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<<  -- 3 --  Trevor Hold    JOHN BISHOP (1931-2000)

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Thames was a small, one-man business - a 'small-timer', in his own characteristic phrase. He worked on a shoestring budget, with no public subsidy or lottery guarantee. Yet over the past 30 years he achieved things that none of the larger, more weathily-endowed music publishers have been able, or willing, to do. The Heritage of English Song and A Century of English Song series, the Warlock Collected Edition (writings and journalism as well as music): without these, British music would be infinitely the poorer. All this work - hard work: far too hard for his own good - was done quietly and unostentatiously behind the scenes. He was not a man who wanted to stand out from the crowd: he let his publishing record act for him.

In the Introduction to his excellent anthology, Music and Sweet Poetry (John Baker 1968: recently republished by Thames), he wrote:

'The great reward of compiling this book has been to bring to light a host of deserving, largely unfamiliar treasures, a paean of loving affirmations of the joy that music brings - music which, to quote Plato, "gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything" '.

This, I think, would be a fitting epitaph for him.

 

Copyright © 21 September 2000 Trevor Hold, Peterborough, UK

 

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