Almost all string players took employment in multiple arenas, although the jobs they obtained, the money they earned, and the challenges they faced were shaped significantly by class, gender, training, and location. In the 1870s and 1880s, the main performance jobs were in the “orchestras” (the word connoted ensembles of varied sizes, from large symphony orchestras to bands of just a handful of musicians) that serviced classical concerts, theater, opera, and the music hall. Most players gave lessons. Some high-level performers pursued chamber music and solo work, both in concerts and at private gatherings in wealthy homes. Further, as new forms of mass entertainment emerged in the ensuing decades, growth and diversification of jobs set in, bringing openings for string players in hotels, restaurants, cafés, department stores, seaside resorts, cinemas, and broadcasting or recording studios, as well as more opportunities in the concert world and music hall, the latter expanding into family entertainment through national networks of large palladiums. Closely bound up with technological innovation and the increased commercialization and democratization of leisure, these developments brought string players into wider, more frequent public earshot (and often view), extending violin culture’s reach within daily life.

Existing studies of professional players have focused chiefly on soloists, master teachers, and chamber musicians who enjoyed sustained public prominence. Most of these individuals, typically violinists, forged careers in the high-serious classical arena through concerts and recordings. A large number were men, some of whom wrote memoirs. Their stories have eclipsed the thousands of unknown, less celebrated workers, including viola players, double bass players, and a substantial number of women, who contributed considerably to violin culture’s solidification. Legions of them were employed in less highbrow music-making or operated in more mundane domains, and they are little represented in the historiography or in the source materials that subsequent generations chose to preserve. Building on established scholarship on the British music profession and its quests for the validation of “musician” as a socially respected métier, this chapter decenters high-profile success stories to provide glimpses of the more typical but largely invisible working lives of the critical mass. Women’s employment options and experiences are threaded through the discussion. They appear intermittently in the first two sections, which survey the types of work available and how livelihoods were made, but they are foregrounded in the third and final section, which discusses how women across the profession negotiated the social, economic, and institutional constraints embedded in the workplace.

Skills and Jobs

The broad employment palette required players to be familiar with, or to quickly learn, specific skills and conventions, some overlapping, others not, as Oscar Cremer’s guidebook of 1924, How to Become a Professional Violinist, published when the market was especially overcrowded, details.Footnote ¹ Cremer, whose 1911 census return places him in Streatham, London, as a thirty-five-year-old musician/violinist, was aiming at inexperienced hopefuls – probably from nonmusician families and without access to apprenticeship networks (his own German-born father was a language teacher) – and he foregrounds expectations for working in orchestras in a range of settings, from symphony concerts to silent cinema.Footnote ² At the time, theater, music-hall, and cinema engagements were sought after because of their ability to provide regular, if modest, wages that could defend against the vagaries of the freelance livelihood. But that work came with its own conventions, for which there was little formal preparation. A symphony orchestra training at a conservatoire had limited relevance. Max Jaffa (b. 1911), while studying at the GSM, got his first job – unpaid – in a London cinema (c. 1925), sitting at the back of the violins for five months: it was “a considerable education,” enabling him to learn the tricks of the trade for playing in a cinema orchestra and to get to know a lot of light music, such as the overture to Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld – the “kind of repertoire which never saw the light of day at the Guildhall.”Footnote ³

Pit work for “shows” required sustained mental alertness because of the myriad cuts and repeats in the parts, ad hoc directions during performance, and demands for fluent sight-reading, while the pace of music-hall and some cinema jobs demanded considerable stamina and concentration in what was often a tiny band. Theater, as Cremer explained, brought expectations for reading from manuscript parts and responding to all sorts of cues from the conductor. Music hall required an ability to play standards from memory (he named The Keel Row, Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, and Home, Sweet Home, among others), as well as skills in transposition and an understanding of other conventions. In a cinema band, strings normally played an octave below the leader and needed to be familiar with the logistics of playing to moving pictures. In the bigger cinemas, rolling screenings meant long hours, sometimes from 3 p.m. to 10:30 p.m., albeit with appointed rest times for the band. In all three settings, the quick-witted novice who could learn fast and fit in musically would likely succeed; Cramer’s book offered a roadmap.Footnote ⁴

Concert orchestra work required some of the same core skills, but Cremer set it apart for being about playing “‘the good stuff’ (as it is commonly called in the profession) well.”Footnote ⁵ To wit, an employable string player keenly observed dynamics and bowing, played evenly in quiet passages, and always used high-quality equipment, from a good instrument and bow, to good strings and resin (to avoid “that annoying ‘whistling’ effect”Footnote ⁶ engendered by poor accessories). As preparation, Cremer advised learning the first and second violin parts of the “more difficult symphonies” and other standard repertoire from Mozart to Tchaikovsky.Footnote ⁷ None of this advice could match the orchestral training that select students at the major conservatoires were receiving in the 1920s, but those players were a minority. Cremer advised joining a good amateur orchestra to flatten the learning curve.Footnote ⁸

Previous chapters have revealed much about the range of teaching positions that string players occupied, and the advantage, for an instructor’s professional credibility, of holding a diploma. But a qualification alone, while useful in gaining an appointment in a school, did not remove the need for knowing how to run the business side of a private practice. Cremer laid out several tips on “How to Get Pupils,” giving attention to how the teaching space, whether at home or in a rented studio, was appointed (good lighting and ventilation; piano; metronome; long mirror; one or two instruments on hand in case strings break during lessons) and how to publicize one’s services successfully. Advice ranged from when to advertise in local newspapers and music magazines (September, January), the need for good manners and a sociable persona (important with parents), and the value of developing reciprocal arrangements with a local music store (“put business in their way, and they will do the same for you”).Footnote ⁹

From the Edwardian era into the 1920s, a new strand of work for string players opened up in sectors of the modernizing catering and retail industries, where the commercial benefits of creating an atmosphere conducive to consumption were becoming clear. In department stores, managers aimed to use live music to encourage consumers to spend more time and money on the premises, developing loyalty to the emporium in the process. Relatedly, shopping became established as a fashionable leisure pursuit, especially among affluent middle-class women, for whom taking luncheon or tea in a socially respectable, female-gendered setting developed into a norm.Footnote ¹⁰ What better way, in such situations, to promote restful (profitable) lingering over food and drink than to place a small ensemble playing light-classical music in earshot?Footnote ¹¹ Stringed instruments were ideal for this purpose, because volume levels were low and timbres mellow, while the repertoire itself connoted accessible high culture. Many a string quartet or piano trio played in department-store eateries, but live music was sometimes also found in other parts of the premises. From 1912, the RCM-trained violinist Kathleen Rydings was in what was billed as an “orchestra” (actually a piano trio) that gave twice-daily prestigious-sounding “programmes” of light music in the tea lounge of Bobby’s in Eastbourne (the town’s high-end emporium) and also played for its fashion shows.Footnote ¹² Department-store employment had clear advantages for women players, thanks to the safety and social respectability associated with such daytime employment; it also gave ensembles more artistic autonomy than was routinely found in stage or cinema work.

