User:Grandsire57/sandbox

Biography
Eric Halfpenny was born in Ruskin Avenue, Manor Park, London, the youngest child of three, having two much older sisters. He was named after his father (Frederick William Halfpenny), but was always known as Eric. His father died when he was twelve, and at sixteen Eric joined Lloyds bank in Lombard Street, where he stayed for the rest of his working life, finally retiring in 1975.

He met his wife, May Wilder in 1927 and they married in 1937 and had one son. During the war he spent four years in the RAF, being duty trumpeter at Ruislip, then the Faroe Islands and subsequently Scotland and Northern Ireland. He was demobbed in 1946 and attended the Nettlefold sale in April 1946, where May bought him a broken serpent for 15 shillings. Eric mended it and played it in the Wagner’s Rienzi overture later that year.

In August 1946, the Galpin sale took place, and this was the start of the Galpin Society, he became secretary and held this post until 1965.

Musical Life
It seems that he had little formal musical training, apart from a few violin lessons from a local teacher and being a member of a church choir, but it is known that before his twenties he was playing the double bass in amateur orchestras and shows in London. It must have been about this time that he began buying his formidable collection of old instruments. These ranged through the whole of woodwind and brass and went up to his three double basses. One of his basses was was made for George III and had the Royal Crest on the back, but the best of them was made by W E Hill & Sons for the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in 1851. This was a superb instrument that I had great pleasure in playing just a few times.

He played his serpent with Karl Haas and the London Baroque ensemble, and in the early 1960’s formed the Guild of Gentlemen Trumpeters, a small group that played on natural trumpets plus kettledrums. For some time he was listed in the Musicians Union directory as a serpent player, and it may have been through that route that he began an association with Gerard Hoffnung. Eric played in several Hoffnung concerts, and can be heard playing the serpent in duets with Hoffnung on the reverse of the double LP produced by the BBC which included the Oxford Union speech.

By the 1970’s he was teaching the double bass at the Redbridge Music School (RMS), which is where I met him, and then had the greatest pleasure playing alongside him in Musici - the teachers orchestra of the RMS and also in Concerti Allegri, a very exciting “young” orchestra formed around that time. It was around the mid 1970’s that Eric demonstrated his skill as a musician capable of playing virtually any non-keyboard instrument in a series of lectures illustrated by historic instruments from his collection.

His academic life
Eric produced a lot of papers on the history of musical instruments, including their construction and techniques for playing them. Maurice Byrne, in his obituary of Eric, printed in Volume 33 of the Galpin Society Journal (1)(which I have raided for quite a lot of this) lists over 100 articles and letters published in a wide range of journals, including articles for the 1954 edition of Grove. He appears to have started with “Double Bass in Arcady”, published in Musical Opinion 62 (1939), quickly followed by “Notes on the Square Pianoforte” in 1940. He catalogued the V&A instrument collection when it came out of storage after the Second World War, taking the opportunity to play the giant double bass which was such a prominent feature of the collection for many years. His verdict was “really not very good”.

Another trove of instruments that he was involved in bringing to light was the Shaw-Hellier collection that was unearthed in a visit to Miss Shaw-Hellier at the family manor house, The Wodehouse. The collection, including valuable manuscripts, was found in a room above the stable block. It has now been split up, with the instruments going to the Edinburgh University Collection of Musical instruments, and the manuscripts to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham.

Eric was a fascinating man – erudite, active and real fount of knowledge about all things musical.