sign in sign up
<<
Home , At the Drop of a Hat, Beyond the Fringe, Donald Swann, Flanders and Swann, Max Adrian, Michael Flanders

Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 1 di 13

Home Newspaper Cuttings

This page contains cuttings relating to from a number of newspapers. The text is copywrite its respective owner. To get back to the article list, click on the 'year' button on the left.

1957

At the Drop of a Hat - Theatre Notice - , 00-01-57

1975

Michael Flanders - Obituary - The Times, 00-00-75

1993

Time for a chorus of glorious mud - The column - The Daily Telegraph, 19- 06-93

1994

Donald Swann dies aged 70 - The Times, 25-03-94 - Obituary - The Daily Telegraph, 25-03-94 Obituary: Donald Swann - The Independent, 25-03-94 Donald Swann; Obituary - The Times, 25-03-94 revival gives witty Swann songs a new voice - An article about the revival of the musical revue - The Sunday Telegraph, 27-03-94 Joined at the hippo - From 'The Highwayman' column in The Times - 09-04-94 Swann songs - One of Swann's last ventures - The Daily Telegraph, 25-05-94 Wills - The Independent, 14-06-94 Latest Wills - The Times, 29-06-94 Follow me, follow down to the hollow - A review of 'Under their Hats', a Flanders and Swann retrospective show. The Times, 10-08-94 Under Their Hats - Arts news (excerpt), as above - The Sunday Telegraph, 14-08-94 Swann song - The Peterborough column - The Daily Telegraph, 26-08-94

2000

Alexander H. Cohen - Obituary of the American Producer of Hat - The Times, 24-4-00

FORTUNE THEATRE - ""

The Times, , January 1957

It does something to explain the continued popularity of their two-man revue that Mr. and Mr. Donald Swann did not mark the fact of yesterday evening's being its first anniversary in the West End, till they had gone right through the show, ensuring its success, like that of any previous show during the run, entirely on its own merits. They made no concession to the festive occasion till, a second encore was asked for after the statutory 19 items. Then indeed Mr. Flanders, in his wheeled chair became a grandmother claiming angrily to be 104 years old, with Mr. Swann at the piano telling him that he had overcounted. Otherwise for both of them it was business as usual: business - highly unusual in itself - as they have been doing it for the past 12 months, with Mr. Swann's piano as the only accessory to the exercise of their joint inventiveness and wit. Each of them, by being and remaining himself, offsets the other beatitifully. We http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 2 di 13

continue looking from Mr. Flander's side of the stage to Mr. Swann's as persistently as Mr. Flanders himself, as the Wimbledon umpire, looks from the invisible left-hand court to the invisible right-hand one. And this match is a good deal liveiler than that umpire will admit his to be.

back to the top

Mr. Michael Flanders

The Times (London), 1975 Obituary

Michael Flanders, the actor and lyric-writer, who has died at the age of 53, was long familiar on the London stage, particularly in the two-man entertainment with Donald Swann where he described himself as "the big one with the beard who writes all the words and does most of the talking" (both of them, he said, "for want of a better word", sang). Since a severe attack of Poliomyelitis while serving in the RNVR during 1943 he had been confined permanently to a wheelchair. Born in London, in March, 1922 and educated at and Christ Church, Oxford, (where he read History), he directed and acted for University societies and began as a professional at the Oxford Playhouse in l941 as Valentine in You Never Can Tell . Later he served as an able seaman in a destroyer on convoys to Russia and Malta, and after his ship was torpedoed during the African landings as an officer in Coastal Forces. Now, he contracted polio; at last, when out of hospital, he became a writer, and later a broadcaster. Donald Swann, a light composer and accompanist, had been with Flanders at Westminster (they put on a revue there in 1940) and the pair started a professional collaboration with material for various intimate , particularly for three devised by - Penny Plain , (St. Martin's, 1951), to which, among other things, they contributed "Surly Girls" with decor by Ronald Searle, and "Prehistoric Complaint"; Airs on a Shoestring (Royal Court, 1953) for which they were the principal writers (and in which sang " Excelsior" and the company joined in "Guide To Britten "); and Fresh Airs (, 1956) where again, most of the work was their own. Presently - and this was the zenith of their association - they became performers themselves. On New Year's Eve, 1956, they put on a new show At The Drop of a Hat , described as an " after-dinner farrago", and modestly-presented and wittily filled out; it opened on the bare stage of the little New Lindsey Theatre at Notting Hill Gate but went on at once to the West End and a run of 759 performances. It was then that London heard "Tried bv the Centre Court", "The Hippopotamus" ("Mud, mud, glorious mud"), and "The Honeysuckle and Bindweed", "Misalliance", and other songs that enabled Flanders and Swann to hold a theatre on their own. They would sustain the entertainment, in various forms and in many places. Thus, they played, for example, throughout the United States (New York, 1959) and in Australia and New Zealand (1964); Flanders was married in New York to an American girl, Claudia Davis. The show developed into its second programme At The Drop of Another Hat in 1963; this had two London scenes - at the Haymarket and the Globe - and from it came such things as "", "Armadillo Idyll", and what a critic called the celebration of old brass bedsteads in any normal English pond. Flanders, in his difficult circumstances, kept an unchallenged warmth and urbanity. During his career he made innumerable broadcasts of all kinds on radio and television; at one stage he was chairman of The Brains Trust. He wrote the libretti of two operas; translated (with ) Stravinskv's The Soldier's Tale - and in 1962 appeared as The Storyteller in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle at the Aldwych, London. In 1964 he received the OBE.

