Alan Franks
Writer and musician
Writer and musician
Humphrey Lyttelton: Trumpet Major
Humphrey Lyttelton by Alan Franks
At eight o’clock on a filthy Friday evening in Dart-ford, in Kent, when many other 85-year-olds are peering at the TV schedules and wondering what the world has come to, Humphrey Lyttelton is stepping on to the stage at the Mick Jagger Centre.
He has driven himself from Barnet in the far north of London and is wearing the light suit just back from the dry-cleaners. In his hand is his trumpet, just as it has been for most of the past 70 years. The audience is from the Radio 4 heartland, mature to the point of retired but still young enough to be his children. When he appears they go as mad as dignity permits, which is actually quite a lot.
This Sunday he is the subject of a South Bank Show and, like the man who has everything, it is hard to know what to give him next in the way of plaudits. John Major reputedly tried to hang a gong on him, but to no avail. When I eventually ask him about this his answer is a masterclass in polite evasion.
For Humph is a famously private man, preferring not to give out his phone number, even to members of his band. He manages to get through an hour of South Bank without a mention of home or children. He was, after all, a celebrity long before that status was thrown open to the dull and the talentless, and never needed to trade private revelations in return for public interest.
He mentions the fact that a newspaper listed him as a National Treasure in the new year and I brace myself for mild disapproval; twice over actually, since the paper was this one, and the person who wrote his entry was me. “Purveyor of blue-chip filth to the nation,” he quotes accurately before saying that this is how he sees his role as well.
The citation also said: “Why get a new one when there’s nothing wrong with the old one?” and he does take issue with this. “I wish that were the case,” he says, “but sadly it’s not. The embouchure isn’t what it used to be; I’m not as steady [as a player] as I was; my range isn’t as great. Not that this matters particularly, as it was never my greatest asset.”
Apart from that, all is in order. When his trumpet announces itself above the rest of his eight-piece band, it does so with a virtually undimmed brightness and clarity. By the time he was 27 and had his first band, his technique was just about in place, and the consensus among critics is that it has never really fallen away.
Old age may have reduced his stature from its prime-time 6ft 4in, and when he blows his horn heavenwards there may be a slight sag in the back of the knees, but the playing itself is right on the button. If you want confirmation of the maxim that says if you don’t want to lose it, use it, the search ends here. He deflects excess praise from himself by pointing to the new members of his band; Jo Fooks, for example, on tenor saxophone and flute, who is young enough to be his granddaughter.
The irony of him playing in a place called the Mick Jagger Centre is not lost on him; the Rolling Stones were right at the heart of the rock revolution that eclipsed the revivalist jazz played in Britain in the 1950s by Lyttelton and his younger contemporaries Chris Barber and Ken Colyer.
During that epoch Jagger was at school here, at Dart-ford Grammar (founded even earlier than Lyttelton’s first band, in 1576) in the adjacent building. Now his band’s memorabilia and early tour logos, displayed all over the building, look nearly as far removed from the present as the black and white jive foot-age from the Hammersmth Palais. All these years on both Lyttelton and the Stones are still going, both examples of how to stay in the same place and let the world come back round to you.
This is how Lyttelton describes the process in respect of his own, less commercial genre: “When people talk about jazz coming back, my response is that it never went away. When I blew my first note on a trumpet, which was in 1936, Count Basie had just arrived in New York, and his remained one of the most popular bands around until his death. I liken jazz to being on a busy street. The traffic goes past, there’s skiffle, there’s R&B and so on, and then, whenever there’s a gap in the traffic, you notice that it’s still very much there.”
And going through an interesting time in Britain? “Yes. Even the fusion is fine, although with fusion I always say, but how good is the jazz? I have the view, not a very practical one perhaps, that when people say ‘I’m really a jazz person at heart’, they should get on and do it. Otherwise it’s like trying to have your cake and eat it.”
