Slaithwaite-born composer Haydn Wood had a prolific output including his most famous song, Roses Of Picardy . But it is the original manuscript score to his Merridale march which is at the centre of a unique presentation. VAL JAVIN reports
IT IS 60 years since Haydn Wood composed a signature tune for his local band in Slaithwaite.
They played Merridale, the march that he had written for them, at a carol concert on December 19, 1948. It was the piece’s first public airing and six months later, it was broadcast by the band on the BBC’s North Regional Station.
Now Slaithwaite Band has celebrated the 60th anniversary of that first performance by donating the original manuscript score and parts of Haydn Wood’s Merridale March to the University of Huddersfield’s Archives.
The band continued their homage to Haydn Wood just before Christmas by playing the march at a concert at their bandroom in Ing Head Road at Slaithwaite.
The performance kicks off a year-long celebration of Wood’s music as this year marks the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death.
During his lifetime, Haydn Wood wrote some 180 songs, three musical comedies, a symphony, a piano concerto, a violin concerto, variations for cello and orchestra, 80 works for orchestra, a string quartet, pieces for piano, for violin, for flute, for oboe, for accordion, and several choral works.
In the 1960s, his home valley honoured this remarkable musician by founding the Haydn Wood Musical Festival which was held for the first time at Colne Valley High School in 1966 and which continues to this day.
He was born at the Lewisham Hotel in Slaithwaite in 1882, the son of Clement and Sabra Wood who owned and ran the pub and hotel.
The Woods were a large, musical family with Clement a brilliant amateur who conducted the local brass band.
When Haydn was still a small boy, the family moved to Douglas, Isle of Man, where he first studied the violin with his brother Harry, an orchestra conductor known as Manxland’s King of Music.
When he was 12, Haydn returned to Slaithwaite to play at the Liberal Club in a concert organised by his brother, Harry. The two were the violin soloists with their brother Daniel as the solo flautist.
It was the first of a series of Harry’s concerts with Haydn, his brothers and their sister Eliza, a pianist, all contributing to the entertainment.
By the time he was 15, Haydn was studying at the Royal College of Music in London where he excelled in violin, piano and composition. He was soon known as a prodigy, “a bright-looking little lad, all smiles and collar, who plays the fiddle as it were the easiest thing in the world, as easy as eating jam tarts” (The Musical Times, January 1, 1898).
When the new bandroom was opened in Slaithwaite in the late summer of 1925, it was Harry Wood who did the honours.
Haydn, who could not be present, had to content himself with sending a telegram: “Please convey to Slaithwaite Brass Band my heartiest good wishes for their future welfare: sorry I am not able to be present to wish you luck personally.”
But the brothers clearly followed the band’s progress closely for in 1933, when the Slaithwaite musicians won first prize in the Grand Shield competition at Crystal Palace, Harry Wood wrote from London: “I am staying with my brother Haydn. We join in offering Slaithwaite Band our heartiest congratulations on their wonderful success and hope that this will be the forerunner of many more triumphs for our native musicians.”
It was the 1930s before Haydn Wood was to perform again in Slaithwaite and he was by then a renowned composer and conductor.
He returned to his home town in 1934 and conducted Slaithwaite Philharmonic Society’s full orchestra in some of his own compositions. They played A Manx Rhapsody, Prelude, A Brown Bird Singing and Three Famous Pictures.
In the same concert, the tenor Frank Titterton sang Haydn’s songs, A Song Of Quietness, Singing To You and the Unforgotten Melody, accompanied by the composer on the violin.
In the Sixties, a room to commemorate Haydn Wood was opened at the once family own Lewisham Hotel in Slaithwaite by the chairman of Colne Valley Council, Clr J R Sykes.
The room was decorated with a photograph of Haydn Wood and framed copies of two of his most famous songs, Roses Of Picardy and A Brown Bird Singing.
By 1966, those songs were again heard at the Lewisham, but by then for the last time. Customers packed the hotel and included those and other Haydn Wood tunes in a final sing-song before the building’s doors were closed for the last time.
Over the years, Haydn Wood, with his wife Dorothy Court, a Savoyard soprano whom he had met while they were both students at the Royal College of Music, returned to Slaithwaite and the Colne Valley many times.
He died in 1959 but the band’s gift to the University Archives of the original score of Merridale March will ensure that it is properly conserved for the future and that people will get greater access to an important piece of local history.
