Category: Culture

Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was born in Worcestershire and taught himself to play the piano and the violin in his father’s music shop. His innate talent saw him devote his life to music ~ as a violin teacher, orchestral musician, conductor and prolific composer. His works are regarded as quintessentially ‘English’. His most famous is ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, sung at the last night of The Proms and, to many, an unofficial national anthem.

He was knighted by King Edward VII in 1904, just a few years after his first big success with the ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ marches and the ‘Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma)’. He also wrote two symphonies and more than 150 other songs, choral pieces, concertos, sonatas and quartets.

A year before he died, he recorded his Violin Concerto with the 16-year-old Yehudi Menuhin with himself conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. This was in the very early days of vinyl records. Elgar’s music has featured in many royal occasions. This is ‘Nimrod’ being played for Remembrance Sunday:-

(Image of Elgar statue in Hereford: Oliver Dixon at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Following on from the ‘swinging sixties‘ came the ‘punk’ youth culture of the 1970s. Naturally, the aim was to shock the older generation, shake up attitudes and push society in a different direction. The fashion side of the punk movement vies with the music for its powerful, long-lasting influence.

Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010) and Vivienne Westwood (1941-2022) pioneered the fashion style in their boutique in King’s Road, Chelsea. Their product range evolved over the decade from  ‘Teddy-Boy’ and biker clothes to bondage gear, anarchist T-shirts and ripped jeans. The T-shirt designs were fully intended to be provocative, bearing swear words, pornography and perverse imagery, such as the Queen with a safety pin through her nose. This, however, did not prevent Westwood being made a Dame in 2006 (having previously been awarded an OBE, in 1992) “for services to fashion”.

Punk fashion, with its studs, body piercings, tattoos, spiked brightly-dyed hair, black eye make-up, rips and random zips, has nevertheless been absorbed into today’s looks. It has come a long way from dresses made of dustbin liners and safety pins, but let it not be said that the fashion industry doesn’t know a brave new innovation when it sees one.

(Top image [cropped]: Stuart Chalmers at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC 2.0)

It was the Labour politician Harold Wilson (1916-95) who had the idea of a ‘university of the air’ back in 1963. This was in the fledgling days of television and when he became Prime Minister, he saw the idea through to its establishment as The Open University (‘the O.U.’) in 1969. It began distance teaching in 1971, offering just four courses to 25,000 students. Anyone could apply as there were no entrance qualifications. There were tuition fees, but these were subsidised.

TV programmes on course topics were shown on the BBC, but these were only a tiny fraction of the coursework. However, they were good publicity and this collaboration with the BBC has gone on to produce some excellent quality films, such as the Blue Planet series.

Today, there are 175,000 students per year on hundreds of courses covering all sorts of subjects. It is the UK’s largest university and more than two million students since 1971 have been very thankful for Harold Wilson’s brainwave, as they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to gain their further education and have their minds and life choices opened up.

(Image: pixabay.com)