messiah were included, ending with the Hallelujah chorus, when ‘the stage must have come near to breaking point... and the hall made to thunder’.

‘Never have I heard so many people singing so few right notes so often,’ declared the reviewer in the school magazine. He did, however, concede that the performance was, in fact, ‘a great success.’ In part this was due to the new director of music at the school, John Carol Case, newly appointed from King’s College Cambridge and already making a name as a professional bass-baritone.

Case was only the second master at King’s with music qualifications. He had been preceded by Robert Illing, appointed by the headmaster Hubert Dixon in 1946, who in his short time at the school established a whole-school choir, and organised the first Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. As archive volunteer Olwen Hamilton has discovered, the importance of music at King’s had gradually been growing ever since a Choral Society was formed in 1873 by enthusiastic staff. After the school moved to Wimbledon in 1897 a Musical Society was formed, in 1903.  Lionel Rogers, headmaster from 1910 to 1934, had a particular interest in music and appointed form masters who were to take part in musical activities. During the Second World War music flourished despite blackout restrictions and transport problems. The Musical Society continued and in 1944 the choir was to provide a concert at the end of the summer term ‘but then came the flying bombs’, which also postponed the first House Music Competition.  

When John Carol Case arrived in 1948 ‘his enthusiasm and love of music ..[met].. with great response from the boys’ in large part because Robert Illing’s hard work had given the pupils a firm musical foundation. Case taught at King’s from 1948 to 1951, choosing an ambitious repertoire for the pupils and building up the orchestra. He left to concentrate on his singing career and was replaced by Mr Lubbock. At the last school Christmas concert before Case left, the choir sang Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols; the work had particular significance for Case who, in 1948, had been selected as the soloist when it was conducted by Vaughan Williams himself (Case would go on to perform and record with Vaughan Williams many times). 

(The Hallelujah Chorus and Fantasia on Christmas Carols have featured in many a King’s concert; when they were performed by King’s pupils in December 1987, it was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with Alan Opie as the baritone soloist.)

Case returned to King’s in 1954, staying until 1958.  By then there was a Jazz Club and Early Church Music Society, alongside the Madrigal Society, Gramophone Circle, choir and orchestra. 

His successor, Noel Long, was just as dedicated. The 1960 Christmas concert once again featured a selection from Handel’s Messiah, finishing with ‘a spirited performance of the Hallelujah Chorus.’ This was followed by the theme and two variations from Britten’s A Boy was Born and The Three Kings by Cornelius. ‘These ambitious projects, on which the concert could so easily have floundered, proved after all to be the mainspring of its success and showed clearly how much hard work had been done by all concerned in its production.’

Long’s music programmes were famously ambitious.  I will end with a notable example. On 28 February 1961, a concert at King’s caught the attention of the Times Educational Supplement: ‘To give the first English performance of a work by as significant a figure as Schoenberg is the kind of honour that usually falls to some august body like the BBC or the Royal Philharmonic Society. So it was with justifiable pride that King’s College School, Wimbledon, claimed the first performance here of Schoenberg’s “Dreimal Tausend Jahre,” Op. 50a, and not on some grand ceremonial occasion, but at an informal chamber music concert – as though such things were just another part of the School’s ordinary musical routine’.  The BBC performed it two days later.

As ever, please do email if you have stories to share or questions about the school archive: I can be contacted at archive@kcs.org.uk. Or click here to complete a written questionnaire if you have memories you would like to submit to our Recollections of King’s project.

Dr Lucy Inglis | School Archivist