h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It was my great good fortune to have known , studied with and cooked for John Beckett. As a mere teenager, I was taken by my music teacher, the harpsichordist and organist David Lee, to Guinness's Brewery, where an eccentric, bird-like man, (Cathal Gannon...mentioned above by Recumbentman) had restored an early harpsichord in his workshop in the brewery. John Beckett was to play it. John came into the room, a vast, nearly spherical, shambling bear, with protuberant brown eyes of blazing intensity. He played Purcell's "Upon a New Ground." That was in the early 1960s.

He brought Musica Reservata to Dublin, where they performed unforgettably in Trinity College Dublin. Significantly, he also brought the unsurpassable Indian sitar player, Nikhil Banerjee to Trinity in 1971, and later the same year, performed a memorable concert of Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas in the same venue.

The next time I met him, in 1979, he was playing viol consorts, (mainly the music of John Jenkins) in Recumbentman's house. In the basement of which house, R'man and I made musical instruments. To say that John was held in awe by Dublin's early music fraternity would be a ludicrous understatement, so it was with some trepidation that I proferred the first viol I made (with the body made from an African gourd!) for his perusal. He was not impressed.

So it was with even greater trepidation that I joined his Academy viol class, urged on by Recumbentman, where John's oft-repeated advice, to "nourish the notes" reduced me to tears of frustration, as at that stage I could barely play the instrument, still less sight-read at speed in consort, let alone "nourish" anything.

Ratchet the fear up another notch or two, as John suggested I come to the Academy for private viol lessons.

Day 1. With knees knocking and my gourd viol gripped in sweaty hands I entered the great man's presence. His opening remark was, "Let's forget about the viol for now. I hear you're very fond of Indian music, and food.....when can I come for supper?"

We became friends very fast, and eyebrows were raised in certain quarters of the Dublin early music scene when this upstart novice viol player was seen to have the temerity to entertain the mighty John and his wife Ruth David to supper.

John was a man of passionate convictions. Although he lost most of the physical weight of his middle years, his appetites were intense and prodigious, not least where red wine was concerned.

He was particularly fond of a mild ginger and garlic Indian-style pickle I used to make, and once demolished an entire jar of it, with his fingers, on the bus journey home. His wife Ruth complained to me that she never got a taste, so I decided John should suffer for his greed. I made him a jar of lethally hot pickle with whole cloves of garlic and dynamite chillies. This was produced, so he told me amidst rueful laughter, at Christmas dinner. The other guests took modest amounts, and tested carefully before tasting. Not John. He said,"No, you should eat it like THIS!!" Whereupon he spooned a huge dollop of the pickle straight into his mouth, and nearly exploded. He told me that the sweat literally spouted from his forehead.

John taught by expectation. He expected you to play better than you could, and insisted that you could play better than you did, until you believed that you could, and did.

When I reverted to pottery in 1990, he came and visited the pottery on various occasions, saying that in his next life he wanted to be a potter.

One of his great devotions was to his cat, Madrid, pronounced "Murray." She produced endless litters and lived to be 22 years old. We were blessed with the gift of one of her offspring from John, a weedy little black-and-white tom kitten called Chester. John insisted that Chester was the kitten's name in utero. After Chester-le-Street. Chester lived to be almost 20, and grew to weigh about 16 lbs. John was present for the scattering of Chester's ashes when that sad day finally came.

One phrase of John's which has never faded from memory, was his programme-note description of an early Spanish song, "Calabaza no say," as displaying "a hearty, and surely healthy obscenity!"

He was a great spirit.

Thank you Chai! I'd forgotten the Indian music connection, though I do remember John's appetite. At one stage he brought a Scottish singer over to Dublin to do a concert of Purcell. She was an amateur singer, very good too, by profession a nurse. At lunch one day she pointed out a very fat man eating a very fattening meal and told John "He'll be dead within a year". This scarified John into losing weight, which he did mighty quick.

He put on the Purcell concert withher (Linda) in the RDS, a fairly large venue, and hardly anyone came. He had done no publicity. He was mildly surprised; he thought that if the music was good, people would find out about it.

[Correction to a few posts back: it wasn't John's father but a neighbour with whom he (Gerald) palyed piano duets who brought home the Bach cantata collection from the war.]

Charles Gannon's wiki entry on John Beckett: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_S._Beckett

John's remains will be cremated in Lewisham on Friday 16th. I may put some of the above together into an Entry after that.

You know, you're right, Gnomon. I should turn this into an Entry.