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.