back to the top

Time for a chorus of glorious mud

The Daily Telegraph, 19th June 1993 The Peterborough column By Quentin Letts

DEATH stares Donald Swann in the eye. Swann, composer, pianist and former partner of the late Michael Flanders, has been struck by cancer. With typical self-effacement he has http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 3 di 13

decided to go public with his condition. He tells the story well, so well that one curses the disease that has put this peaceful, thoughtful man on a life expectancy of weeks. 'It is rather haunting,' admits Swann, in the Sixties half of one of the best-known comic turns in the world. 'The idea that you do not know how much time is left gives life a new intensity, so I have a feeling that, as well as sleeping and resting a lot, I am also racing around.' Swann, 69, first noticed something was wrong last year on a trip to Russia, where he had terrible backache. Tests found cancer of the prostate gland, spine and pancreas. He describes his battle since then in a coda to a new edition of his autobiography, Swann's Way, to be published later this month by Arthur James. There came, first, a spell in a hospice, where one day he performed a concert with one of the nursing staff. Within minutes everyone was joining in a chorus of 'Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud'. Slowly he learned to face up to his disease, and to 'riding downhill' to the next world. Despite the sensation of 'letting go, letting go', he has already lived beyond his doctors' prediction of three months. He felt well enough to travel to the tiny Greek island of Kasos. At the airport he used a wheelchair, just like his old partner Flanders. Swann recalls: 'I thought 'from this position he wrote all the lyrics which enabled me to pay for this holiday'. It heartened me to think that again he had touched my life. Once more, Flanders, I tip my cap to you'

back to the top

Donald Swann dies aged 70

The Times, London, 25th March 1994 Front page

Donald Swann, the comedy songwriter and performer, has died, aged 70. Swann, who died in Trinity Hospice, Clapham, two years after cancer was diagnosed, became a household name in the 1950s through his partnership with Michael Flanders.

back to the top

Donald Swann

He could play the fool at the drop of a hat - Composer whose famous partnership with Michael Flanders put the melody into mud, mud glorious mud The Daily Telegraph, 25th March 1994 Obituary

DONALD SWANN, the composer and entertainer who has died aged 70, was the musical and comedy partner of the late Michael Flanders; in their revues they epitomised English nonsense humour in the good-natured tradition of Punch. Flanders's lyrics - whether about London omnibuses, gasmen or animals - were usually satirical but never bitter or heavy-handed. Swann's sprightly melodies, which he played with an admirable touch on the piano, were larded with musical jokes. The Hippopotamus Song, with its chorus 'Mud, mud, glorious mud', was their most celebrated number and was translated into 18 languages; Swann himself sometimes sang the chorus in Russian. Two of their revues - At the Drop of a Hat (from 1957) and At the Drop of Another Hat (from 1963) - enjoyed long runs in the West End and New York and toured around the world. Flanders's confinement to a wheelchair meant that the whole performance was delivered from a sitting position; there were no special effects, and nothing but Swann's piano and a lamp-stand for props. The entertainment rested on the songs, Flanders's monologues and the comic rapport between the pair. Swann appeared as the boyish subordinate who would listen with lively interest while his partner conversed with the audience, and then occasionally go 'slightly berserk' as he tried to hog the stage with a turn at the piano. 'It is an astonishing entertainment,' commented the late W A Darlington in The Daily Telegraph. 'When the curtain rises, your natural reaction is to wonder how they will keep things going for the whole evening. But once their insidious brand of lunacy gets hold of you, you believe they might easily keep things going for a week if they wanted.' Swann was not only musically inventive and dexterous but also accomplished the rare feat of listening in an entertaining fashion. 'Sometimes,' Darlington noted, 'he will sit quiet with quick darts of head and eyes which http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 4 di 13

remind me of a big bird on a perch. Sometimes he will give a sudden plunge of restrained ecstasy as one of his partner's shafts strikes home. Sometimes he merely looks interested, but he never goes out of the picture or fails to contribute to it.' Though Swann collaborated with a number of other artistes, the music he wrote without Flanders never enjoyed the same popular acclaim. Many of his compositions reflected both his Christian beliefs and his desire to modernise church music. These included an opera, Perelandra (after C S Lewis's allegorical story Festival Matins) and three books of new carols. But Swann's serious work was criticised for lacking 'musical personality' and 'initiative'. His sincerity was not in doubt, though. Swann was a lively participant in Church affairs, and in 1964 delivered a sermon in St Paul's Cathedral in which he claimed that and song could cleanse the soul from the dreariness of ordinary living. He also participated in religious programmes on radio and television. Towards the end of his life he joined the Society of Friends. Donald Ibrahim Swann was born at Llanelli on Sept 30, 1923. The family history was exotic. Donald's great-grandfather, Alfred Trout Swan, a draper from Lincolnshire, emigrated to Russia in 1840 and married the daughter of the horologer to the Tsars. At some point the Swans acquired a second 'n' in their name. The family, though resolutely English, was deeply involved in St Petersburg musical circles. Alfred's son became a manager in the Russo-American India Rubber company; his son, Herbert (Donald's father), was a medical student at the time of the Russian Revolution and married a Muslim nurse from Ashkahabad. Recruited into the Red Army, at the end of 1919 he escaped with his wife to Britain, where he found a job as an assistant to a doctor in Llanelli. He then acquired a practice in the Walworth Road in London, so young Donald was raised in the Elephant and Castle. His mother died when he was 11, but he could remember her singing Russian gipsy songs and accompanying herself on the guitar, while his father played the piano. The boy learned both instruments. He was educated at Westminster, where he met Michael Flanders and first performed in a revue with him; he also studied piano and composition as a special student at the Royal College of Music. Swann went on to read Russian and Modern Greek at Christ Church, Oxford - though his university career was interrupted by the Second World War. In 1942 he registered as a and joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit. Later he transferred to the Friends' Relief Service and did three years refugee work in Greece and the Middle East. After the war he returned to Christ Church and took part in revues and dramatic productions. Shortly before coming down in 1948 he had a song accepted by the director and producer Laurier Lister. Thus encouraged, he decided to try to earn a living as a composer and accompanist. Michael Flanders was then freelancing as a lyric writer, and together they began to contribute songs to London revues - among them Airs on a Shoestring (1953) and Fresh Airs (1956), which won an Ivor Novello award. Swann did not work exclusively with Flanders, though. He wrote the music for the revue Pay The Piper (1954) and collaborated with Philip Guard for the musical play Wild Thyme (1955). His first joint performance with Flanders was in a show at Whistler's Ballroom in Cheyne Walk in 1950. At the Drop of a Hat opened at the small New Lindsey Theatre Club in 1956, and Flanders and Swann were amazed at its success. At first they shunned the offer of transferring to the larger , being more concerned with their burgeoning careers in broadcasting and composing. But after 'some 48 to 72 hours of no sleep' they accepted. At The Drop Of A Hat opened at the Fortune in January 1957 and ran for two years. It then transferred briefly to the Festival (under the title At The Drop Of A Kilt) before opening in October 1959 in New York, where it ran for seven months. It also toured America from 1960 to 1961, and Britain and Ireland from 1962 to 1963. At The Drop Of Another Hat opened at the Haymarket in 1963 and later toured Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong before returning to the Globe in 1965. After taking the show to New York from 1966 to 1967 Flanders and Swann ended their stage partnership - although they remained friends until Flanders's death in 1975. Even during the Hat years Swann never excluded other ventures. In 1958 he set music to some poems by Sebastian Shaw, and performed and recorded them with Shaw in London Sketches. He later composed music to the poems of other writers including J R R Tolkien, C Day Lewis, and . Under the pseudonym Hilda Tablet he wrote satirical music for the poet for BBC Radio. In addition to church music, his other work included a number of songs and operas written in collaboration with Arthur Scholey. His concert entertainments after 1967 included An Evening in Crete, Between The Bars, A Late Night, Swann With Topping and Swann Con Moto. Swann was a quondam president of the Fellowship Party, a pacifist political organisation, and belonged to a number of other humanitarian and pacifist societies. http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 5 di 13