What you can’t help noticing about Lyttelton is the sheer comic class of the man. One reason for this is that he is the world’s most reluctant toff. Born in Eton, for heaven’s sake. Not just educated there, but made in the belly of the beast, a son of one of the masters. Descended from an exact namesake in the gunpowder plotters. Nephew of Sir Oliver Lyttelton, later Lord Chandos. Could have walked into a City job as his uncle’s private secretary.
And then, suddenly, jazz. He bunked off the Eton and Harrow cricket match to buy a trumpet in Charing Cross Road, then set about teaching himself. A few years later Louis Armstrong was calling him the best trumpeter in Britain. In 1949 he was accompanying the tremendous Sidney Bechet for a classic session with Melodisc. In 1956 his composition Bad Penny Blues became the first jazz record to reach the Top 20. He also had a career as a cartoonist (with the Daily Mail), which completed the picture of a young man just about as much at odds with his destiny as he could possibly be.
Yet it seems that no one tried to stop this headlong descent into bohemia. “I suppose in some respects I did rather kick over the traces,” he says. “I mean, I didn't wear a suit, for example. At the end of the war [he served in North Africa, then Italy], my father hoped I would follow in his footsteps. I remember having a conversation about me possibly taking a geography diploma. One of the things I would be studying was the composition of the Earth’s crust, and I thought, I'm not remotely interested in the Earth's crust. And he said: ‘Yes, I rather thought you might say that.’ ” Today, and for the past 35 years, Lyttelton has cut a similarly laissez-fairefigure as the nominal chairman of Radio 4’s self-proclaimed antidote to panel games, I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue. The hilarity of his position is precisely that; he looks and sounds so effortlessly patrician that he could save the programme from itself with just a scrap of wise counsel. The truth, meanwhile, is that he heads for anarchy quite as merrily as the other technically adult men over whom he is apparently presiding.
Although he couldn’t replicate that role on the jazz stage without bringing everyone’s careers to an abrupt end, he is nonetheless an antiauthoritarian leader, and proud of it. “I’m not one for post mortems,” he says. “If someone has played a wrong note somewhere the last thing I’m going to do is take them to task. The moment’s gone, and you have to think ahead to the next thing.”
The moving-on approach may sound modern for such an old-timer, but the egalitari-an aspect comes from a particular experience. One of his father’s brothers was a director of a steel firm in South Wales. At his suggestion Humphrey and his cousin went down there to work. “It was very uncomfortable,” he recalls, “because the men there thought we were management spies. Eventually a foreman called Fred befriended us, and got us to meet the rest of the workforce.
“He went to the MD and asked if we could work in the smelting shop, which meant throwing stones, dolomite, manganese, into the furnaces. It was the lowest form really. And he took us to the working men’s clubs, and I played the trumpet there.”
That experience, and the war itself, when he felt similarly uncomfortable about his privilege, made him a socialist. There was an incident when a (Conservative) council wanted to cancel his band’s engagement because he was a known Labour supporter and had taken part in one of the party’s political broadcasts.
It is while we are talking about this that I ask whether it is true that the Major Government wanted to give him a knighthood. There is a long pause, and then he says: “Yes, I was lucky. They do say if you want a longish life you should choose your parents carefully.”
Either it’s a very good impression of a senior moment, or else it’s an accomplished shift of theme. But it’s worth staying with, taking us as it does into the misunderstood business of silliness. He says there is this person called Chairman Humph who, Mao-like, issues thoughts on all manner of things. He takes care of the pompous pronouncement side of things, freeing Lyttelton up for less solemn duties.
“As you travel through life it is important to have a capacity for silliness – and I don’t mean frivolity or fatuity. I have identified it as not stopping yourself doing what children do. I mean, children do things for no other reason than that it amuses them. I suppose one example would be playing the trumpet outside Buckingham Palace.”
This is a reference to VEDay, when he was wheeled about in a handcart, blowing his heart out among the joyful Londoners.
