Joyce Stone

WHEN JOYCE Newman’s parents found out that their daughter was to marry the famous Jewish bandleader Lew Stone in 1937, it was not the fact that he was Jewish that disturbed them, but that he was in show business!

Their daughter had already told them what was happening in Germany, so this came as no surprise to them.

While travelling to that country with her then fiancé in the mid-1930’s, they had picked up a teenage hitchhiker and they asked him what he thought of Hitler. His reply was that his parents were in work for the first time since World War One. He then looked carefully around the deserted lake in the middle of a forest before adding quietly, “But I do not like the way they treat the Jews”.

Having first spoken to Lew at her 21st birthday party at the Monseigneur Night Club in Piccadilly, where his band was playing, Joyce was later to joke about why he married her. Lew had told her that he would like to take her out, but this would not be possible because he was too busy with music to copy. She said: “I can do that”. When he explained that what he meant was transposing the music for the other instruments in the band, she replied “Well I am an LRAM double gold medallist!”

The privileged country girl from Gloucestershire was not the least bit interested in horses, hunting or being a debutante, but instead loved London and its night life and contemporary music scene.

Her father had told her that she could stay in London if she earned her own living, which she did, by teaching the piano. On one occasion, arriving at the home of the Sebag-Montefiores to give her pupil a lesson, she was greeted by a stern-faced butler who said: “Not today Miss Newman– it’s Yom Kippur!”

In the antisemitic climate of the late 1930s, she was not afraid to say that she had married a Jew.

She was a member of the Unity Theatre – performing with such celebrated stars as Alfie Bass and Bill Rowbottom (later to change his name to Owen) – where the Fascist dictators were regularly lampooned in the period leading up to the Second World War. During this time she was involved with the People’s Convention and the Women’s Parliament– as well as organising the administrative side of Lew’s bandwork.

Joyce was a staunch supporter of Israel and after Lew’s death in 1969, she became a JNF benefactor, later endowing a concert hall in his name at the Ben Shemon Youth Village, which she visited whenever possible.

She was also considered an authority on the 1930s big band scene and was consulted regularly – notably in connection with Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven programmes about Al Bowlly and the Radio 2 series The Bands that Mattered, which featured a double episode about Lew Stone.

Joyce had happily sacrificed her own potential career as a concert pianist, for Lew. She would remark, however, that she had forgotten more about music than Lew would ever know, but then conceded that he had more music in his little finger than she had in her whole body.

Joyce was a well known figure in South West London (Roehampton and East Sheen) where she lived as a widow before moving to a care home in her native Gloucestershire 18 months prior to her death.

Joyce and Lew had no children, but she is survived by four nephews and a niece and their children.