He published an autobiography, Swann's Way, in 1991. He married, in 1955 (dissolved 1983), Janet Oxborrow; they had two daughters. In 1992, already ill with cancer (though the disease was still undiagnosed), he revisited Russia. Early in 1993 he went to the Greek island of Kasos. Confined in a wheelchair at the airport, he remembered his old friend Flanders. 'From this position,' Swann reflected, 'he wrote all the lyrics which enabled me to pay for this holiday. It heartened me,' he concluded, 'to think that again he had touched my life. Once more, Flanders, I tip my cap to you.' PATRIOTIC PREJUDICE by Flanders and Swann And crossing the Channel one cannot say much For the French or the Spanish, the Danish or Dutch; The Germans are Germans, the are Red And the Greeks and Italians eat garlic in bed. The English are moral, the English are good And clever and modest and misunderstood And all the world over each nation's the same - They've simply no notion of Playing the Game; They argue with Umpires, they cheer when they've won, And they practice beforehand, which ruins the fun The English, the English, the English are best So up with the English and down with the rest It's not that they're wicked or naturally bad: It's knowing they're foreign that makes them so mad

back to the top

Obituary: Donald Swann

The Indenpendent, 25th March 1994 By

Donald Ibrahim Swann, composer and entertainer: born Llanelli 30 September 1923; married 1955 Janet Oxborrow (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1983), 1993 Alison Smith; died London 23 March 1994. DONALD SWANN, composer of Youth of the Heart, a bestiary of ditties about armadilloes, gnus, rhinos and hippos as well as songs about gasmen, London buses, even honeysuckle and bindweed, will no longer be seen, bespectacled and touchingly manic, at the keyboard as he was before, after and during the world-wide fame of the various Drop of a Hat revues, with his bearded, wheelchair partner Michael Flanders. Swann was born in 1923 at Llanelli in Wales, of a father who spoke English always with a strong Russian accent and a mother who came from Transcaspia, speaking very little English at all. Donald's great- grandfather was a draper rejoicing in the name of Alfred Trout Swan (the second 'n' comes and goes in the family like a Cheshire cat). He left Lincolnshire to settle in St Petersburg in 1840 and it was not until the Revolution that Donald's father decided to return to the land of his ancestors. Herbert was a had married a Muslim nurse called Naguime and brought her to England; he qualified again in the UK and by the time Donald's sister Marion was two Herbert was a glorified locum tenens in Wales. When Donald was three Herbert Swann bought a practice in the Walworth Road, Elephant and Castle, and there the two children grew up, Donald at first going to Dulwich College Preparatory School and then to Westminster School as a King's Scholar. The family was hard up and it was some time before a good upright piano was installed above the surgery at No 92. Herbert and his brothers were all keen one-piano-four-hands duettists (a Russian speciality) and they had a large collection of the classics and the Russian repertoire which Donald and his family used to play; and myself, too, for I had become friends with Donald at the Prep during our last year there, 1935. By this time Naguime had died and English became the language of the household. Although Donald never spoke to me about his mother, I think he felt her loss very deeply; his sister was at school, his father was busy with his patients, and Ada, the wall-eyed daily, was handy with the macaroni but not motherly. Donald Swann was assiduous in the classroom but wild in the playground, pitting himself in the 'break' against a line of boys before collapsing into protracted fits of giggling. His table manners were grotesquely awful. At the annual hobbies exhibition he showed manuscripts of little piano pieces penned in his spidery, almost unreadable writing - alas, it got worse over the years. A letter from him took longer to read than it took him to write. At this time Swann's musical interests were entirely classical with strong leanings towards Rachmaninov - he could give a nifty reading of the fearsome E flat minor Etude Tableau, http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 6 di 13