Independent restaurants and large hotels offered similar employment. Cremer suggested that anyone familiar with the “picture show business” would find playing in such venues less taxing mentally, because of the pause between numbers.Footnote ¹³ In the mid 1920s, Jaffa worked nightly at the Station Hotel, Richmond (“with two ladies of the old school, a pianist and cellist”), and subsequently at one of the J. Lyons Corner Houses, multifloor eateries that peddled a luxury experience to Londoners on a budget.Footnote ¹⁴ The latter was coveted work, because the Lyons Band Office hired “a vast army” of top-notch players, expected high standards, and also booked players for hotels.Footnote ¹⁵ Performing a mix of light-classical items in small ensembles and solo turns, the musicians might play eight-hour sessions with just two half-hour breaks.Footnote ¹⁶ The music-making in the more lavish establishments developed notable reputations, not least through live broadcasts by the BBC, which brought sounds of strings and (often upcoming) string soloists into people’s homes, further embedding violin culture’s ubiquity into national consciousness through the 1920s. Solo careers were launched. Alfredo Campoli led and soloed with the Grill Room orchestra in Lyons’s Trocadero restaurant, the firm’s upscale, flagship location, where music accompanied dinner and, as the evening progressed, dancing.Footnote ¹⁷ Albert Sandler, who had likewise led at the “Troc,” directed the six-piece group (four strings, piano and organ) in the lounge of Park Lane Hotel, London, and also at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne.Footnote ¹⁸ Broadcasting provided free publicity for the band’s leader/soloist, who (according to Jaffa) did not receive a session fee,Footnote ¹⁹ as well as for the hotel, which probably attracted diners on account of its star-billed violinist.

Jaffa delineated typical dinner repertoire as “selections from favourite operas like Carmen or La Bohème and Gounod’s Faust,” but noted that diners had eclectic tastes, requesting anything from Handel’s Largo (from Xerxes) – a parlor classic – to Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs.Footnote ²⁰ At the luxurious Hotel Cecil on London’s Embankment in 1929, Belgian violinist Alphonse Du Clos’s six-member string and harp/organ ensemble played for both lunch and dinner, where the evening selections appear to have had a weightier cast (Schubert, Dvořák, even Debussy) than those earlier in the day (Sullivan, Svendsen, Chaminade).Footnote ²¹ At the opulent Frascati Restaurant in Oxford Street, programs were printed on the menus; the thirteen-piece orchestra’s three-hour dinner music ended at 9 p.m., at which point the group ceded to a ten-piece “high-class” ballroom-dance orchestra.Footnote ²² As this decade unfolded, popular social dance music, including jazz, offered competing modernity via brassier orchestrations, innovative rhythms, and loosening inhibitions on many hotel dance floors, with events often conveyed far and wide via broadcasting.Footnote ²³ Yet even here, string timbre was not entirely vanquished, with many bands highlighting a solo violinist (Henry Hall’s Gleneagles Hotel Band, Scotland, a good exampleFootnote ²⁴) – further evidence of how normalized violin culture had become.

Seaside and spa resorts brimmed seasonally with jobs and had done so since the 1890s, as the Orchestral Association Gazette makes clear. Moderate-sized orchestras (usually with small string sections, sometimes full wind and brass) and miscellaneous small ensembles performed on piers, often twice, even thrice, daily, providing much-needed employment for musicians from major inland cities who were prepared to relocate for the otherwise barren summer months.Footnote ²⁵ The rapid development of seaside towns in the late nineteenth century – a by-product of the railway age – and the soon popular one-day excursion provided many lower-middle and working-class people with affordable access to the coast. Well into the early twentieth century, resorts were enticing visitors with a range of outdoor and indoor entertainments, many of them musical and all calibrated according to the resort’s social character and adaptive to changing fashions.Footnote ²⁶ In upmarket destinations, concerts took place in purpose-built pavilions, as at Llandudno in North Wales. Extant programs of the Pier Company’s Full Season Orchestra (an ensemble of thirty-four, including seventeen strings) in 1928 reveal a mix of classical music: overtures, symphonic movements, and standalone works, spanning Beethoven and Wagner to Elgar and MacCunn, as well as instrumental showpieces, and occasional songs.Footnote ²⁷ Behind any seafront, too, lay additional opportunities for string players to augment their livings, such as occasional teaching of amateurs or (later on) hotel and department-store work. Stephen Banfield’s description of Bournemouth’s “musical glamour in the 1920s and ’30s” reveals ballroom dances at the Royal Bath Hotel (broadcast live) and “a trio, quartet, or more, playing for morning coffee, lunch and afternoon tea” at three local department stores.Footnote ²⁸

Since strings were at the core of cinema ensembles, the arrival of silent film requires further mention for its transformational impact on the workforce. Greta Kent (b. 1895), from a family of jobbing musicians, remembered the rage for cinema making “a tremendous difference” to employment options, especially once picture palaces in cities became larger and grander (“super cinemas”), screening films continuously across much of the day.Footnote ²⁹ Cinema ensemble work is widely considered to have been in its heyday in the 1920s.Footnote ³⁰ Yet, as Jon Burrows has argued, evidence suggests the replacement of lone pianists by bands became relatively widespread earlier, notably during the 1910s. Usually, ensembles were small: Burrows’s examples include the Golden Domes Picture Theatre in Camberwell, London, which comprised a piano, organ, two violins, cello, double bass, and clarinet.Footnote ³¹

Livelihoods

The possibility of working as a musician maintained its allure, persisting even at points in the 1910s and 1920s when the oversupply of string players, the downward pressure on their wages, and the rising cost of living created financial strain for much of the workforce. Presumably, the draw of making a living from an activity that had begun as a pastime and appeared to counter conventional, often humdrum, notions of work was compelling enough to offset the warnings that the career choice was ill-advised. In any event, by the 1920s strings were in greater demand than most other instruments except the piano, since the new cinema industry was generating jobs aplenty and the ongoing boom in wanting to learn to play a stringed instrument had created numerous opportunities for establishing a teaching connection.

