Ronald Binge: The working class origins of Derby's Elizabeth composer

Ronnie Binge did not write Elizabethan Serenade for the Queen or for the coronation but it became associated with anything regal

As a young Queen Elizabeth took her place on the throne in 1952, there was a musical work that defined the new era.

The light music piece, Elizabethan Serenade, had been composed by Ronald Binge.

Its distinctive combination of flowing strings and jaunty wind instruments made Binge's name.

"It was set to words, it was translated into different languages. It was played all over the world," said David Parry, a musician who lives in Derby and has given talks on Binge's rise.

"Even now, more than 40 years after Binge's death, when you look at the Classic FM list of their listeners' favourite pieces, he is always in there."

Yet Binge's beginnings in working class Derby did not suggest a career as a coronation-commemorating composer awaited him.

"He came from a very poor background," said David.

"His father came out of World War One too injured to work and he died a few months later, meaning there wasn't any money coming in."

Born in Normanton, a suburb of Derby in 1910, Binge's family quickly moved into a council house in Chaddesden.

"When he left school, he had to work straight away," said David.

"He didn't have a musical education in any way but he sang in the local church choir and the choirmaster saw his potential and taught him the piano and the organ."

Binge's first job in music was in the local "fleapit" cinema, arranging the music and playing the organ to accompany what were then silent movies.

Distinctive sound

So promising was he, David said, the cinema kept him on even when talkies came in.

Binge then began to play with dance bands, moving around the country to do a summer season on the coast before taking up a role in the late 1930s, composing and arranging for Annunzio Mantovani, a famous Anglo-Italian dance band leader.

David believes Binge did not get enough credit for developing Mantovani's distinctive sound.

"He was responsible for Mantovani's famous cascading string sound and I don't think he got the recognition he deserved," he said.

By the end of the war, Binge had married and had started a family and was more interested in composing, David said.

"Because he had had such a rough childhood himself, he wanted to spend as much time with his own kids as possible and composing from home gave him the chance to do that."

At the time, there was a huge demand for light music, as themes for radio programmes, films and plays.

In later years, Binge's piece Sailing By was used as the theme to the late Shipping Forecast, while The Watermill was used in a BBC adaptation of The Secret Garden.

The Elizabethan Serenade initially started life as a piece called Andante Cantabile.

'Title was a winner'

In an interview in 1969, Binge said: "I sat down writing it one morning after breakfast and finished it in time for the five o' clock post."

"We always knew that Ronnie didn't write Elizabethan Serenade either for the Queen or for the coronation," said Hilary Ashton, chair of the Light Music Society, whose father Ernest Tomlinson was a good friend of Binge and conducted a lot of his works.

"It was written earlier, probably for Mantovani.

"The name it came to be known by was a suggestion made by the publisher of the piece because he thought it sounded 'olde worlde' - referring to our past Elizabethan age.

"The title was a winner, and naturally Ronnie was pleased that it was used as a background piece to anything royal.

"The publisher was inspired, I think. It was obviously a good earner. But he didn't have anything royal in mind when he wrote it."

Hilary has some memories of her father's friendship with Binge.

"I remember Ronnie and his wife coming round to dinner and us going to visit their house," she said.

From the 1960s onwards, Hilary said her father and Binge were caught up in an ongoing battle with the BBC to keep their music on the air.

"It was very strange," she said. "When I was a child, my father's music was on the radio all the time.

"The music itself didn't lose its popularity. It was simply that the BBC stopped broadcasting it. The music was considered too lowbrow for Radio 3 and too highbrow for Radio 2.

"You would hear it occasionally on adverts. And whenever there was footage of the coronation, they would play Elizabethan Serenade."

Thanks to her father and Binge's efforts, their music continued to be played until the early 1970s.

'Music destroyed'

"But a lot of light music composers had to find some other way to make their money," she said.

More than a decade after Binge's death in 1979, light music began to be played once more, largely thanks to the interest of a handful of music labels - and the efforts of Hilary's father.

"When the labels approached the publishers for the music, they found it had been destroyed," she said. "Then they approached the BBC and found they had done the same.

"But my father had it. When he had seen the BBC was getting rid of it, he rescued it. We now have a library of more than 35,000 orchestral sets.

"My father became a consultant for a CD series and conducted five CDs, including one of Ronnie Binge. They got played on Classic FM and other recording companies jumped on the bandwagon."

Hilary is in no doubt as to the quality of the music and its continued appeal.

"Mozart wrote light music; so did Schubert," she said. "It's music that may be easy to listen to, but it isn't easy to play.

"There is huge skill that goes into making these seemingly simple pieces."