Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton (1921 - 2008)

Born 23 May 1921 in St Christopher, Eton College, Buckinghamshire, England

Ancestors

Died 25 Apr 2008 at age 86 in Barnet General Hospital

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Biography

Lyttelton, Humphrey Richard Adeane [Humph] (1921–2008), jazz musician and broadcaster, was born on 23 May 1921 at St Christopher, Eton College, Buckinghamshire, the only son of the Hon. George William Lyttelton (1883–1962), schoolmaster, and his wife, Pamela Marie, née Adeane (1889–1975), a keen amateur musician. He had four sisters. One of his distant relatives, Humphrey Littleton, had been hung, drawn, and quartered for his role in the Gunpowder Plot. His maternal grandfather, Charles Adeane, had been lord lieutenant of Cambridgeshire while his paternal grandfather, the eighth Viscount Cobham, according to Lyttelton, ‘owned half of Worcestershire’. Among his relatives was the politician Oliver Lyttelton, Lord Chandos.

Lyttelton was educated at Sunningdale preparatory school and Eton College. As a boy, he considered following in the steps of his father, described as ‘a great oak tree of a man who had delightfully little in common with most people's idea of a schoolmaster’ (The Times, 28 April 2008). A plan for him to work with an uncle in the City came to nothing and he was sent to spend eighteen months at the steel mill in Port Talbot to see if he had the makings of an industrialist. He did not, and the experience turned him into a lifelong left-winger. Then the Second World War came and he joined the Grenadier Guards; he once danced with the thirteen-year-old Princess Margaret at a ball at Windsor Castle. He had already fallen in love with jazz, initially playing the harmonica and then graduating to trumpet in a band at school in which the future writer and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy played the drums. He acquired his first trumpet in Charing Cross Road when visiting London with his mother to watch the annual Eton–Harrow cricket match. He took the instrument with him during his war service, even at the landing on the beach at Salerno where he went ashore carrying a pistol in one hand and his trumpet in the other. On VE-day he played Roll Out the Barrel standing on the back of a handcart that was pulled to Buckingham Palace. He had also developed a strong interest in art and on demobilization enrolled at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts as well as joining a traditional jazz band, the Dixielanders, a fairly rough and ready aggregation led by the pianist George Webb which played at a pub in Bexley, Kent. At the same time, he drew cartoons for the Daily Mail, and supplied story lines for the popular strip, ‘Trog’, drawn by his friend and fellow jazz musician, Wally Fawkes.

In 1949, Lyttelton, who was also a good clarinet player, formed his own band which earned considerable success playing traditional jazz mainly in the 100 Club in a basement in Oxford Street. At the Nice jazz festival, he was delighted to learn that in referring to him, his hero, Louis Armstrong, had said, ‘That boy's comin' on’. The idea of an old Etonian leading a group playing the music of New Orleans was a great novelty and its sessions at the 100 Club attracted a smart audience as well as jazz fans; however, he recalled appearing at debutante dances at which the mothers would ask the musicians to play quietly, so the horn men put in mutes and turned to face the wall. In the following years, he moved into mainstream swing, stopping short of ‘bop’ modern jazz but dropping the banjo and adding a fine saxophonist, Bruce Turner, to the horror of diehard enthusiasts for his original New Orleans style; when Turner soloed at one concert in Birmingham traditionalists stood up waving a banner inscribed, ‘Go Home Dirty Bopper’. ‘People accused us of going commercial when we wore uniforms for the first time rather than moth-eaten turtle-necked sweaters’, Lyttelton recalled. Meanwhile, on 19 August 1948, he married Patricia Mary (Pat) Braithwaite (b. 1929), daughter of John Wellesley Gaskell, engineer, and stepdaughter of John W. C. Braithwaite. They had one daughter, Henrietta (b. 1949), but the marriage was dissolved in 1952, and on 1 November the same year he married (Elizabeth) Jill Richardson (1933–2006), daughter of Albert Edward Richardson, civil servant. They had two sons, Stephen (b. 1955) and David (b. 1958), and a daughter, Georgina (b. 1963).

Lyttelton's band's records did well, and in 1956 its version of a simple riff tune, Bad Penny Blues, produced by Joe Meek, became the first jazz record to get into the Top Twenty. The same year Humphrey Lyttelton and his band were chosen to support Louis Armstrong and his All Stars at a series of concerts in London. In the late 1950s the band expanded with the presence of three top-rate saxophonists, Tony Coe, Jimmy Skidmore, and Joe Temperley. It incorporated Caribbean rhythms and was joined by visiting American stars, including the blues singer Jimmy Rushing and the trumpeter Buck Clayton, with whom Lyttelton had a strong friendship and whose style influenced his playing. As well as his trumpet work (always with his eyes closed) and his leadership of a series of top-class bands, Lyttelton was a prolific composer with more than 200 tunes to his credit. As one of Britain's best-known jazz musicians, he performed all over the country and abroad; his Who's Who entry listed jazz festival appearances at ‘Nice, Bracknell, Zurich, Camden, Montreux, Newcastle, Warsaw, Edinburgh, and Glasgow’. He also founded his own record label, Calligraph, and his own music publishers, Humph Music.