In times when the official school-leaving age never rose higher than fourteen, many players got an early start, some even in childhood. Campoli recalled playing in his father’s cinema band in London while a boyFootnote ³² – the sort of valuable work experience that musicians’ children benefited from, as Chapter 4 noted. Youngsters often went uncompensated. Jaffa, playing in that London cinema in his teens, had done so without pay: “All young players have to start somewhere, and naturally music directors took advantage of us to fill out their little orchestras with students and youngsters,” he recollected.Footnote ³³ On the other hand, to judge from the scrapbooks of Gladys (Babs Vincent; “Little Babs”) Bowen (b. 1901?), who grew up in Birmingham, a young upcoming player might sometimes be remunerated modestly for playing solos in local concerts.Footnote ³⁴

For musicians of all ages, written and oral recommendation networks – of teachers, relatives, peers – were important for obtaining work. Violinist Vincent Howard, later a member of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, evidently owed getting a job at the new Lyceum Cinema in the Moldgreen district of Huddersfield (1922) – work for which some felt he lacked experience – to his teacher Arthur Kaye’s recommendation, Kaye’s testimonial painting Howard “honestly” as “one of the finest players in this locality.”Footnote ³⁵ Vacant orchestral seats, typically seasonal engagements at small regional theaters, were listed regularly in the major theatrical weekly The Era, where players could also advertise their availability. Auditions were not required for many everyday positions but were significant sifting mechanisms for the top symphony orchestras. During his RCM years, Eugene Goossens gained useful experience in West End hotel and theater orchestras before auditioning for the first violins of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra (1912) and commencing four years of what he later considered “invaluable … apprenticeship” under Henry Wood.Footnote ³⁶ Relatedly, while at the GSM, Jaffa worked a two-week trial before landing the leadership of the restaurant orchestra at the Piccadilly Hotel in central London (1927).Footnote ³⁷

Building a primary profile as a concert soloist – a topic Simon McVeigh has explored in some depthFootnote ³⁸ – involved distinctive steps and rites of passage. The trail would begin with a recital at a major London venue, the debutant playing culturally sanctioned sonatas and concertos. For violinists, the Mendelssohn and Bruch concertos were popular, “safe” choices; those of Beethoven and Brahms signaled significant artistic aspiration; while concertos by Paganini and Wieniawski indicated assumptions of technical prowess. If a critical success, the moment could lead to further engagements, including a concerto with a major orchestra, and could be especially productive if backed by the strong publicity provided by one of the new-breed booking agents. In addition, professional networks were crucial to getting started: Auer recommended his student Margery Bentwich to the agent Daniel Mayer, for whom she played in October 1907, receiving the trenchant advice to conquer her nervousness before “risking a London debut.” Mayer added that he thought “a provincial tour would be best [initially] and will see about concerts around London.” Months later (July 1908), she played Bach’s Double Violin Concerto with the teenage star Mischa Elman at the Queen’s Hall; her Bechstein Hall debut followed in November, to positive acclaim.Footnote ³⁹

Among accomplished women players, who had fewer career options than men, soloistic ambitions ran especially high. Yet the cold reality was that the path was competitive and economically challenging – often a struggle, as the problems faced by cellist Mabel Chaplin (b. 1870) illuminate well.Footnote ⁴⁰ Recitals seldom made a profit, and diversification was usually essential. Many promising women settled for building a reputation in a provincial town, developing a local teaching practice, and giving recitals in the vicinity. For those who succeeded with a high-profile career, chamber music was often pivotal. In the late nineteenth century, several proven, high-caliber musicians (male and, increasingly, female) formed and promoted their own chamber ensembles – a new development that combined well with solo concertizing and fitted with the economics and practicalities of the modernizing concert world and growing recording industry. This work, too, carried expectations for debuts at major concert venues, and from 1900 several successful ensembles, especially string quartets, emerged: the Wessely, Spencer Dyke, and Isabel McCullagh quartets, for instance.

For all that it may have looked glamorous from the outside, a string musician’s life was prone to long hours and a “tremendous amount of drudgery.”Footnote ⁴¹ The travails and fatigue of rail travel awaited both soloists and members of touring ensembles and orchestras, as well as string players and teachers in big cities who commuted from the suburbs. The burden of this aspect of the life is captured in the cellist’s hunched gait and the drab colors used in London Underground’s iconic advertising campaign of 1930 (Fig. 5.1). For those seeking seasonal theater or resort work, temporary relocation was a necessity. Greta Kent’s parents often took jobs in different locations simultaneously, the children traveling with their mother in the school holidays, otherwise remaining at home with grandparents.Footnote ⁴² A further difficulty for Kent was how the taint of the theater affected the family’s social standing; at her school in Luton (c. early 1900s), she and her sibling(s) were the only children with parents who “had anything to do with the theatre.” The other pupils “thought … we were wicked. They wouldn’t have anything to do with us at first.” Overall, the lifestyle was “not easy really. But then, if you like the life you put up with that.”Footnote ⁴³ Her comment is an apt reminder that, for many, despite the considerable difficulties, the deep satisfactions of making music for one’s living trumped alternatives.

Figure 5.1 London Underground poster by the artist Charles Pears, 1930.

© TfL from the London Transport Museum Collection.

The majority of players were modestly remunerated, with wage increases over time typically offset by rising living costs. Many never earned enough annually to surpass what a skilled artisan might make. Giving lessons was essential for almost everyone, if liable to be considered a time sink (“days gradually fill up with more pupils”Footnote ⁴⁴). For women, permanent teaching positions in girls’ schools, while secure – room and board was often gratis – were mostly poorly paid. According to the Englishwoman’s Year Book of 1899, “[t]he average music-teacher in the average private school” was “under-paid” and “over-worked,” while a job manual for girls a few years earlier warned that such employment tended to bring in around £25 p.a. or less (£50 p.a. was exceptional) – a meagre sum, akin to being in domestic service.Footnote ⁴⁵ Contrast earnings at the top of the educational ladder: violinists Alfred Gibson and Benno Hollander earned vastly higher sums for teaching at the GSM: in 1891, £303 and £311 p.a., respectively.Footnote ⁴⁶ Both men had busy performance careers, which would have generated much additional income for them. Acclaimed foreign soloists such as Willy Hess could exact more from educational institutions: his annual teaching fees at the RMCM (1893) were guaranteed at £500.Footnote ⁴⁷ Not all conservatoire teachers were so richly remunerated, and much depended on numbers of pupils. Fifteen years later, Arthur Catterall and Edith Robinson (also RMCM) were paid 7s. 6d. per hour to teach lessons, neither working more than six hours a week or earning more than £78 p.a.Footnote ⁴⁸

Orchestral earnings varied depending on ensemble type and status, the nature of the position (rank-and-file or principal), the periodicity of the work, and other factors including gender, to be examined later in this chapter. Many cinema musicians were paid less than theater musicians.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the symphony orchestras – famously, bastions of male employment – fees were better, but still modest:Footnote ⁵⁰ some string players were engaged for a season, while others were hired-in extras; also, the number of concerts per season could be small (as with the Philharmonic Society, London). According to an 1895 estimate, most musicians working in London concert (and theater) orchestras made under £150 p.a., which was rather more than a carpenter but considerably less than a station clerk.Footnote ⁵¹ The arrival of the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union (AMU) in 1893 – open to all players, including part-timers – had heralded attempts to improve working conditions and broker fairer wages for its membership. In 1921 it merged with the protectionist, London-based National Orchestral Association (NOA), also established in 1893 but limited to top-notch professional players,Footnote ⁵² to become the Musicians’ Union (MU). This trade unionism found some successes, especially when agreements with employers were reached;Footnote ⁵³ activities also contributed to broader consciousness-raising of musicians’ low wages. But the chronically fragmented workforce and the inability to achieve a “closed shop” were perennial problems, as John Williamson and Martin Cloonan explain.Footnote ⁵⁴ By no means everyone joined the AMU/MU. Moreover, members came and went, either being excluded for non-payment of fees or resigningFootnote ⁵⁵ – actions suggestive of hard times and the precarity of fluctuating incomes.