opus 39, also of pieces by Scriabin (Donald's uncle Alfred had written the first biography of this composer in the English language) and Nicolai Medtner (with whom the family was on visiting terms in his Golders Green exile). Swann would occasionally regale me with details of life at Westminster: how the Scholars had been punished because at a rehearsal for the Coronation they had spoonerised the cry of 'Vivat Regina'; of playing tennis with a certain Ustinov; of a politically minded already distributing socialist leaflets; of the young Von Ribbentrop putting the weight; of beach games with , and of his lessons as an external student at the Royal College of Music, studying piano with Angus Morrison and composition with Hugo Anson. During his later years at school he had come into contact with a boy 18 months his senior, a budding actor called Michael Flanders. After the Second World War started the boys were evacuated first to Lancing, in Sussex, and then to Exeter University, where Michael and Donald wrote a few funny songs together. The war took over before long. After a year at Oxford Swann had a tribunal, where he was registered as a conscientious objector; he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) and slogged away with the , whose thinking he found congenial even though his duties included operating a mortuary trolley, digging latrines, cleaning out operating theatres and even shaving the pubic hairs of high-ranking military personnel. Then came service in Egypt, Palestine and Greece. Swann fell in love with Greece, the people, the language and, above all, the music, which entered his soul and left there for the rest of his life those quirky rhythms and exotic turns of decoration and melody. One day, near the Albanian border, he flung his arms wide 'embracing the countryside around me which had been home to so many different races - Albanians, Greeks, Turks, Bulgars, Romanians, Vlachs - and exclaimed: 'What a beautiful thing it would be if this were all one country] Surely we are all one]' ' His remarks were taken down by a Greek soldier, he was branded as a corrupting influence and relieved of his post. He came home in 1946. Back at Oxford Swann added modern Greek to his Russian studies. Musically he had gone 'light' by now. He still listened, nostalgically perhaps, to pieces like Rachmaninov's Third Symphony, but a disastrous school performance of a Beethoven concerto, the early numbers with Flanders, and revues in the FAU had shown him the way his life was to go. 'Dreaming spires, my foot] I played the piano for Sandy Wilson's revues.' But for his songs he needed a writer, and fate saw to it that he met Michael Flanders again, the budding young actor now crippled by polio, stuck in a chair for life, denied his livelihood and even refused re-entry into his old college. At this stage both of them had several small irons in the fire; Flanders was working in radio, Swann was discovering and setting Betjeman and dishing up some numbers inspired by Greece. The impresario Laurier Lister accepted some of these for his revue Oranges and Lemons. This type of sophisticated revue was popular at the time and others followed: Penny Plain and The Lyric Revue in 1951 (the latter included one of Swann's best-known songs 'The Youth of the Heart', lyric by Sydney Carter), Airs on a Shoestring, Pay the Piper and Fresh Airs (1956). The stars of these shows were the likes of (some of whose lyrics Swann set), Max Adrian, Elizabeth Welch and Ian Wallace. Wallace had such a success with Flanders and Swann's 'The Hippopotamus' ('Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud . . .') that a bestiary evolved around him and his fruity bass-baritone voice: 'Elephant', 'Warthog', 'Whale' and 'Rhinoceros'. Recordings, song-publishing and performing rights began to provide a living. Up to this point the general public heard only others performing the Flanders-Swann material; but in private the pair had built up a performing technique, either demonstrating to the stage performers or doing turns at parties. Hitting the West End gave Swann ideas of expansion: 'I was going to write the next Oklahoma.' Maybe because Flanders had no taste for writing musicals, this never happened. But Swann tried, with various other writers. The centenary of the 1851 Exhibition gave birth to The Bright Arcade, but no backers were found for this delightful and ambitious score that included a massive multi- faceted aria sung by Jennifer Vyvyan at parties to great effect. 'Angels' were found, in the shape and bank balance of Joyce and Reggie Grenfell no less, for a fantasy called Wild Thyme, but it came and went during a summer heatwave in 1955. Similarly, a charming dream-piece written with Sydney Carter called Lucy and the Hunter also bit the dust. A romance that lasted longer than either was licensed in 1955, during the run of Thyme, when Swann married one of his favourite English roses, Janet Oxborrow, whom he had met at the Dartington Music Summer Schools. Swann came to help me run the Dartington summer sessions and one year Flanders came too and they performed a little cabaret one night to their largest audience yet. Their rapturous reception, plus the loan of our mailing list, led the pair to chance their arm at a little theatre in Notting Hill Gate, west London. They called their 'after-dinner farrago' At the Drop of a Hat. More rapture; and full houses. From the New Lindsey the show moved into the Fortune Theatre in the West End and stayed there for two years and a bit. The Royal Family came en masse, the Cabinet portfolio by portfolio; the pair were applauded, recorded and, eventually, transferred to New York, where the show took so well that the years lengthened and the tours spread http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 7 di 13

