Beresford King-smith
Guiding spirit of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for more than half a century
BERESFORD KING-SMITH, who has died aged 90, was for more than 50 years a larger-than-life presence with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, serving as concert manager, administrator, acting chief executive and archivist; he also designed the orchestra’s first logo and wrote the official history, Crescendo!, which was published in 1995 to mark its 75th anniversary.
King-smith – a bearded Father Christmaslike figure who often wore a comforting cardigan and had a bulging satchel under his arm – was calm and unflappable. He needed to be. When Louis Frémaux and Arthur Baker, the CBSO’S chief conductor and general manager respectively, departed abruptly one weekend in April 1978, it fell to King-smith to pick up the pieces.
He and George Jonas, who headed the council of management, brought in Erich Schmid to hold the baton, while the arrival of Ed Smith as general manager five months later led to the appointment of a young Simon Rattle as music director in 1980. Over the next 18 years King-smith often drove Rattle, who did not drive, from concert to concert, and he came to know the charismatic conductor well.
To many music lovers in the Midlands and beyond King-smith was, after Rattle, the public face of the CBSO, giving talks about its work to clubs and societies. He recalled that after becoming archivist in 1993 he was given a document entitled “Birmingham and its Civic Managers 1928”. It included a series of headings that began “schools, finance” and ended with “sewers, mental defectives, cemeteries, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra”. As he said in Nicholas Kenyon’s biography of Rattle: “So we’ve moved up a notch since then.”
Arthur Beresford King-smith was born in Keynsham, near Bath, on June 10 1931, the younger of two sons of Philip King-smith and Rosemary (née Boucher); he was a cousin of Dick King-smith, author of The Sheep Pig, which was made into the film Babe (1995).
He was educated at St Peter’s School, Weston-super-mare, where Roald Dahl had been a pupil, and Sherborne School, singing in the chapel choir each day. After National Service with the Royal Artillery in Gibraltar he started a degree at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but dropped out and joined the family business, Golden Valley Paper Mills, in Bitton, South Gloucestershire.
Meanwhile, he was becoming involved in local music groups, and in 1955 was the founding conductor of Bath Cantata Group, booking soloists such as Janet Baker, Alfred Deller and John Shirley-quirk to appear with them. In 1964 he joined the CBSO, where he was responsible for the practical details of the orchestra’s concerts, ranging from setting up music stands and organising refreshments to ferrying soloists around the Midlands and further afield.
In 1968 he was on the orchestra’s tour of eastern Europe when Hugo Rignold, the conductor, was briefly arrested by Soviet border guards on suspicion of spying after they had performed in Czechoslovakia at the time of the Prague Spring uprising. Four years later he negotiated with the Yugoslav authorities when some of the players were detained during another tour, and in 1973 he helped to start the CBSO chorus directed by Gordon Clinton.
King-smith, who was subsequently appointed deputy general manager and later deputy chief executive, took early retirement in 1993 to complete his history of the orchestra. He also became honorary archivist, remaining in that unpaid role until January 2014, by which time he had completed 50 years with the orchestra. A genial man who always had time for a chat, he was of assistance to this newspaper’s obituary writers on many occasions.
Away from his day job he was a committed singer, conductor and composer, including at Sutton Coldfield United Reformed Church, where he had worshipped since 1994. He had a strong faith, wrote two Christian musicals, and was involved in the founding of the Christian African Relief Trust, which distributes food and clothes to areas of need in Africa.
He had a strong interest in early music, especially the works of JS Bach, and from 1988 to 2004 was chairman of the Midlands Early Music Forum, which puts on regular one-day workshops. His other performing groups included Merrie Madrigall, a semi-professional group of costumed singers that featured on Songs of Praise in July 1990; Quadro, a small instrumental group; and the Holborne Consort of Recorders, where he was known as “Uncle Beresford”.
In retirement he took on another chamber choir, the Circle Singers of Royal Leamington Spa, which provided fresh impetus for his composing. In 2006 the Sutton Coldfield Choral Society gave the first performance of his Psalm Symphony, a work that incorporates the traditional calls of the Jewish shofar, or horn, and in 2019 he returned to the Bath Cantata Group to hear them perform that work.
Beresford King-smith married Margaret (Margot) Morrison, who had been a violinist in the National Youth Orchestra, in 1960, and set some of her Christian poetry to music. She died in 1985 and in 1991 he married Kate Lucas, who died in 2017. He had no children.
Beresford King-smith, born June 10 1931, died September 28 2021