Players in the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra were paid annual salaries from 1896, but such enviable employment terms were not part of the London orchestra scene until much later.Footnote ⁵⁶ A watershed moment for some string players came in 1930, with the establishment of the 114-strong BBC Symphony Orchestra, which auditioned musicians for full-time jobs and saw the broadcaster become, in Williamson and Cloonan’s words, the “first employer to offer year-round contracts with a fixed number of hours, holiday provision, and a salary of £11 a week for rank-and-file members,” after negotiations with the MU.Footnote ⁵⁷ These were attractive conditions during the slump and, as we shall see, a handful of positions were given to women.

For most of the period and for most string players, a freelance, pieced-together existence obtained across many of the work settings discussed above. But how did such patchwork employment play out in terms of ordinary lived experience? Few diaries have survived, less still financial accounts, to address this question; there is also little source material documenting orchestra workers, especially women, or others in the underbelly of the profession. Mabel Chaplin’s diaries, which McVeigh discusses, give a rare sense of an aspirant solo/chamber musician’s life.Footnote ⁵⁸ Correspondingly, something of the texture of a fairly successful orchestral player’s working life – week on week, year on year – can be grasped from notebooks of viola player and violinist Herman Sutherland Bantock, who built a livelihood in the northwest of England.Footnote ⁵⁹ Bantock, cousin of the composer Granville Bantock, was born in Manchester in 1874. An accountant’s son, by 1885 he was learning the violin, diligently keeping a practice diary.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1890 he began lessons with Simon Speelman, a regular viola player in the Hallé Orchestra, soon to be on the RMCM’s professoriate and to become a member of the Brodsky Quartet.Footnote ⁶¹ It was a seven-year apprenticeship that surely led to getting the first of many seasonal engagements as a violinist in the Blackpool North Pier Orchestra (which Speelman conducted) in summer 1895, and to his batting and bowling for the band in a friendly cricket match with the Victoria Pier Orchestra, potentially reinforcing social bonds with his new coworkers.Footnote ⁶²

Over the ensuing years, Bantock’s income was sourced from a changing mix of jobs, as new opportunities presented themselves and he moved up the professional ladder. Early on, his work included theater, pantomime, pier, and winter garden orchestras, with occasional choral society and chamber concerts interspliced (he was second violinist in the Rimmer Quartet). During the 1910s – he was not conscripted in wartime – he played regularly with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras across the region during the season, at Blackpool in the summer, also picking up work in cinemas. The weekly schedule in winter was relentless. In January 1917 he played in Blackpool, Liverpool (four times), Seacombe, Wigan, Manchester (five times), Bootle, Bolton, Birmingham, and Burnley.Footnote ⁶³ He had a handful of pupils, but not a large teaching connection. In 1924 he added work with the BBC’s Liverpool studio.Footnote ⁶⁴ Meanwhile, the contracts Bantock signed with resort orchestras reveal a host of rules that musicians undertook to abide by: they included fines for arriving for a performance later than the specified time and the requirement to dress appropriately (no “peculiar costumes, tan boots, sand shoes”; hats to be provided by the company) and in specific colors (dark-blue serge suits; but “black tie” for evening concerts) for Scarborough Spa Orchestra players (1929); and no smoking in specified places for players at the Blackpool Pier (1925).Footnote ⁶⁵

Bantock’s account books also reveal some of the financial realities of an orchestral string player’s life. His earnings for 1904 (aged thirty) were just over £105, substantially below the threshold for middle-class comfort (£160 p.a.) and probably far less than his father would have hoped his son would earn.Footnote ⁶⁶ While others in this situation might have taken on more pupils, Bantock’s domestic setup (he lived with his parents) probably mitigated the need to seek additional income – at least until 1908, when his account books show new earnings from investment dividends. Since 1908 was the year his father died, this fresh income stream suggests Bantock was responding to a new need to support his mother and sisters, using inherited money to set up the fund. Within a few years, Bantock was making substantial sums from shares, so that his total income for 1922 equated roughly to an army officer’s pay.Footnote ⁶⁷ Further, these investments protected him from periods of rising living expenses and especially the impact of the slump in 1930. See Table 5.1.

Bantock was fortunate. He had capital to invest. For many male performers, the best strategy for overcoming the work’s low pay and the economically insecure lifestyle that went with it was to diversify their efforts through teaching or other means – for instance, by gaining proficiency on other instruments, developing skills in violin making/repairing, or becoming an examiner for local “grade” exams (work that increased one’s teaching credibility). In low-income brackets, a common solution was to hold down musical jobs together with nonmusical employment. This was entirely possible, since so much of a musician’s work was “done at night, whether he be a teacher, soloist, or orchestral musician.”Footnote ⁶⁹ By 1911, as Dave Russell’s census-led study shows, double-jobbing that combined casual piano-teaching with another occupation was rife, including in small working-class communities, for without relinquishing the “day job” a person could significantly raise earnings by giving a few sixpenny lessons locally each week.Footnote ⁷⁰ As with pianists, so with some violinists. Census returns for 1881 reveal men reporting two jobs, combining not only stringed-instrument teaching but also playing with such work as house carpenter, plasterer, master barber, cordwainer, or agricultural laborer. Glennie Barretta (b. 1908) – from Sheffield – recalled how her self-taught father had worked by day making cut-throat razors and played second violin at the Empire Theatre at night.Footnote ⁷¹ Ira Dawson from Barrow, who was called up in World War I, had been both tinsmith and violinist.Footnote ⁷²

In all, for most musicians across the 1870–1930 period, financial uncertainty was par for the course, even for established string players, which is why they valued seasonal contracts. Anxiety struck hard in the less well paid parts of the workforce or where individuals lacked the safety net of family wealth to cushion hard times. For Kent, family dinners of potato and onion stew (in the 1900s decade) were emblematic of how her theater-violinist father and mother had struggled. She mused:

In extreme situations, busking helped players avoid penury. When Marie Hall was a child and her father’s engagement at a Newcastle theater was terminated, she and other family members busked with him on the streets, but it produced negative memories that stayed with her.Footnote ⁷⁴ Some men self-reported as street or itinerant violinists to census enumerators, and unsighted violinists were regularly encountered on urban sidewalks.Footnote ⁷⁵ The parents of Salvation Army musician Richard Slater (1854–1939) had made him learn the violin as a child so that if he inherited the family’s predisposition to cataracts and became impecunious he might busk.Footnote ⁷⁶

Women in the Workplace

With hindsight, we can see that the most significant transformation in the string-playing workforce between 1870 and 1914 was the arrival of thousands of women who operated either locally or nationally as soloists, quartet players, teachers, and members of the ensembles that animated the growing leisure and entertainment industries. This change flowed from the initial take-up of stringed instruments among girls and women in the respectable classes, and from shifting social attitudes towards both the long-held unacceptability for respectable women to take paid work and the impropriety of any woman playing a stringed instrument in public.Footnote ⁷⁷ And yet, for all such advances in British musical life – made, as Paula Gillett has observed, “despite prevailing prejudices” towards women’s “intellectual and creative powers”Footnote ⁷⁸ – limitations persisted into the 1920s in terms of what women were able to achieve. Likewise, derogatory views on women string players’ abilities and their rights to work surfaced in some quarters, and challenges remained.Footnote ⁷⁹

Philip Bullock has noted the irony that, while Victorian and Edwardian liberal values emphasized the agency of the individual and supported women’s education and self-improvement, normative middle-class ideology still imposed “constraints” on how women’s lives played out in the public sphere.Footnote ⁸⁰ Marriage, especially, was a showstopper for many middle- and upper-class women string players. If “going out to work” had become understood as a useful training for a woman’s later adult life, a “distinctive – and extended – passage between puberty and marriage” (to quote Sally Mitchell), entering wedlock ushered in a return to the older expectations for domesticity and motherhood.Footnote ⁸¹ Two marriages of 1908 are indicative. Mary Rowe Lavin (b. 1877), the violin-playing daughter of a draper, former mayor, and JP in the small Cornish town of Penryn, attended the RAM as a fee-paying student between 1893 and 1895 and began teaching the violin, piano, and possibly other subjects (as a “governess”) at the private Royal Latin School, Buckingham, in 1899.Footnote ⁸² She left on marrying a local farmer.Footnote ⁸³ The 1911 census shows the couple living in a large house in Llandegai, Wales, with a one-year-old child and two servants; Mary is recorded without occupation and does not appear to have continued to teach. To have done so would have been to rub against the socioeconomic norms of middle-class masculinity, whereby the implication of a married woman earning money was that her husband was unable to support her financially.Footnote ⁸⁴ At the other end of the career spectrum sits former Brodsky and Ysaÿe student Nora Clench (b. 1867), who had seen considerable success as a soloist and quartet leader. She gave up her concert career when she married the artist Arthur Streeton, later moving to Australia.Footnote ⁸⁵

That said, change bubbled beneath the surface. Some men with professional careers proved supportive of working wives, especially those who had garnered reputations as solo or chamber violinists: examples include Beatrice Langley and Emily Shinner, the former married to a sports journalist (Basil Tozer), the latter to a retired army captain (Augustus F. Liddell).Footnote ⁸⁶ Several women players who wed professional musicians continued to work at a high level – for example, Clarice Dunnington (married to Archie Campbell, bassoonist in the Hallé Orchestra), Dora Garland (married to organist Harold Darke), and Jessie Grimson (married to cellist Edward Mason); others did not marry (Edith Robinson, May and Beatrice Harrison, Editha Knocker).

In less affluent musician circles, working wives were more normalized, as census data from 1881 to 1911 underlines. As we have seen, Greta Kent’s mother worked in theater orchestras while raising children in the years around the century’s turn – a necessity to make ends meet.Footnote ⁸⁷ Joan Perkin has written of how married women and unmarried daughters from working-class families took jobs to help create an adequate household income, relying on older relatives for childcare if employment took them outside the home. Historically, such demands had left “little time for hobbies or enjoyment” of the sort that might have set them on a musical path to eventually being able to obtain work through string-playing skills.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, by the time of the 1911 census, at which point the Maidstone scheme had been spreading violin teaching into less affluent communities for over a decade, we see examples of women’s breakthroughs: Flossie Capper (Keele), a coal miner’s daughter, and Lynda Brown (St. Albans), whose father was an ironmonger, worked as violin teachers, evidently transcending their social origins.

Some telling accommodations to middle-class expectations of gender can be observed in how women solo violinists were presented as concert artists. While cuts and styles of women’s clothing changed over the sixty years in question, one recurrent feature in public-facing photographsFootnote ⁸⁹ of many ensembles and soloists is elegant, white dresses – a social signifier of youth and purity that was presumably intended to negate any residual moral concerns about young women being on display on a concert stage. That said, a sampling of soloists’ photos from c. 1890 to c. 1910 shows several players – whether posed in playing position, rest position, or for a head-and-shoulders shot (Louise Nanney, Fig. 5.2a) – in gowns with “feminine” scooped necklines and often short or half-length sleeves: costumes that reveal bare necks, collarbones, arms, and even a little of the upper back, thus adhering to a socially accepted male gaze on a woman soloist’s side-on body in the liminal space of the concert hall. Contrast photos of all-women resort orchestras and string quartets, where collaborative music-making was the name of the game and soloistic personality was deemphasized. In such images, more demure, largely uniform, white frocks with long sleeves and modest necklines are common (e.g., Royal Navy Ladies’ Orchestra, Fig. 5.2b).Footnote ⁹⁰

Figure 5.2a Louise Nanney (Strings [June 1895]).

Image courtesy of the Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

Figure 5.2b Royal Navy Ladies’ Orchestra, Worthing Pier (postcard, 1911).

Image courtesy of Mike Brubaker.

What agency soloists had in selecting photos for public presentation is unclear, but there were exceptions to the all-white look.Footnote ⁹¹ In engravings and photos of Wilma Norman-Neruda (known, after her marriage to Charles Hallé in 1888, as Lady Hallé) as solo violinist, she is dressed in dark fabrics (a nod to her maturity and marital status), albeit with low necklines and white trims.Footnote ⁹² More unusually, a photograph in Strings magazine (1895) shows violinist Ethel Barns – nearly four years before her marriage and around the time she was first appearing as a recitalist – in a costume and rest-position stance that communicates a seriousness of purpose more suited to office or department-store work. Barns’s white (or off-white) dress is high-necked, with full-length sleeves and a built-in bolero edged in dark braid, as are the frilled neckline and cuffs (Fig. 5.2c).Footnote ⁹³ Propriety is also on display in images of mixed-gender string quartets. Norman-Neruda, who led an otherwise male quartet at the Popular Concerts in London from 1869, is clad in a dark, high-collared long-sleeved dress, with a little decoration on the bodice, in an engraving of 1872.Footnote ⁹⁴ Nearly forty years later, viola player Helen Rawdon Briggs appears even more unostentatiously, in a dark, high-necked dress, in a publicity shot for her husband’s quartet (Fig. 5.2d). For the sole woman in such an artistically democratic setting to wear a gown suggestive of sexual allure would have drawn unacceptable attention to her – and away from the music – both from the audience’s perspective and that of her collaborators.