The dressing-room door opens and in comes Susan, his manager this past half a century. Time for the sound check. Only now, late on, does he mention the fact that his wife Jill – also of 50 years standing and the mother of three of his four children – died less than a year ago.
“Oh, it was a horrible thing,” he says. “Something called PSP [the degenerative brain disease, progressive supranuclear palsy]. She had it for eight or nine years. All the things she liked doing, they shut down one by one.”
No good agonising, he says, sounding for a moment like a war-generation stoic. “I don’t agonise over many things, I don’t see the point. I mean, I could agonise over my father’s treatment of me in the Easter holidays – we can all allow these things to hang on and take over our lives.”
Susan comes in again, and his time’s up. Last question. Who was the best you ever played with? Expecting the answer: “Bechet.” No pause this time, not a single missed beat. “This lot,” he gestures down the passage, and goes off to join them.
This article was published in The Times on 23 March 2007.
At eight o’clock on a filthy Friday evening in Dart-ford, in Kent, when many other 85-year-olds are peering at the TV schedules and wondering what the world has come to, Humphrey Lyttelton is stepping on to the stage at the Mick Jagger Centre.
He has driven himself from Barnet in the far north of London and is wearing the light suit just back from the dry-cleaners. In his hand is his trumpet, just as it has been for most of the past 70 years. The audience is from the Radio 4 heartland, mature to the point of retired but still young enough to be his children. When he appears they go as mad as dignity permits, which is actually quite a lot.
This Sunday he is the subject of a South Bank Show and, like the man who has everything, it is hard to know what to give him next in the way of plaudits. John Major reputedly tried to hang a gong on him, but to no avail. When I eventually ask him about this his answer is a masterclass in polite evasion.
For Humph is a famously private man, preferring not to give out his phone number, even to members of his band. He manages to get through an hour of South Bank without a mention of home or children. He was, after all, a celebrity long before that status was thrown open to the dull and the talentless, and never needed to trade private revelations in return for public interest.
He mentions the fact that a newspaper listed him as a National Treasure in the new year and I brace myself for mild disapproval; twice over actually, since the paper was this one, and the person who wrote his entry was me. “Purveyor of blue-chip filth to the nation,” he quotes accurately before saying that this is how he sees his role as well.
The citation also said: “Why get a new one when there’s nothing wrong with the old one?” and he does take issue with this. “I wish that were the case,” he says, “but sadly it’s not. The embouchure isn’t what it used to be; I’m not as steady [as a player] as I was; my range isn’t as great. Not that this matters particularly, as it was never my greatest asset.”
Apart from that, all is in order. When his trumpet announces itself above the rest of his eight-piece band, it does so with a virtually undimmed brightness and clarity. By the time he was 27 and had his first band, his technique was just about in place, and the consensus among critics is that it has never really fallen away.
Old age may have reduced his stature from its prime-time 6ft 4in, and when he blows his horn heavenwards there may be a slight sag in the back of the knees, but the playing itself is right on the button. If you want confirmation of the maxim that says if you don’t want to lose it, use it, the search ends here. He deflects excess praise from himself by pointing to the new members of his band; Jo Fooks, for example, on tenor saxophone and flute, who is young enough to be his granddaughter.
The irony of him playing in a place called the Mick Jagger Centre is not lost on him; the Rolling Stones were right at the heart of the rock revolution that eclipsed the revivalist jazz played in Britain in the 1950s by Lyttelton and his younger contemporaries Chris Barber and Ken Colyer.
During that epoch Jagger was at school here, at Dart-ford Grammar (founded even earlier than Lyttelton’s first band, in 1576) in the adjacent building. Now his band’s memorabilia and early tour logos, displayed all over the building, look nearly as far removed from the present as the black and white jive foot-age from the Hammersmth Palais. All these years on both Lyttelton and the Stones are still going, both examples of how to stay in the same place and let the world come back round to you.
