The Glasshouse

Danyel Gilgan, author of The Life Before: My Grandfather’s Life Uncovered, explains how his grandfather Wilf Franks influenced Michael Tippett and how the composer’s music is connected to the North East of England.

Sir Michael Tippett’s career spanned many decades, and his creative output continued to evolve over the many long years of his compositional career. Never one to settle into a set style or a finished version of himself, Tippett continued to be a musical innovator throughout his life, creating experimental works such as The Rose Lake when he was an old man in his late eighties. But despite his long and illustrious career, Tippett is perhaps best remembered for one composition, his 1941 oratorio, A Child of Our Time. The work was composed during the traumatic years of the Second World War and is widely understood to be inspired by the case of Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish refugee who assassinated a Nazi official. Grynszpan’s actions led to Kristallnacht, a night of brutal aggression against the Jewish population in Germany. It is probable that Tippett uncovered the story of Grynszpan in an article by Leon Trotsky. Grynszpan, the child of our time, became emblematic of the dispossessed and of those seeking sanctuary. Ending up in a Gestapo cell we know nothing of his ultimate fate.

Tippett’s powerful integration of African American spirituals with more traditional influences such as Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Passions, was an instant hit with war weary concert goers when it premiered in March 1944. Tippett wrote the libretto himself, and it encapsulated numerous elements including his rage at the horrors of war and his empathy with the victims of human oppression such as the Jewish holocaust and racist lynchings in the southern United States. Also woven into the libretto are references to the composer’s personal life and his struggle to come to terms with his own sexuality, along with his evolving political outlook as he moved away from the radical Marxist views of his younger self towards the Pacifist views with which he was latterly known by way of Carl Jung. Tippett was searching for musical motifs that would express the oppression of universal humanity. Initially looking at Hebrew liturgy, he found them in the African American spiritual and its yearning for emancipation.

The story of Tippett’s musical development and indeed the origins of A Child of Our Time itself, have strong connections to the Northeast of England and more specifically the ironstone mining village of Boosbeck in East Cleveland which lies part way between Middlesbrough and the North Yorkshire coast. How was it that such an eminent composer came to be associated with this seemingly obscure location? And how did such a place come to leave an indelible mark on a giant of the British musical establishment and become a part of his best-known work?

The answer lies in Tippett’s compassion for those whom society has oppressed and forgotten, in his association with an aristocratic arts patron of the district and perhaps inevitably with what the composer himself described as his ‘deepest, most shattering experience of falling in love’.

During the early part of the twentieth century, Middlesbrough had grown from nothing into one of the foremost iron and steel manufacturing centers for the British Empire and the town’s ship building and bridge making enterprises spanned the world. The blast furnaces that produced the town’s steel were fed by the iron ore which was mined in the villages of East Cleveland.

In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression began to bite, the demand for steel collapsed, the furnaces of Middlesbrough went cold and their need for iron ore dried up. It was a disaster for the region and as the local industry shut down unemployment hit 90% and many residents were close to starvation.

Aristocratic landowner James Pennyman of Ormesby Hall in Middlesbrough and an eccentric friend, Rolf Gardiner, decided to assist the miners in their hour of need. Gardiner, who was the father of conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, had got to know the Cleveland miners through his passion for traditional English folk dance and he was a great admirer of their local sword dance tradition. Pennyman secured some rough local land for the miners to grow crops and keep livestock and Gardiner helped him established a series of workcamps at which the miners, assisted by student helpers, cultivated the land by day and participated in musical and cultural events by night. To help with the cultural side of things, Gardiner brought with him two friends from Germany, the choral singing teacher Georg Gotsch and renowned puppeteer Harro Siegal.

The initial workcamp in spring of 1932 was a great success and a second camp was planned for September of the same year. But there was a problem, Gardiner and his friends were not available so Pennyman’s wife Ruth, who was keen to ensure the creative aspects of the camp continued, stepped in to assist with the cultural and musical events. David Ayerst, a journalist with the Manchester Guardian, had helped with the initial project and he suggested that his friend, a young composer called Michael Tippett, be recruited as musical director for the next camp. And so it was that Tippett came to be involved with the miners. He produced two operettas with the villagers including an adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and later his own version of the Robin Hood story, on both occasions incorporating local choirs, villagers as actors along with an orchestra largely consisting of students and friends of Ruth Pennyman.

It was through his adventures with the mining community of Boosbeck that Tippett met and fell in love with Wilfred Franks, an artist and craftsman who had trained at the famous Bauhaus art school in Germany, and who had latterly helped establish a furniture making scheme with the miners. Throughout much of 1930s the two young men would be involved in a tumultuous on-off love affair that would ultimately end in heartbreak for the composer. Tippett later wrote that his ‘shattering experience’ of falling in love with Wilf ‘was a major factor underlying the discovery of my own individual musical voice’.

Throughout the 1930s Tippett and Ruth Pennyman corresponded and she became one of several older women to whom the young composer looked for support and guidance at this time in his life. A number of letters he sent to her during this period are held at the Teesside Archives in Middlesbrough. They are very revealing of Tippett’s thinking and include a range of subjects such as the Marxist political views they shared, conversations about Tippett’s work, the Shakspearian productions which Pennyman would stage at Ormesby Hall, as well as some emotional letters about his relationship with Franks. In one letter he appeals to her for funds to help ‘Anarchist – Bolshevik – Leninists’ fighting in the civil war in Spain. While it is unknown how Pennyman responded to the request, we do know that she was instrumental in bringing Basque refugee children to the northeast of England. Another letter provides a window into his turbulent relationship with Franks, ‘We had a bad row (trying my hardest not to let him know how much I think his London lot are worthless!)’

Tippett and Franks collaborated on numerous creative projects during the 1930s both with the miners in Cleveland and in London where the two men worked with Margaret Barr’s Dance Drama Group, a radical left-wing contemporary dance group; Wilf as a dancer and Tippett as composer. But as the 1930s drew to a close, Franks fell in love with a female dancer from the group leaving Tippett out in the cold. The break-up of the relationship precipitated a major personal crisis for the composer, and he turned to Jungian dream therapy to help come to terms with the shattering end of the love affair as he questioned his own sexuality. Tippett wrote:

I went into the dream therapy anticipating that what would come out was the possibility of marriage. But then I began to realise half-way through that something else was being said. That came in an extraordinary dream… in which I was contrite and Wilf forgiving, and a mystic marriage took place. This I rejected. I turned away for some reason…from Wilf’s shining face, knowing that love had to go deeper.

For Tippett, this dream signified a release from the past and acceptance of his true self going forward. ‘This was the turning point in the therapy’, he wrote. So important was this image of reconciliation and self-acceptance that it was included in the libretto of A Child of Our Time, as Tippett explained: ‘The image of the shining face later appeared transformed in the alto aria in Part 3 of A Child of Our Time’. In the midnight of the century these dreams, words and notes brought light into the darkness.

However, it was not just romance that was burned into Tippett’s consciousness during his visits to the northeast of England. The poverty he experienced also left its mark on the composer and influenced his compassionate feelings towards outcast people of the world. In his 1991 autobiography he wrote the following:

Sitting on the kerbside, we lunched on bread, cheese and apples. The apple cores we threw away were immediately seized by some small children nearby: these poor mites had sores on their faces and were obviously half-starved; coming from the well-fed South, I found it mortifying. The sight of these underprivileged, malnourished northern children haunted me for years afterwards.