Lyttelton gained a national audience for his BBC Radio 2 programme, The Best of Jazz, which became a Monday night fixture for forty years from 1967 and on which, as well as playing an eclectic range of music, he honed his skills as a broadcaster, erudite and wryly amusing at the same time, constructing programmes built around often quite arcane themes in which he took a special delight. He had also presented a shorter-lived television series, Jazz 625 (1964–6), which featured the best visiting American musicians. In 1972 his skill as a broadcaster led to his becoming chairman of the long-running radio quiz game, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, in which his deadpan but sharp wit and perfect timing marked him out as a true original presiding over a seemingly anarchic cast of top comedians whom he set ‘silly things to do’ in what was billed as ‘an antidote to quiz games’. His own contribution was peerless in the role of a somewhat absent-minded schoolmaster innocently reading out smutty double entendres about the ever-absent, mythical, and beauteous hostess, Samantha, guiding the rest of the cast through an impossibly arcane game dubbed ‘Mornington Crescent’ whose rules were, he claimed, a secret he kept to himself, and periodically exclaiming ‘you couldn't make it up, could you?’

Lyttelton's laconic, urbane style hid great industry. He appeared to be the epitome of the classic upper-class Englishman who moved seamlessly through life never taking anything too seriously and charming all around him, but he was a deeply committed craftsman, always open to new ideas and fired by enthusiasm. As the poet and jazz enthusiast Philip Larkin put it, ‘One musn't be misled by the amiable, bumbling persona … He is a toughly intelligent man moving confidently in any kind of surroundings from Windsor Castle to Birdland [the New York jazz club]’. As he approached his seventy-fifth birthday, a member of his band described him as ‘the world's oldest teenager’ (The Observer, 19 May 1996). He himself wrote that, when he was shopping in a supermarket at Barnet, he looked as though he was 120, a ‘stooping, shuffling human wreck clearly wishing he was dead’, but when he was on the bandstand he felt as if he were still forty (Last Chorus, 4).

‘Humph’, as he was known, was a man of many parts. As well as leading his band for six decades, broadcasting, and cartooning, he was an accomplished calligrapher (presiding over the Society for Italic Handwriting), a restaurant critic for Harper & Queen, an occasional do-it-yourself enthusiast, and an excellent writer as shown in his many newspaper articles, two books on the history of jazz, The Best of Jazz (1978) and The Best of Jazz 2 (1981), and six volumes of memoirs, notably It Just Occurred to Me (2006) and Last Chorus (published posthumously in 2008). Despite his fame, he was an intensely private man. He designed his house in Arkley, Hertfordshire, with blank walls on the outside and the windows opening onto an internal courtyard. He hated using the telephone and kept his number ex-directory, changing it if anybody else discovered it—though he relented in later life after acquiring a mobile handset which he guarded less closely. Given his dislike of the telephone, he communicated by post, including letters to hire and fire members of his band. He also developed a striking ability to read backwards at high speed and delighted in inappropriate juxtapositions of letters read one way and then the other.

Lyttelton received honorary degrees from Warwick, Loughborough, Durham, Hertfordshire, and De Montfort universities as well as Keele, where he was an honorary professor of music, and was given the Walpole medal of excellence in 2007. He was honoured with lifetime achievement awards in jazz in 2000 and 2001 and with a Sony gold award in 1993 for his broadcasting. He was reported to have been offered a knighthood twice but to have turned it down on principle. On 21 April 2008 he was operated on at Barnet General Hospital for an acute abdominal aortic aneurysm. Awaiting the operation, he told his son, Stephen: ‘This is a win-win situation for me. If the operation goes to plan, then I will wake up with you all around me. If it doesn't then I will know no different but you will all be OK’ (Last Chorus, foreword). He died four days later. Announcing his death, his website carried his last thought: ‘As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation’.

Jonathan Fenby

Sources

H. Lyttelton, I play as I please (1954) · H. Lyttelton, Second chorus (1958) · H. Lyttelton, Take it from the top (1975) · H. Lyttelton, Why no Beethoven? (1984) · H. Lyttelton, It just occurred to me (2006) · H. Lyttelton, Last chorus: an autobiographical medley (2008) · The Independent (26 April 2008); (28 April 2008) · The Times (28 April 2008) · Daily Telegraph (28 April 2008) · The Guardian (28 April 2008) · www.humphreylyttelton.com, accessed on 11 Aug 2011 · WW (2008) · Burke, Peerage · personal knowledge (2012) · private information (2012) · b. cert. · m. certs. · d. cert.

Archives

FILM

BFINA, current affairs, documentary, and light entertainment footage

SOUND

BL NSA, current affairs, documentary, interview, light entertainment, and performance recordings

Likenesses

photographs, 1948–2007, Getty Images, London · photographs, 1949–2007, Rex Features, London · H. Hammond, bromide print, 1954, NPG · W. Hanlon, double portrait, photographs, 1954 (with Jill Lyttelton), NPG · W. Hanlon, photograph, 1954, NPG · Triad Studios, cream-toned vintage press print, 1954, NPG [see illus.] · Triad Studios, cream-toned vintage press prints, 1954, NPG · photographs, 1955–2005, PA Photos, London · J. Hedgecoe, photograph, 1956, repro. in J. Hedgecoe, Portraits (2000) · photographs, 1956–2005, BBC · S. Samuels, bromide print, 1968–70, NPG · J. Kennington, bromide fibre print, 1987, NPG · obituary photographs · photographs, Camera Press, London · photographs, repro. in Independent Magazine (2007)

Wealth at death

£1,157,714: probate, 28 April 2009, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

Sources

• Notes in private Brother's Keeper 7 database held by ancestors hotmail.co.uk

• Dictionary of National Biography
• https://www.bigredbook.info/humphrey_lyttelton.html
• Indexed at This Is Your Life
• Indexed at BBC Radio: Radio 4 programmes