The death of an old friend is not the easiest thing to write about.
Friendships come about through two people discovering they shared that ‘something’ called a common interest, writes DON FRAMPTON.
Mine with John Davis who died on October 27 at the ripe old age of 92 was not something tangible but quite intangible. It was music.
The world of music probably holds something for 99 per cent of people. Our shared interest was classical music and just one classical composer in particular, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius who also lived to a ripe old age and died in 1957 aged 91. The music of Sibelius touched something inside of both of us. Just what that ‘something’ was – is– is well nigh impossible to define.
John was brought up in a musical home. His mother was a piano tutor and father an organist. He was home taught music and played the organ.
John’s first introduction to the music of Sibelius was some 80 years ago, his first record – on 78rpm – a piece called The Karelia Suite by Sibelius. When we first met we compared notes. My first Sibelius LP record was his Second Symphony, nearly 65 years ago. That conversation lasted he and I for some 20 years.
In the mid 1940s John did his National Service in the Royal Navy and years afterwards he liked to claim he gave some 32,000 people permission to drive a car on the public highway – he was a driving test examiner.
When he moved to Newton Abbot he became a founder member of Torbay Gramophone Society that later became Torbay Recorded Music Society where ultimately he was elected chairman and then president. He was the founder of The Torbay Music Weekend, a UK-wide gathering of music lovers who came to listen and share music.
Between these two commitments is where the depth and breadth of his knowledge and love of classical music came into its own. He made music come that much more alive when he would talk on the subject he loved, ‘The Composer and his music’.
As a self-taught musicologist he was known to and worked with many English conductors and those working in the field of music .
There was nothing he liked better than to take groups of classical music lovers to hear orchestras around England and Europe. In one of a series of trips he took them as far as the USSR travelling via Prague to hear the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra on the way.
For the last 20 years the highlight of his year was when he travelled to Finland for the annual Lahti Sibelius Society festival.
He ‘sponsored’ organ pipes for both the Symphony Hall organ in Birmingham and the Sibelius Hall organ in Lahti, Finland.
In 2014 John was made president of the newly founded international ‘Sibelius One’ Society dedicated to extending the world wide appreciation and understanding of the music of Sibelius
Despite his musical commitments he enjoyed family life with his wife, Christine and their children Julia and Edward plus their four grandchildren and he always found time to offer an immediate welcoming smile to both strangers and friends.
I am sure that John and his musical life will long be remembered and played while his contribution to the understanding and appreciation of classical music by so many people will stay with them. He was quite an extra-ordinary, ordinary man.