John Ireland, one of our most distinguished Grand Old Men of music, died on 12 June, at the age of 82. His contemporaries were Vaughan Williams, Bax, Gordon Jacob, the neglected Cyril Scott, and Havergal Brian, whose Gothic Symphony was given its première here recently, some forty years after it was written! England is not an easy country to be born into as a composer, and Ireland had a hard struggle to support himself. He went to the Royal College of Music on a scholarship at the age of 14, and kept himself alive by playing at Smoking Concerts (he was a fine pianist), teaching and coaching.

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I first met Sir Thomas Beecham in New York and in the Green Room at Carnegie Hall after a concert. Although I cannot remember which orchestra he was conducting, it was possibly the Rochester Symphony Orchestra. Due, I was told, to various feuds with important managements, Sir Thomas never conducted either the New York Philharmonic or the Boston Symphony Orchestras, at least not during the period I knew him there, from 1941 until his return to London in 1944. I had been introduced by his assistant John Barnett and was also armed with the encouragement of critic-composer Virgil Thomson, a friend and admirer of Sir Thomas, who had heard John rehearsing my overture, The New Age. This work was later rejected by the committee of the New York City Symphony, a group of unemployed musicians working under the W.P.A., a kind of dole. Partly from anger at what he thought an unjust decision, Barnett arranged my introduction to Sir Thomas.

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