This is how Lyttelton describes the process in respect of his own, less commercial genre: “When people talk about jazz coming back, my response is that it never went away. When I blew my first note on a trumpet, which was in 1936, Count Basie had just arrived in New York, and his remained one of the most popular bands around until his death. I liken jazz to being on a busy street. The traffic goes past, there’s skiffle, there’s R&B and so on, and then, whenever there’s a gap in the traffic, you notice that it’s still very much there.”
And going through an interesting time in Britain? “Yes. Even the fusion is fine, although with fusion I always say, but how good is the jazz? I have the view, not a very practical one perhaps, that when people say ‘I’m really a jazz person at heart’, they should get on and do it. Otherwise it’s like trying to have your cake and eat it.”
What you can’t help noticing about Lyttelton is the sheer comic class of the man. One reason for this is that he is the world’s most reluctant toff. Born in Eton, for heaven’s sake. Not just educated there, but made in the belly of the beast, a son of one of the masters. Descended from an exact namesake in the gunpowder plotters. Nephew of Sir Oliver Lyttelton, later Lord Chandos. Could have walked into a City job as his uncle’s private secretary.
And then, suddenly, jazz. He bunked off the Eton and Harrow cricket match to buy a trumpet in Charing Cross Road, then set about teaching himself. A few years later Louis Armstrong was calling him the best trumpeter in Britain. In 1949 he was accompanying the tremendous Sidney Bechet for a classic session with Melodisc. In 1956 his composition Bad Penny Blues became the first jazz record to reach the Top 20. He also had a career as a cartoonist (with the Daily Mail), which completed the picture of a young man just about as much at odds with his destiny as he could possibly be.
Yet it seems that no one tried to stop this headlong descent into bohemia. “I suppose in some respects I did rather kick over the traces,” he says. “I mean, I didn't wear a suit, for example. At the end of the war [he served in North Africa, then Italy], my father hoped I would follow in his footsteps. I remember having a conversation about me possibly taking a geography diploma. One of the things I would be studying was the composition of the Earth’s crust, and I thought, I'm not remotely interested in the Earth's crust. And he said: ‘Yes, I rather thought you might say that.’ ” Today, and for the past 35 years, Lyttelton has cut a similarly laissez-fairefigure as the nominal chairman of Radio 4’s self-proclaimed antidote to panel games, I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue. The hilarity of his position is precisely that; he looks and sounds so effortlessly patrician that he could save the programme from itself with just a scrap of wise counsel. The truth, meanwhile, is that he heads for anarchy quite as merrily as the other technically adult men over whom he is apparently presiding.
Although he couldn’t replicate that role on the jazz stage without bringing everyone’s careers to an abrupt end, he is nonetheless an antiauthoritarian leader, and proud of it. “I’m not one for post mortems,” he says. “If someone has played a wrong note somewhere the last thing I’m going to do is take them to task. The moment’s gone, and you have to think ahead to the next thing.”
The moving-on approach may sound modern for such an old-timer, but the egalitari-an aspect comes from a particular experience. One of his father’s brothers was a director of a steel firm in South Wales. At his suggestion Humphrey and his cousin went down there to work. “It was very uncomfortable,” he recalls, “because the men there thought we were management spies. Eventually a foreman called Fred befriended us, and got us to meet the rest of the workforce.
“He went to the MD and asked if we could work in the smelting shop, which meant throwing stones, dolomite, manganese, into the furnaces. It was the lowest form really. And he took us to the working men’s clubs, and I played the trumpet there.”
That experience, and the war itself, when he felt similarly uncomfortable about his privilege, made him a socialist. There was an incident when a (Conservative) council wanted to cancel his band’s engagement because he was a known Labour supporter and had taken part in one of the party’s political broadcasts.
It is while we are talking about this that I ask whether it is true that the Major Government wanted to give him a knighthood. There is a long pause, and then he says: “Yes, I was lucky. They do say if you want a longish life you should choose your parents carefully.”