throughout the United States and Canada. At the Drop of Another Hat was equally popular and long-running at the Haymarket in London, in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, London again and the US again. The last Hat was dropped in New York on New Year's Day 1967, having begun to drop on the same day of 1956. Since 1991, anybody too young to have enjoyed the show has had a chance to catch up with the experience, since the Hats are available on three CDs and a video. Flanders resisted television until the show's very last night. The video was lost until recently, but one can now see as well as hear replays of this enchanting show. What made that enchantment? To talk about good lyrics and tunes, wit and imagination is to scratch the surface. Flanders was one of the great lyric writers of the century, Swann a genius of a tune-smith with the rare gift of writing memorable, warm melodies arranged with elegance and consummate craftsmanship. There is no suspicion of cliche except in conscious parody. Nothing in Swann is contrived; the music flows naturally, spontaneously. After much deliberation, Swann broke up the partnership. Long stays on long tours did not suit him or his way of life, and he felt that there were other things he wanted to write. Post-Hat he never enjoyed the same success but he composed a lot of music and performed it, alone or with partners, sometimes with a religious group, sometimes secular. He enjoyed performing and audiences. He turned to opera with Perelandra (CS Lewis), The Visitors (Tolstoy) and The Man With a Thousand Faces (Colin Wilson); there is a 'Te Deum' and a 'Requiem for the Living'; for the old Third Programme he had collaborated with Henry Reed in some delightful features about Hilda Tablet, a butch atonal composer. Except for the last named there is nothing in the music that would have frightened Mendelssohn or Sullivan; the Russian heritage is there but discernible more in the cut of the melodies than in the harmony. That is, until the last five years or so. I remember him ringing me up one day to say: 'My dear chap, I've written some dissonances, may I come round and play some new settings of Clare and Blake?' Sometimes I couldn't help reflecting that Swann's passionate and expert piano-playing - what a tenor thumb he had - seemed an integral part, not to mention his clear and telling non-singing voice, of the success of these non-Flanders compositions. Scoring was not one of his gifts and too often, it seemed to me, dramatic situations relied on pianistic tremolando effects (what Grainger called 'woggle-notes'). But there is much to explore and once the so-called 'classical' performers dare to sing Swann's music we shall see that he was a great deal more than 'the chap at the piano' in Drop of a Hat that Flanders, some of us felt, somewhat denigrated; although it must be admitted that Swann went along with this, giving the impression of a manic curate. I have never met anybody who knew Donald Swann who did not like him; his friends positively adored him. And he seemed to inspire love because love was what he was about; it came out in his life and his music. Like any (other) saint he could mildly infuriate from time to time with his absent-mindedness and with his seeming inability to see things, sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically. But one came to realise that these minor failings came through his single- mindedness or loyalty or the depressions that he suffered from. So were they failings? By the time that his daughters Rachel and Natasha were grown - ups he and his wife separated. Latterly he found deep happiness with Alison Smith, an art historian, who had beautifully illustrated his autobiography Swann's Way (1991), and it was a fearful blow to them that cancer interrupted their lives and put an end to one of the great melodists of our time. They were married at St Thomas's Hospital in August last year. Fortunately Swann latterly recorded nearly a hundred of his songs at home on his own Bluthner. Included are religious songs like the touching setting of Quoist's 'Lord, Why did you tell me to love all men, my brothers?'; settings of Tennyson, Hesse and Rossetti; a Tchaikovsky-like winner called 'Long Lonely Year' and 'Hat'; favourites like the tender 'Armadillo' and 'The Honeysuckle and the Bindweed (Misalliance)', 'Gnu' and many others, including some of the Tolkien settings. Swann singled out 'Bilbo's Last Song' as one of his own favourites: Day is ended, dim my eyes, but journey long before me lies . . . Shadows long before me lie, beneath the ever-bending sky, But islands lie behind the sun that I shall raise ere all is done; Lands there are to west of West, where night is quiet and sleep is rest. JOHN AMIS Donald Ibrahim Swann, composer and entertainer: born Llanelli 30 September 1923; married 1955 Janet Oxborrow (two daughters; marriage dissolved 1983), 1993 Alison Smith; died London 23 March 1994.

back to the top

Donald Swann http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 8 di 13

Obituary The Times, London, 25th March 1994

Donald Swann, composer and pianist, died on March 23 aged 70. He was born on September 30, 1923. DONALD SWANN was the piano-playing half of the double-act Flanders and Swann, which was formed in 1956 and which thrived for the next decade or so on a witty repertoire of songs and monologues about gnus, hippopotami, wart hogs and gasmen. On stage, Swann provided the perfect foil to the large and genial Michael Flanders, who was always sophisticated and professionally assured despite being confined to a wheelchair. Swann, on the other hand, played the willing stooge and the complete amateur peering through his National Health Service spectacles, revelling in his rare moments in the limelight and, for much of the time, being forced to listen in rapt silence to Flanders's ingenious monologues. The songs they performed ``I'm a Gnu,'' ``The Gas Man Cometh,'' ``The Hippopotamus Song,'' ``Have Some Madeira, M'Dear'' typified a certain strand of gently satirical English humour. Flanders's lyrics, though sharp, were never bitter or heavy-handed, Swann's sprightly tunes were larded with musical jokes. They needed no other props than a standard lamp and a grand piano. ``Everything in the programme is as well made as a piece of carpentry, and this includes the ensemble balance between the two partners, '' wrote The Times's drama critic of their first musical revue, At the Drop of a Hat, in 1957, ``Mr Swann, boyishly subordinate, uttering inaudible protests and hogging the stage whenever he gets a solo; Mr Flanders urbanely conversing with the audience and keeping his colleague (`the Enid Blyton of light music') firmly in his place.'' Although he always seemed to be the quintessential Englishman, Donald Ibrahim Swann was actually born in Llanelli to Russian parents who had fled the revolution, and grew up speaking Russian as his first language. The family moved to London when he was three. His father was a doctor, his mother a Muslim nurse from the Caucasus. Swann was hence exposed to exotically foreign musical influences from an early age. His mother sang Russian gypsy songs and accompanied herself on the guitar, a paternal uncle was a composer and a maternal uncle played the balalaika. Swann was never far from a piano and composed his first piece at the age of 13 on the day his mother died, as an antidote to grief. Like Flanders he was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. The two became friends and first collaborated when Swann was 14 on a school revue. Flanders recalled him then as ``small and beetly'', but said he was the best pianist in school. Swann went up to Christ Church in 1941 to read languages, but the war interrupted his studies. Although he had been brought up as an Anglican, he had by then become a Quaker and felt obliged to register as a conscientious objector. But he still saw an active war in the Friends Ambulance Unit, working with refugees in Greece and the Middle East. Afterwards he returned to Christ Church to read Russian and Modern Greek, and became president of the Oxford University Russian Club. Sandy Wilson and Kenneth Tynan both used him as a pianist in their undergraduate revues and, not long before graduating in 1948, he had a song accepted by the director Laurier Lister. Encouraged by this professional endorsement, he decided to set himself up as a freelance composer and accompanist. Flanders, who had by this time been stricken with polio and was confined to a wheelchair, was also freelancing as a lyric writer. The two teamed up again and contributed songs to revues and shows: Penny Plain (1951), Airs on a Shoestring (1953) and Fresh Airs (1956). Swann wrote the music for Pay the Piper (1954) and Wild Thyme (1955). The BBC played his music on both the Light and Third programmes. Up until this point, performances of their own comic songs had been limited to enthusiastically amateurish private shows for friends. Gradually news of their double-act spread, and they were encouraged to assemble the best parts into a two-hour revue for which they obtained a short booking at the small New Lindsey Theatre Club, opening on December 31, 1956. Against all their gloomy predictions, At the Drop of a Hat received ecstatic notices and by the end of the month had been forced to transfer to the more spacious Fortune Theatre. There it clocked up 808 performances and played to everyone including the royal family and , then Prime Minister, who went twice. The show ran for three years and transferred to the Edinburgh Festival in September 1959, where it was known as At the Drop of a Kilt, before crossing to New York. American audiences, when they first encountered the pair in 1959, hardly knew what to make of them: ``An over-age altar boy who is losing his hair,'' began the Herald Tribune's bewildered critic on Swann. ``Sometimes his head would fly higher than his hands while he was attacking the piano. In one number he began to cackle noticeably. After a while, he stopped everything to do a song entirely in Greek.'' But, despite the self-conscious Englishness of their humour, Flanders and Swann quickly won over American audiences in the same way they had the British, and after 215 performances on Broadway the revue went on the road for a coast-to-coast tour of America and Canada. They returned to the West End in 1963 with a sequel At the Drop of Another Hat which http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 9 di 13

