Novello’s songs have endured through time
KEEP The Home Fires Burning and We’ll Gather Lilacs are songs that still receive an occasional airing on Radio Two.
The composer was David Ivor Davies, better known as Ivor Novello who was born on January 15 1893 in Cardiff, but spend his formative years in Gloucester.
His mother was the singer Dame Clara Novello Davies, his father David Davies was a tax collector and in 1902 Ivor was sent to the Bastion House Music Preparatory School in London Road at the top of Wotton Pitch in the city.
Lodgings were found for him at the home of Mrs Arthur Sly, a friend of his mum’s, in Elmbridge Road.
An anecdotal history of Ivor’s stay in Gloucester was published in The Citizen in 1954.
In this Mr H H Jordan, a city postman, recalled how he used to deliver letters to the young Ivor Novello, which arrived from his mother in London almost every day.
Ivor’s mum had other friends in Gloucester who lived at Longford House, which had its own private theatre.
It was here at the age of 10 he first trod the boards in a juvenile amateur production of Sheridan’s The School fo Scandal.
Ivor played the leading role of Sir Peter Teazle and on the opening night the young lady playing Lady Teazle forgot her lines and dried. Ivor apparently responded by roaring with laughter, so contagiously that the audience joined in (which must have done wonders for Lady Teazle’s confidence.)
At the age of 11, Novello left Gloucester to sing at Magdalen College, Oxford.
He returned five years later to study organ and harmony with Dr Herbert Brewer, the organist at Gloucester Cathedral.
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Brewer once commented that Ivor Novello was the laziest pupil he ever had.
However, natural lack of application.
By the end of the First World War Novello was a huge star thanks to the success of the song Keep The Home Fires Burning.
This captured the spirit of the time, earned Novello £15,000 (about £285,000 in today’s values) and made him a hot property.
Talented and handsome, he wrote and starred in smash hit musicals for the West End such as The Dancing Years, played romantic lead roles on stage and entertained the rich and famous at his flat above London’s Strand Theatre, which was renamed the Novello Theatre in his honour in December 2005.
He also starred in many films. These included The Call Of The Blood, The Lodger (which probably sounds racier than it was), A Symphony In Two Flats and a trio that began with The Rat, continued with The Triumph Of The Rat and concluded with The Return Of The Rat.
These masterpieces of the cinematic art are all but forgotten today, but Ivor Novello is perhaps best remembered in the songwriting award that bears his name.
Novello died on March 6, 1951. ability overcame