Either it’s a very good impression of a senior moment, or else it’s an accomplished shift of theme. But it’s worth staying with, taking us as it does into the misunderstood business of silliness. He says there is this person called Chairman Humph who, Mao-like, issues thoughts on all manner of things. He takes care of the pompous pronouncement side of things, freeing Lyttelton up for less solemn duties.
“As you travel through life it is important to have a capacity for silliness – and I don’t mean frivolity or fatuity. I have identified it as not stopping yourself doing what children do. I mean, children do things for no other reason than that it amuses them. I suppose one example would be playing the trumpet outside Buckingham Palace.”
This is a reference to VEDay, when he was wheeled about in a handcart, blowing his heart out among the joyful Londoners.
The dressing-room door opens and in comes Susan, his manager this past half a century. Time for the sound check. Only now, late on, does he mention the fact that his wife Jill – also of 50 years standing and the mother of three of his four children – died less than a year ago.
“Oh, it was a horrible thing,” he says. “Something called PSP [the degenerative brain disease, progressive supranuclear palsy]. She had it for eight or nine years. All the things she liked doing, they shut down one by one.”
No good agonising, he says, sounding for a moment like a war-generation stoic. “I don’t agonise over many things, I don’t see the point. I mean, I could agonise over my father’s treatment of me in the Easter holidays – we can all allow these things to hang on and take over our lives.”
Susan comes in again, and his time’s up. Last question. Who was the best you ever played with? Expecting the answer: “Bechet.” No pause this time, not a single missed beat. “This lot,” he gestures down the passage, and goes off to join them.
This article was published in The Times on 23 March 2007.
Music and words: the life of Humph
1921 Born in Eton, where his father is a housemaster
1936 Forms jazz quartet at school
1939 Joins Grenadier Guards, sees action in North Africa and Italy
1948 Forms Humphrey Lyttleton band
1949 Records with Sidney Bechet
1956 Releases first jazz record to reach UK Top 20
1972 Becomes chairman of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
1995 Turns down knighthood
In celebration of Humph
by Alan Franks
National monuments like Humphrey Lyttelton tend to have characteristics willed on to them by an admiring public. Many of these, for example his commitment to silliness, are accurate; others, such as the notion that he was endlessly freewheeling and gregarious, less so. Philip Larkin, the poet and jazz lover, surely got it right when he wrote of the veteran trumpeter and radio host: “One mustn't be misled by the amiable, bumbling persona... He is a toughly intelligent man moving confidently in any kind of surroundings from Windsor Castle to Birdland.”
That spectrum takes in the Mick Jagger Centre in Dartford, Kent, which is where I met him on a filthy Friday evening a year before his death. He was 85, and by then diminished to a mere 6ft - four inches less than the height of his prime. He was still an imposing, elegant figure. He had just driven down from his home in the far north of London, and was bearing the essentials of his trade; in one hand a trumpet case with a thoroughly lived-in look; in the other the lightweight suit still wrapped in the Mill Hill dry-cleaners' polythene.
In the sense that he was purposeful, punctual, eyeing the terrain for signs of his band members, he corroborated Larkin's reading. At the same time there was something mildly hunted about him. This may well have been because of the sheer freight of association with chaos that 34 years in the chair of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue would place on anyone's shoulders. While talking to him, and to people who knew him, I became convinced that his distinctive thing - his chop, as musicians say - was to border-cross; to be in places that you might not expect to find him, and then to give the probably accurate impression that he felt thoroughly at home.
It started with his birth, in 1921, which occurred in Eton. Once he had become famous in the postwar years, some thought he was having them on when he answered straight questions about his origins with straight answers. It was not just Eton the place, but Eton the school. His father was no less than the Hon George Lyttelton, who was a teacher there. So Humphrey was in effect born at Eton, duly went there as a pupil and might even have considered following in his father's professional footsteps if he had been more academically inclined and less crazy about music. One woman who knew him as a very young man on family holidays in Suffolk recalls a delightful, rather distrait character who couldn't be bothered with socks. In a classic and symbolic piece of bunking off, the teenage Humphrey walked off from an Eton v Harrow cricket match at Lords and went to Charing Cross Road to buy himself a trumpet.