successfully repeated the winning formula. This time, the show included an ominous song about nuclear explosives, ``Twenty Tons of TNT,'' which contrasted starkly with the overall geniality of their other offerings. Through all this Swann had continued to work on other material. In 1958 he performed London Sketches with Sebastian Shaw and in 1961 wrote an opera, with a libretto by an old Oxford friend, David Marsh, based on C.S.Lewis's Christian allegory Perelandra. By 1967 he had begun to feel artistically strait-jacketed by the Flanders and Swann format. Amicably enough in the circumstances, he and Flanders went their separate ways, Swann turning his attention full-time to more serious musical pursuits. He set poetry to music, including Greek narrative verse and works by Tolkien, Betjeman, Cecil Day Lewis and Sydney Carter. He was an active churchgoer and, at the 1975 meeting of the World Council of Churches in Nairobi, collaborated with Dr Donald Coggan, then Archbishop of Canterbury, to present a new musical version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. If none of these later works had the hummability or popularity of earlier tunes, then Swann expressed no regrets about moving on, and accepted the predictable requests for ``The Hippopotamus Song'' at concerts with great good humour. Last year his portrait, painted by Binny Mathews, took its place in the National Portrait Gallery. Swann's reflections on Christianity were contained in The Space Between the Bars (1968). Other books of his were Swann's Way Out (1975) and the autobiographical Swann's Way: A Life in Song (1991). Michael Flanders died in 1975. Swann was divorced from his first wife Janet in 1983. He had been suffering from cancer for the past two years and is survived by their two daughters, and by his second wife, Alison.

back to the top

Revue revival gives witty Swann songs a new voice

The Sunday Telegraph, 27th March 1994 By Christy Campbell

THE obituaries of Donald Swann, exemplar of the gentleman comic songster, last week evoked another age, one of white tie and tails, of elegance and wit, of cleverness. It all seemed so long ago. Surely no one was still interested in all that whimsical stuff about gnus and hippopotami? But, as alternative comics rise unchecked and crudity becomes essential, musical revue is back. Kit and the Widow, Flanders and Swann's spiritual heirs in the two-men-and-a- grand-piano tradition, have just finished a 10-week residency in London's West End. And last week the three women who comprise Fascinating Aida opened their act at the Lyric, Hammersmith, also offering an evening of comic songs. Wit is back and making money. 'Lyrics you can hear - with the entertainment in the words, not all that pop stuff,' is the secret of success according to Kit Hesketh-Harvey, half of Kit and the Widow, who was smitten by the gnu song as a schoolboy. Flanders and Swann classics concerned big-game animals, gasmen, iron bedsteads, libidinous Madeira-drinkers and omnibuses. They celebrated the eccentric furniture of English life. Kit and the Widow cover similar ground but make modern concessions with topics such as doubting bishops and Aids. Fascinating Aida are up to date too, their elegant veneer giving a gloss to adultery, political correctness and supermodels - 'any subject except paedophilia,' according to their lyricist, Dillie Keane. The point is that both acts present themselves in the tradition of revue. Kit and the Widow acknowledge their creative debt - last Thursday they interrupted their sell-out show with a moment's silence on the news of Swann's death. 'The teenagers in our audience looked terribly sad,' said Mr Hesketh-Harvey. At their height in 1959-60, Flanders and Swann were one of the biggest comedy acts in the world. At the Drop of a Hat ran in New York for more than 1,000 performances. Swann, the Welsh-born composer, and Flanders, the nautically bearded lyricist confined to a wheelchair by polio contracted during the war, seamlessly picked up the salon- entertainment tradition of Noel Coward. The entire Royal Family turned up one night in 1957 to sing the gnu song in chorus from the Dress Circle. The Queen Mother loved it. Then along came the satire boom and protest singers to make it all look terribly old- fashioned. The pair drifted apart. Flanders died in 1975. But the formula is working for Kit and the Widow. 'We can be as smutty and political as any so called alternative comedian,' says Mr Hesketh-Harvey. 'It's amazing what you can get away with when your material is delivered in a clipped accent.' The Widow (his nickname - his real name is Richard Sissons) exudes a bashful diffidence from the piano as the show progresses through witty dissections of government policy and http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 10 di 13