Figure 5.2c Ethel Barns (Strings [July 1895]).

Image courtesy of the Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

Figure 5.2d Helen Rawdon Briggs in the Rawdon Briggs Quartet (The Strad [May 1910]).

Image courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

Barns, also a composer, became a member of the Society of Women Musicians (SWM), a group founded in 1911 – against the backdrop of the campaign for voting rights and the increasing visibility of financially independent women – to support and advance female musicians.Footnote ⁹⁵ The organization, which put on concerts of its members’ compositions, attracted some highly trained string players, such as the cellist May Mukle, violin/viola player Rebecca Clarke, and violinist Beatrice Langley. Individual members would have been aware of the inequities of both the low wages paid to women string players and their exclusion from the leading symphony orchestras, but these issues were not a priority for the SWM itself, which shrank from publicly aligning itself with the suffrage movement. Still, some members campaigned outside of the organization for the cause of women musicians, and, as noted towards the end of this chapter, in the late 1920s the SWM did lobby for women to be considered for one major orchestra.

The issue of pay was contentious and had multiple preexisting dimensions. It was fueled by many women being in low-status jobs that were poorly remunerated: tea-shop, restaurant, department-store, seaside, and cinema work especially. In addition, women were typically paid less than men for the same work. Rosabel Watson (b. 1865), an enterprising violinist, viola, and double bass player who organized and directed all-women ensembles, advocated for parity of pay; her groups included the acclaimed Aeolian Ladies’ Orchestra, which flourished from the early 1890s into the 1920s and was known by 1910 to have attracted many “ardent suffragists” as players.Footnote ⁹⁶ Watson cautioned women who “accept[ed] lower salaries than men,” arguing that if women improved their standard of playing they might “be able to obtain the best scale of terms.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Yet the pay imbalance was in line with how women were remunerated in other spheres: in the civil service in 1914, men typists were paid three times as much as women typists.Footnote ⁹⁸ Although in 1917 the AMU and NOA endorsed the principle of equal pay,Footnote ⁹⁹ relatively few women musicians were union members.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In any case, the practicalities did not sit in their favor. The AMU’s efficacy was, as Williamson and Cloonan emphasize, “constrained by an over-supply of labour and its inability to form a closed shop across the profession.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Additionally, the NOA, which was concerned with protecting the elite slab of symphony orchestra players, proved no advocate for women who hoped to join a top-drawer ensemble.Footnote ¹⁰²

To this knot of problems deep-seated male anxieties added a further strand, for as the number of players seeking orchestral jobs grew, fears that women were stealing men’s livelihoods increased. The threat had been articulated fairly early, in the Orchestral Association’s 1894 Gazette, which ran an antagonistic article that cited several incursions into men’s space, including by sixty women recently hired in London for a Covent Garden theater production, who were cast as depriving family men of much-needed income.Footnote ¹⁰³ Sparky debate ensued.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the early 1900s, the argument would be framed in terms of women undercutting men.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In retrospect, we can see that such tactics blamed women for a situation over which they had little power.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It was men who usually engaged women at lower fees; and with women in the subordinate position of aspiring to be admitted to an oversupplied workplace, any attempt to negotiate higher rates was unlikely to succeed. Besides, paying them less than men reinforced the idea that they were socially and musically inferior. More specifically, with men societally recognized as breadwinners, defensive patriarchal attitudes held strong, especially in high-ranking ensembles.

It is hardly surprising that, faced with barriers to gaining stable positions in top orchestras, talented women sought the soloist’s route, for all its difficulties. Some of them were exceptionally good players with recognizably stellar techniques and artistry. Margery Bentwich, for example, was hailed for having the variety of tone and rhythm “of a Kreisler or an Ysaye [sic],” the technique of a Ševčík pupil, and a beguiling “note of personality.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Far too numerous to document here and spanning multiple generations, these notable soloists included Edith Robinson, May Harrison, Marie Hall, Isolde Menges, and Orrea Pernel (all violinists), May Mukle and Beatrice Harrison (both cellists); also on the circuit were highly-acclaimed foreigners such as violinists Wilma Norman-Neruda, Daisy Kennedy, and Jelly d’Aranyi and cellist Guilhermina Suggia. Hall – the sole British-born violinist in the prewar period to achieve international stardom – stunned and sparkled at her debut with the Queen’s Hall Orchestra (1903) in the Paganini No. 1 and Tchaikovsky concertos and Wieniawksi’s Fantaisie on themes from Gounod’s Faust: excessively demanding repertoire conventionally considered the wheelhouse of men, and a remarkable feat of virtuosity and stamina.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In contrast, hundreds of would-be soloists either never made the cut or they struggled financially. Some women anchored their livelihoods around teaching and allowed concert work to supplement that income, reflecting advice meted out by RCM-trained violinist Marion Scott in a 1909 Daily Express article.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ And, as Chapter 7 shows, many found musical satisfaction by playing in good amateur orchestras. Still, most solo players diversified their portfolio, performing in “at-homes,” “assisting” at others’ recitals with a couple of choice pieces, and pursuing small-ensemble work.

Indeed, it was in chamber music that women soloists often established both alternative artistic agency and a potential means to augment income.Footnote ¹¹⁰ From the 1890s, a cluster of them gravitated to the string quartet, and some all-women groups gained significant reputations: in the prewar period, the Emily Shinner Quartet (established 1887) was the first to gain attention, possibly modeled on Marie Soldat’s quartet in Berlin, followed by others including Nora Clench’s quartet (1904), Edith Robinson’s (1906), and the Lucas (sisters) Quartet (formed in Europe, first British concert 1909).Footnote ¹¹¹ After 1918, more groups came forward, many building on an RCM or RMCM chamber-music training and benefiting from the built-in rehearsal mechanisms that socially motivated quartet playing embodied: the Isabel McCullagh Quartet (1920, Liverpool), the Kendall Quartet (also 1920), which was led by Katherine Kendall, and the Marie Wilson Quartet (1927), among others.Footnote ¹¹² Several ensembles garnered attention by programming new or rarely heard repertoire, including British music, alongside concert-hall “standards.”Footnote ¹¹³ For example, Nora Clench’s quartet foregrounded contemporary works by Taneyev, Wolf, and Reger; Isabel McCullagh’s quartet performed music by Joseph Holbrooke; Kendall’s played Germaine Tailleferre and McEwen; and Marie Wilson’s recorded Bax’s Quartet in G major for the National Gramophone Society.

