Gavin Gordon: Composer - A Few First Musings

I wrote recently about ‘lost’ English ballet scores and noted a certain Gavin Gordon. I understand from Philip Scowcroft’s excellent ‘Garlands’ series on MusicWeb International that Gordon is a fellow Scot. I was delighted to see that he came from Ayr (a place of many happy days by the sea for me) where he was born in November 24 1901. However, he did not hang around the Auld Country for too long, and subsequently was educated at Rugby and then at the Royal College of Music. Apparently he studied there with Ralph Vaughan Williams. Scowcroft notes that Gordon was a ‘multi-talented’ man who was not only a composer but was an actor, a singer and a cartoonist.

In my CD collection is a copy of ‘A Tribute to Madam’ – the great Ninette de Valois. On this disc is a recording of Gordon’s masterpiece The Rake’s Progress. Not only did the composer write the music but he thought out the scenario and persuaded Ashton and de Valois to choreograph it. It has long been a piece that I have wanted to hear. However there are a number of other works – both for the stage and in other genres. Ballet scores that await rediscovery include A Toothsome Morsel, set in a dentist’s waiting room where the patients plot to murder the dentist (Uugh), Regatta (a particular desideratum of mine), The Scorpions of Ysit and The Death of Hector. Regatta was the first piece that Frederick Ashton choreographed for the Vic-Well Ballet

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I have looked at WORLDCAT and the COPAC library search sites and virtually nothing turns up. Philip Scowcroft has noted that there exists (somewhere) Four Caricatures and a neo-classical piece called Work in E major – both of which are for orchestra. Apparently these pieces of ‘light’ music parody ‘old-style’ dances.
The British Library does have copy of a musical called Dick Whittington, or, Love is the key that opens every door. Yet I am not yet sure whether this is an operetta or a children’s cantata. However, I do understand that he wrote a deal of music for pantomimes, including possibly Cinderella. There may be some incidental music for shows by Leslie Henson and Frith Shepherd and he wrote the score for the play Simon Bolivar by Robert Donat.
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According to a letter in the Gramophone magazine (October 1981) John Warrack writes that Gordon was an able pianist who could play stretches of Italian opera from memory (he had a cat called Puccini, one of a line named after composers beginning with P: the most onomatopoeic was Pfitzner). Furthermore he played in the stage version of My Fair Lady.
Warrack notes that Gavin Gordon was a clever, nicely malicious cartoonist, whose subjects included Walton Bliss and Lambert.
Gavin Gordon died on Wednesday 18 November 1970.
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It would be great if some scores or other information about Gavin Gordon were to turn up. Perhaps there are a few piano pieces of songs? Meanwhile I plan to have a look at references in the literature to Regatta and The Rake’s Progress.