modern manners. Princess Margaret is a fan, just as she was of Flanders and Swann - and the pair are available for engagements at grand country-house weekends. They were booked for last year's Conservative Party Conference - but turned the offer down. 'We have an anti-fox- hunting song - 'Nobility and vermin at the ditch - and it's hard to know exactly which is which',' Mr Hesketh-Harvey says. 'But we've done that number at hunt balls and got way with it.' Flanders and Swann also delivered more than English whimsy. The night after their royal patronage, Harold Macmillan visited the show. He was observed to smoke a large cigar, sing along to the hippopotamus song with Lady Macmillan and laugh at an improvised lyric called There's a Hole in My Budget. The Prime Minister was applauded as he walked to his car. Times have changed. Kit and the Widow's and Fascinating Aida's material is rougher and their lyrics are tougher than the gentler wit of Flanders and Swann. But the charm is the same. 'And,' confides Mr Hesketh-Harvey, 'we're dead suave as well.'

back to the top

Joined at the hippo

The Times, London, 9th April, 1994 The Highwayman column

THE DEATH OF Donald Swann has revived memories of his wonderful stage partnership with Michael Flanders. I hope it will prompt Flanders's widow Claudia to finish a memoir of him which she has been working on for some time. Flanders died suddenly in 1975 at the age of 53. ``It's not a biography, more a series of snapshots and recollections of life with him,'' she says. ``We had some hilarious times travelling round the world with two daughters in tow.'' She has so far written about 40,000 to 50,000 words, but put it aside to concentrate on the charity Tripscope, which helps the disabled and the immobile elderly. It was set up in memory of Michael Flanders, who was confined to a wheelchair by polio. ``I need someone to give me Pounds 115,000 to finance the charity for the next year and let me finish the book,'' Mrs Flanders says. ``I'm only sorry Donald didn't live to read it. There was a very special companionship and understanding between them.''

back to the top

Swann songs

The Daily Telegraph, 25th May 1994 By Sarah Foot

BEFORE he died, Donald Swann was working on a show, Swann Among The Sirens. 'For Donald, Greece was a spirtual haven, an Ithaca for a Russo-English Odysseus. I hope this show will be a memorial to him,' says his wife. It will be staged at a London venue in the second half of September and the company must sell 300 seats at pounds 25 each before June 30. Details from The Cherub Company, Arches 5 & 6, Midland Road, London NW1 2AD (071-383 0947).

back to the top

Wills

The Independent, 14th June 1994

Mr Donald Ibrahim Swann, of London SW11, the composer and pianist (of the double-act Flanders and Swann), left estate valued at pounds 580,640 net. He left pounds 200 each to the Wandsworth Meeting of the Society of Friends, St Julian's, Coolham, West Sussex, the Share Community, Save the Children, and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, Alkmaar, Holland.

http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 11 di 13

back to the top

Latest wills

The Times, London, 29th June 1994

Mr Donald Ibrahim Swann, of London SW11, the composer and pianist and the piano- playing half of the double-act Flanders and Swann, left estate valued at Pounds 580,640 net. He left Pounds 200 each to the Wandsworth Meeting of the Society of Friends, Pendle Hill of Wallingford, Penna, USA, for general charitable purposes, St Julians, Coolham, West Sussex, the Share Community, Save the Children and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, Alkmaar, Holland.

back to the top

Follow me, follow down to the hollow

The Times, London, 10 August 1994 Theatre review by Kate Bassett

Under Their Hats, King's Head, N1 "MUD, mud, glorious mud." Many's the time I merrily fudged my way through those immortal lines when scarcely more than a burble in my baby bath. Not until now, naive as I am, did I know who was responsible: the musical double act of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. Taking off in the mid-1950s, they lightly entertained Broadway and West End audiences both satirising and epitomising postwar Britishness until they parted in 1965 as the wackier Beyond The Fringe comedy boom boomed. Under Their Hats is a retrospective revue of their numbers with comic monologues and the history of their careers intertwined. Performed by a black-tie cast of six, that distinguished old warhorse Moray Watson among them, the show pays tribute to the talent of this singing and piano-playing team. ``I'm a gnu. How do you do?'' runs one of their greatest hits. I have to say I ceased to find this sort of nonsense enormously amusing soon after casting my nappies aside. However, some of the audience attending press night, definitely not born yesterday, were guffawing and singing ``Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood'' (from the classic ``Hippopotamus Song'') as if they were having the time of their lives. I felt a certain sang-froid. You probably had to be there in the 1950s if you are fully to appreciate this calibre of humour restaged. Although they were more decorous than contemporary ``rock'n'roll'' stand-up, Flanders and Swann were not consistently sophisticated intellectually and artistically. Some of the numbers, like the ``Song Of The Weather'' are not worth preserving. The basic jokes, repeated choruses included, seem slow-moving today. On the other hand, Flanders's lyrics, hoarding great lists of adjectives, are crammed into Swann's helter-skelter pastiche scores. Such innocent fun can be heartening. The numbers get bogged down in insincerity when the cast put on their serious faces and sing about TNT. Louise Tomkins, required to play the dolly girl parts, looks as if she may break out in a simper. But overall this is a spry production with several zippy performers. Most notable are Duncan Wisbey and Stefan Bednarczyk (with a touch of Richard Stilgoe and an operatic voice): both dexterous pianists with acting ability, a fine sense of the silly and an assured stage charm. Meanwhile, Susie Blake makes a pleasing sloth singing upside down, and Watson is in fine fettle in his loopy monologue about man pitted against the olive.

