Inglis and Peggy Gundry © Gundry Family
George Lloyd
I must now go back to 1934, the year before I was due to take up music at the R.C.M. The season at Covent Garden was just due to start. The Morning Post gave a list of the foreign operas to be performed and then added: “as usual there are no English operas and never will be”.
Incensed by this remark, I wrote a letter to the Morning Post, which I was not in the habit of doing, giving a list of the English operas that might have been included. I remember mentioning Vaughan Williams’ Hugh the Drover and Sir John in Love, Boughton’s Immortal Hour, The Queen of Cornwall and Alcestis, Delius’s Village Romeo and Juliet and others. To my surprise my letter was published and it had quite a response. I heard for the first time from Rutland Boughton and a letter came from Penzance from a Mr. William Lloyd saying that he had just had a wonderful success with a new opera called Iernin written by himself and his son George, which they were bringing to London, at the Lyceum Theatre when he hoped I would come to see it, and if so he would be pleased to meet me after the performance. I was surprised to find the theatre so full. I think Frank Howes, the music critic who had a cottage in Cornwall must have done a lot to promote the cause of Iernin. I had a long chat with William Lloyd during which George came to collect the full score from which he had been conducting. I was introduced to him, though he did not remember ever having met me when years later we came to meet each other. I tried to follow their fortunes and went to see their next opera The Serf at Covent Garden. After that I lost touch.
The next I heard of George was that he had joined the Navy, as I did, but had been seriously wounded, as never happened to me.
At the premiere of my opera, Avon I happened to find myself sitting next to Christie of
Glyndebourne, who told me that he had offered George the chance of joining the staff at Glyndebourne in order to learn the ins and outs of an opera production, but that he had refused.
The next I heard of George was that he had been offered the chance of writing an opera for the Carl Rosa but what came of this I never heard.
Not long after this I gathered that George was no longer an opera composer but had turned to symphonies with some success. At last I met him again, for the second time, though he could not remember the first. It was a meeting of the London Cornish, and I was delivering the third Trelawney Lecture on “The Musical Spell of Cornwall”. Afterwards we had quite a long conversation together and we were able to get to know each other as never before. In the lecture I had said that Cornish composers tended to write opera because they had the Cornish “guise-dance” in their blood. He told me that although he now wrote symphonies, he still thought of them as operas.
My next association with George Lloyd was when I heard him broadcast his “Desert Island Discs”. He alluded to his troubles in the Navy. He had pulled himself out of his troubles by sheer will-power and determination. One could not help admiring his display of sheer courage though he did not specify the exact form it took. He mentioned that at one time he seemed to be “black-balled” (I presume because his scores were rejected) but now all that was changed and everything was accepted.
In this way I seemed to be always coming close to my fellow Cornish composers but never intimate. He came to my 90th Birthday Concert, as I was told later, but I did not see him there. I hope there may be opportunities of meeting him in the future.