Couple who spent 67 years bringing music to the people of Walsall
In 1948, young Trevor Matthews slipped into the prefects room at Queen Mary Grammar School, and turned the wireless on.
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Trevor, now 93, was surrounded by music from the time he was born. As a youngster growing up in Willenhall, one of Trevor's earliest memories was of lying in bed while his mother Bessie gave evening piano lessons downstairs.
Trevor's grandfather Steve was an accomplished violinist, so it was perhaps natural that his father Norman would follow in his footsteps from an early age.
"My dad used to tell me how, as a child, his dad would watch and listen to him practice on the piano, and sometimes he would join in on the violin. And if he made a mistake, my grandad Steve would whack him over the head with his bow. People were very strict disciplinarians in those days."
Steve, who worked as a miner, led the choir at Lichfield Road Methodist Church, at New Invention. And by the time he was 14, Norman was the regular organist.
Trevor produces a picture of the choir, taken in 1913: Steve is pictured bottom left, while a teenage Norman is on the right. What no-one would have envisaged at the time is that Norman would still be playing the organ in church - by this time All Saints' Church in Darlaston - at the time of his death in 1975. It is hard to comprehend how many choristers must have passed through the ranks over the 60-odd years that followed his debut on the organ.
The appearance on the BBC's Light Programme - the forerunner of todays Radio 1 and 2 - was perhaps the pinnacle of Norman's musical career, and came at the suggestion of well-known composer and musician Joseph Engleman.
"My dad knew him, he lived at Little Aston, and I think there was a bit of collusion between them," says Trevor, who now lives in Claverley. "He asked dad for the scores, and said 'you ought to get this played on the radio,' so my dad sent in the score of a waltz he had written, called Scintillation.
"It was played by the BBC Midland Light Orchestra. I don't think my dad heard it at the time. It was in the daytime, and he was a teacher. Taylor's, the music shop in Walsall, recorded it off the radio, so the family could hear it later."
Trevor reckons his father probably began writing music in the late 1920s, but his first move into public entertainment came when he formed the Orpheus Light Orchestra in 1934.