back to the top

'Under Their Hats'

The Sunday Telegraph, 14th August 1994 The Arts (excerpt) By John Gross

http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 12 di 13

Under Their Hats, at the King's Head, Islington, is a musical tribute to Flanders and Swann, devised by Alan Strachan, which works at two levels. Some of the material (the song about House and Garden decor, for example) is perfectly of its period: the Fifties preserved in aspic. Some of it (Madeira, M'dear', the skit on ) still seems as fresh and funny as it once did. Either way - unless your taste has been hopelessly corrupted by alternative comedy - it offers a great deal of pleasure. The show sticks to the original songs and sketches, with a minimum of linking commentary. But it would obviously have been a mistake to have two actors impersonating Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. Instead, we get a team: four men and two women. Not all the performers are yet ready to audition at La Scala, but they are so likeable and good-humoured that you readily forgive them their odd squeaky notes and flat notes, and even non-notes. Moray Watson makes a particularly welcome appearance, and comes into his own in a masterly lecture on the mystique of Andorran olive-stuffing (so much more mystical than bullfighting, though not altogether dissimilar).

back to the top

Swann song

The Daily Telegraph, 26th August, 1994 In the Peterborough column By Quentin Letts

IT WAS the fate of poor Donald Swann, who died in March, to be remembered only for his amusing collaborations with Michael Flanders. He really wanted to be thought of as a serious composer. This will be made clear at a London theatre next month. The Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, is to hold a one-night tribute to Swann, performing some previously unheard Greek music he wrote towards the end of his days. 'In a sense he was just like Arthur Sullivan,' says the mighty Vi Marriott, one of the producers. Swann fell slightly in love with Greece during the war, when on Kassos. Miss Marriott, 74, adds: 'He wanted to be taken seriously, rather than just be remembered for Mud, Glorious Mud.' The show is called Swann Among the Sirens and includes - beware - a liberal amount of Greek folk music. LADY O'Cathain, ballsy director of the Barbican, was taking visitors around her realm. They passed the Barbican's resident hawk, which frightens off pigeons. 'So,' said one wit, 'which one is the hawk?

back to the top

American producer who took Beyond the Fringe to Broadway

Alexander H Cohen The Times, London 24th April 2000

Alexander H. Cohen, Broadway producer, was born on July 24, 1920. He died on April 22 aged 79

ALEXANDER H. COHEN achieved his greatest successes as the American producer of a series of small, intimate entertainments such as At the Drop of a Hat with Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, Beyond the Fringe with and , and An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May. On a different scale, he was responsible for a series of epic New York stage productions including the 1964 with Richard Burton, The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, and Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy with Geraldine Page, Michael Crawford and Lynn Redgrave. Broadway, however, will best remember him as the impresario who brought the Tony Awards to national television and invented the Nights of 100 Stars. Amid all this he also produced seemingly endless revues, starring the likes of Yves Montand, Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich. A colourful and prolific showman, Cohen was a product of the golden age of Broadway, when one man could afford to put on a play or a musical. His second production, Patrick Hamilton's Victorian thriller Angel Street, proved to be one of his biggest hits, running for 1,295 performances. It was later made into the film Gaslight with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. But, along with other theatrical producers, he found it increasingly difficult to draw a http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007 Flanders and Swann Online - Newspaper Cuttings Pagina 13 di 13

scream from his audience: "What TV has done is usurp our place," he told an interviewer. "If you spin your dial after 11pm, you will find five or six things that will scare you to death." Increasingly he found himself immersed in comedy and musicals. Cohen was quick to spot the New World's love affair with the British stage, and during the 1950s he was a regular visitor to London scouting for productions to import to New York. After his Flanders and Swann success of 1959, he transported the complete London Coliseum production of Aladdin, with its cast of 75, to Broadway. And in 1965 he cajoled the London County Council into parting with a supply of London street signs, which he erected on Broadway to publicise the Sherlock Holmes musical Baker Street. By this time he was producing shows on both sides of the Atlantic, having launched himself in the West End with The Doctor's Dilemma in 1963, a collaboration with the London production office of H. M. Tennent. He opened his own business in London six years later and soon had four shows running simultaneously. But Cohen was persistently involved in squabbles of one sort or another. He railed against the "atrocious manners" of London theatre critics who accepted two tickets but used only one, keeping the spare seat as a place to park their coats. And after Marlene Dietrich gave an interview in 1973 about his management of her television show, he issued a writ for libel. The Tony Awards began in New York in 1947, but when he took over as producer in 1967 Cohen expanded the format to include numbers from the best musical nominees and sold the concept to the ABC television network. The Tony Award broadcast often revolved around a theme such as the renaming of a theatre or a tribute to a Broadway composer. Cohen drove the operation for 20 years until a disagreement with the American Theatre Wing. He also produced other television extravaganzas, including the Emmy Awards. Alexander Cohen was educated at New York and Columbia Universities but dropped out in order to make some money. He began his career producing Ghost for Sale at Daly's Theatre, New York, in September 1941. It failed spectacularly. Nor was it his only flop: other expensive failures included Jerry Herman's Dear World with Angela Lansbury, and Richard Rogers's last musical, I Remember Mama. In 1998 Cohen took to the stage himself in a one-man revue called Star Billing at the Douglas Fairbanks Theatre, in which he reminisced with self-deprecating humour about his long and eventful career as well as offering pearls of wisdom for the future of the theatre. His last show, Noël Coward's Waiting in the Wings, starring Lauren Bacall and Rosemary Harris, is currently playing on Broadway. Cohen married Jocelyn Newmark in 1942. His second wife was Hildy Parks, whom he married in 1956. She survives him, as do their two sons and a daughter.

back to the top

http://www.uniurb.it/lingue/matdid/murray/2007 -08/Flanders%20and%20Swann%20Online%20 ... 05/12/2007