Then there was the war, or rather the effects of it - the erosion of class barriers and the easing of a “downward” passage into what was considered bohemia. But again, if you look at something that had happened to him before he joined the Army (he served in North Africa and Italy) - it explains much of his deliberate journey away from privilege. “One of my father's brothers was the director of a steel firm in South Wales,” he said. “My cousin and I went down there to work. It was most uncomfortable because the workers there thought we were management spies. Eventually a foreman called Fred befriended us and got us to meet the rest of the workforce. He asked the MD if we could work in the smelting shop, which meant throwing all kinds of stones, dolomite, manganese into the furnace. It was the lowest form really. He took us to the working men's clubs and I started playing the trumpet there.”
It might not have been quite such a public renunciation of class birthright as that of the public school-educated former 2nd Viscount Stansgate Tony Benn, but a socialist he was. When, at the Mick Jagger Centre, I asked him if it was true that he had turned down a knighthood from John Major, he effectively snubbed the question by doing an impression of a senior moment. It was, in a different sense, pure class. Even his chairmanship of Clue could be seen as a subversion of authority, even if that authority was notionally his own.
Although he never tried to disguise his roots, he never flouted them. Far from the Old Etonian tradition of sticking close with your fellow alumni, visible still through David Cameron, Lyttelton was wary rather than proud if a bunch of them turned up at his gigs.
For someone who was for so long in the public eye, and who had chosen the most extroverted of instruments, the intensity of his privacy may have looked odd; it was of course, as Larkin implied, a necessary part of keeping the show on the road. Most musicians who worked with him had nothing but respect and affection, but even they were alarmed to discover that none of them had his phone number, and that if by some error it ever leaked, he would have it changed immediately. To my surprise he did talk of the pain of losing his wife Jill the previous year after a long struggle with the degenerative brain disease progressive supranuclear palsy. “Oh, it was a horrible thing,” he said, shaking his head. “Eight or nine years. All the things she loved doing, they shut down one by one.”
But then, like a bandleader striking into a brighter number: “No good agonising. I don't agonise over many things. I mean, I could agonise over my father's treatment of me in the Easter holidays. We can all allow these things to hang on and take over our lives.”
It was not until he died that I realised the biggest boundary he crossed in his life was the one between the past and the present - for want of a subtler definition, the pre- and the post-Diana Britains. This was both a stoical gentleman from the war generation and an artist who enacted such New Age-friendly ideals as living in the moment, acknowledging the healing power of music and becoming the person he was meant to be.
His funeral in London on May 6 was a private affair. Family and friends only. On the order of service were these words, written many years before, by Lyttelton: “As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation.” He knew as well as any educated Englishman the link between that deceptive word “silly” and its Germanic origin selig, meaning blessed.
After my article appeared I got a letter with a Suffolk postmark. It was from the woman who recalled his youthful charm - Patricia, his first wife and mother of their daughter, Henrietta, who is now a grandmother herself. Humphrey had left when the girl was 2, and there were periods when there was not much contact. Patricia tells of an occasion when she and Henrietta surprised him in the interval of a concert at Aldeburgh by joining the queue for signed CDs. Henrietta says she developed a very warm relationship with him, and with her two brothers and sister. “He was a wonderful father to have,” she says. “Very interested, and always tremendous company.” Whatever happened all those years earlier, both women seem to have enacted his principle of no agonising.
Lyttelton also rang me to leave a message, saying thanks for the chat. I rang back but got caller withheld ... naturally. In such a long playing life, it was one of the few numbers of which there was no record.
This article was published in The Times on 14 June 2008, after the great man died.