A few all-women piano trios and piano quartets on the concert circuit also registered national attention.Footnote ¹¹⁴ But it was women’s establishment in the string quartet arena that is most historically symbolic, because quartet performance was entrenched as an activity for male musicians, as Simon McVeigh notes.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The genre itself, marked as intellectual, boasted a repertoire that could support decades of concertizing, while the practicalities, economics, and autonomy of this type of work were such that women were not portrayed as threatening men’s livelihoods. Quartet playing was further understood as a test of collective artistry and musicianship. Most all-women groups named themselves after their leader – just as men’s quartets did – effectively underlining their claim to equality in this sphere. More so, some ensembles mixed men and women, and occasionally a woman led three men. Precedent here was set from 1869 by Norman-Neruda’s leadership of the “house” quartet at the “Pops.” Although her presence in the role was greeted with some astonishment, her artistic command was recognized instantly by most critics. The Daily Telegraph proclaimed that she led with “such power, force, dignity, and fire as few indeed of the most gifted men are endowed withal.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ She continued to be fêted as a leader into the 1890s but was still, one senses, considered an exception to gender norms, for it took time for other ensembles of men led by a woman to emerge. Those that did were driven by a younger generation: the Grimson Quartet (established c. 1900; Jessie Grimson, leader), Marie Motto’s eponymous quartet (1903), and the reinvented English Quartet of 1927, with Marjorie Hayward on first violin; composer Frank Bridge played (violin II or viola) in all three groups.Footnote ¹¹⁷ With the role of quartet leader seen, to quote McVeigh, as “a touchstone of musical integrity,” involving “the undoubted power of directing the debate,”Footnote ¹¹⁸ the concert-hall optics of a woman at the helm of three men, even while seated alongside them in a conversational semicircle, were surely striking. Where a woman led three other women, the messaging around her authority was complemented by an impression of collaboration and community that reinforced traditional ideas of womanhood, the near “perfection” of the Lucas Quartet’s ensemble being tied to the “psychological influence” of their literal sisterhood on their playing.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The oversupply of capable violinists doubtless encouraged some women to pursue jobs on the viola. In her 1909 essay, Marion Scott had observed that female viola players and cellists stood the best chances of securing chamber or orchestral work, even while acknowledging that “all the best engagements are filled by men.”Footnote ¹²⁰ For a while she led her own mixed-gender quartet, which gave concerts in London, but, evidently for health reasons, she later relinquished ambitions for a high-status performance career to become a writer on music. In less prestigious settings, self-formed women-only ensembles of various sizes proved an effective means for getting work on all instruments. Referring to women’s employment options in a time “long before television arrived, or even radio” (i.e., up to 1922), Greta Kent remembered the multiple opportunities ensembles grasped:

Such environments sometimes gave rise to chamber groups that concertized professionally. The Elzy Piano Quartet grew out of an ensemble that played to soldiers at Ciro’s nightclub (London) during the War.Footnote ¹²²

At seaside resorts, all-women orchestras, which typically hired a substantial body of strings, functioned as attractions for holidaymakers and local residents, as well as photographic sources for commercial exploitation in the form of resort postcards. If women playing together in the open air underscored gendered norms of sisterhood and compliance, their doing so surely sometimes disrupted conventional ideas of authority, in that a number of groups were conducted by a woman, often an accomplished violinist. The Royal Navy Ladies’ Orchestra, under Florence Sidney (who, in later years, styled herself as Madame Florence Sidney Jones), played at several resorts, 1893–1915 (see Fig 5.2b); Clarice Dunnington conducted the pier orchestra at St. Anne’s-on-Sea in the 1920s.Footnote ¹²³ Related precedents can be found in the amateur string orchestras that originated in the 1880s, some giving high-profile performances, most notably those of the ensemble of upper-class women directed by the Countess of Radnor (discussed in Chapter 7). Such initiatives provided opportunities for women amateurs into the new century, further normalized all-women ensembles, and created artistic openings for violinist-conductors: Gwynne Kimpton and Editha Knocker were among string players who later took on that role. The onset of the jazz era also saw all-women bands; Hilda Ward’s included a violinist.Footnote ¹²⁴ Sociability was embedded in many of these structures. Women working in the theater sector often relocated for seasonal work, and Greta Kent remembered how a nationwide community of female players developed after a few seasons: “usually when you arrived at the engagement it would be quite a reunion.”Footnote ¹²⁵

***

Arguably, the most significant boost to employment openings for women performers came once picture palaces became seen as safe, respectable spaces following licensing legislation of 1909.Footnote ¹²⁶ Playing hours were long, breaks were few, and the wages modest, but women had no difficulty demonstrating they had the stamina, thus giving the lie to charges of feminine frailty. All-women cinema orchestras became commonplace during World War I,Footnote ¹²⁷ when the light-entertainment workforce shrank as a result of men leaving for military service, especially after conscription began in early 1916. That same year, Oswald Stoll, head of the Empire theater and cinema network, replaced men in music-hall orchestras with women, on the same terms and pay. The initiative caused Percy Scholes and Edith Reed (an organist) to write approvingly of Stoll’s actions in the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, arguing that women were “worthy of men’s salaries” and suggesting that women were already (November 1916) no longer accepting “less than men for picture[-]house work.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Yet even this pair expressed an internalized socioeconomic expectation that cinema-orchestra women would willingly “retire to domestic life when their men folks return.”Footnote ¹²⁹ In fact, says film historian Laraine Porter, after the War women were “actively encouraged or forced to vacate their [cinema] positions” for returning servicemen, and the AMU was “brutal in its condemnation” of women who resisted.Footnote ¹³⁰ Moreover, Cremer’s generic, clubby references in his advice manual (1924) to theater orchestra members as “the Boys” and the principal violinist as “he” suggest a postwar return to an assumed norm of a male-breadwinners’ workplace, and a deep desire to keep it that way.Footnote ¹³¹

Conventional wisdom has recognized for some time that in a few of the artistically coveted symphony orchestras, symbolic breakthroughs for women occurred during the War. Less well understood is that some women had been thus employed earlier that decade. One significant moment concerns conductor Henry Wood’s hiring of six of them, including Rebecca Clarke and Jessie Grimson, to the upper strings of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra (QHO) in London in 1913 on account of their high aptitude for ensemble work; Clarke (Solly Quartet) and Grimson were already working as quartet players. The six, selected by an audition process that attracted 137 women applicants, were “paid the same rates” as the men.Footnote ¹³² Wood was convinced that women were the equal of men players, and for the Proms season of 1916 he appointed women to twelve of the seats vacated by men going on active service.Footnote ¹³³ In later life, Clarke remembered the thrill of performing in a large professional orchestra, indicating that women were liable to be hired as “extra strings” for works requiring large forces, and recalling that male colleagues’ initial antagonism towards their presence gradually melted.Footnote ¹³⁴ What other examples might be found? In 1916, Scholes and Reed referred tantalizingly to “[m]any of the concert orchestras” having “for some time now been employing ladies as string players,” adding that the women’s “efficiency is generally admitted” and suggesting to us that the QHO was not the only trailblazer.Footnote ¹³⁵

Other wartime advances include the hiring (1917) of a few women violinists, among them RMCM-trained Lilias Dunlop, Gertrude Barker, and Clarice Dunnington, by the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, in lieu of men who had been called up, and the arrival of a “number of ladies … in the string section” of the Harrogate Orchestra – one of the elite spa ensembles.Footnote ¹³⁶ In May 1918, Marion Scott reported that women were working in municipal orchestras in Brighton, Bournemouth, and several other regional centers.Footnote ¹³⁷ More research is needed to determine geographic spread, but published wartime orchestra lists for the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra, which reveal a handful of women in the upper-string sections, seem indicative and suggest that what happened in London has overly shaped the accepted narrative.Footnote ¹³⁸ Moreover, theater orchestras were said to have seen the greatest change in the workforce, with all-women orchestras appearing at the London Coliseum, the flagship music hall/variety theater (at which women “responsibly” filled the empty orchestral spotsFootnote ¹³⁹), and at Empires and other venues across London.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

To many women, the gains must have felt frustratingly temporary when, postwar, many of their seats were reoccupied by men. Kent referred somewhat wistfully to relatives who had played in “the Symphony Orchestras” and had to “give up this employment” when the men returned home.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Hamilton Harty, who became the Hallé’s conductor in 1920, moved quickly to replace the women with men, an act that drew protests from feminist (and SWM member) Ethel Smyth in a national newspaper article.Footnote ¹⁴² Nonetheless, women players were proven to be more than equal to the job and, although a rebalancing of the gender distribution of string players in top-tier orchestras was still decades off, the notion of a woman in the rank-and-file was less outlandish than it had been. Moreover, at least one top orchestra continued to hire modest numbers of women. A photo of the QHO from 1920 shows at least twelve in the string section (including one cellist).Footnote ¹⁴³ How typical this was remains to be determined (as does whether they were on contract or paid as extras), but pressure and lobbying for more women in the principal orchestras, especially the BBC’s ensembles, continued.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Minute books of the Royal Philharmonic Society (London) record in autumn 1928 that Smyth had written “with reference to the engagement of women players in London orchestras,” noting only that “[i]t was decided to take no further action.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Smyth’s letter is not preserved, nor any reply. However, the Philharmonic showed less antipathy towards employing women than did other orchestras, such as the London Symphony Orchestra.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ During the previous season it had hired Patience Lucas (of the Lucas Quartet) to its viola section and thereafter gradually added other women, many with experience in reputable quartets; by 1929–1930, eight were playing in rank-and-file positions.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This was, of course, still limited representation, and several of the women were in the violas, where need for proficient players was probably greatest.

Other elite jobs in the 1920s remained largely a man’s world. The acclaimed light orchestras in prestigious London hotels and restaurants were men’s realms, to judge from a series of features in The Caterer of 1928–1930 – a finding supported by Jaffa’s accounts of his working life in that milieu.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Men dominated string positions in conservatoires, too, despite some progressive in-house appointments: Marie Motto (an Arbós student) taught at the RCM, 1886–1913; Edith Robinson was hired by Brodsky, her former teacher, at the RMCM in 1907; Marjorie Hayward and Elsie Owen (former students) were appointed at the RAM in the 1920s. Meanwhile, the failure of the ABRSM and CoV to assign women examiners and the absence of women adjudicators at the competitive festivals did nothing to advance perceptions of women’s authority as teachers at all levels of instruction.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Still, to the aspirant string-playing girl contemplating a conservatoire prospectus or attending concerts of certain top orchestras in the 1920s, the presence of some women players working professionally at the highest levels signaled that such attainment, if far from commonplace, was not impossible for a woman, even if it forecast considerable struggles ahead.

The arrival of some women string players in the rank-and-file of the new BBC Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s has been hailed as a significant moment. Recruited by nationwide auditions rather than purely from the pool of regular London freelancers, the upper strings included violinists Marie Wilson, who later led the orchestra, Jessie Hinchcliffe, who was an Arthur Kaye student from Huddersfield, and Kathleen Washbourne from Bangor.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ As Porter reveals, the SWM had urged women to apply for BBC jobs during a successful campaign to draw public attention to its track record in orchestra hiring.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The results, however, were more symbolic than paradigm-shifting. A publicity photo of 1930 reveals just sixteen women (violins and violas) in a string section of nearly seventy players, indicating that priority was still “overwhelmingly given to male breadwinners.”Footnote ¹⁵² Was this a “good proportion of women,” as one commentator put it in 1981?Footnote ¹⁵³ Perhaps so by the standards of 1930; but there was a long way to go, as Ethel Smyth understood when she agitated in 1933 about the orchestra’s exclusion of women cellists.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

In light of the obstacles to career progression, several string-playing women of considerable competence did not seek employment as performers. Some embraced alternative forms of musical labor, not necessarily well remunerated. One such avenue was composition, particularly of chamber music with strings, in which women often had years of playing experience. Traditionally considered off-limits for them because of the generic expectations for compositional complexity, the endeavor attracted violinist-composers Ethel Barns and Susan Spain-Dunk, plus others who had been much exposed to string playing, such as Alice Verne-Bredt, Morfydd Owen, Ethel Smyth, and Adela Maddison (further discussion in Chapter 9). Some of this music was publicly performed in high-profile venues, and occasionally by male ensembles: the London String Quartet, led by Albert Sammons, included Smyth’s string quartet and Verne-Bredt’s Phantasie Trio, in Aeolian and Bechstein Hall performances, 1912–1913.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Meanwhile, as Chapter 7 shows, many highly proficient women players from wealthy backgrounds gave their services to amateur endeavors; Marian Arkwright performed mostly in amateur ensembles on the viola or double bass, often for charitable causes. Along similar lines, violinist Maisie Radford (1885–1973), who had trained in Berlin with Andreas Moser, moved to southwest Cornwall with her pianist sister Evelyn and after the War embarked on a lifetime of relentless work animating music-making and education in the local community, including in Women’s Institutes.Footnote ¹⁵⁶