Jenkins of the BBC

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 551, 13 January 1950, Page 16

Jenkins of the BBC

IN the right is the latest photograph of Rae Jenkins, conductor of the BBC’s Variety Orchestra. Once Jenkins was a pit boy in a Welsh coal mine, and his grandfather spoke no English. The grandson speaks English fluently, but his accent is still strongly Welsh and even unobservant people can guess the country from: which he comes. Though he was a miner at 14, he was a musician almost from the cradle. He saved money for a London holiday when he was 16 and spent most of it attending the Promenade Concerts which Sir Henry Wood was then conducting at Queen’s Hall. Rae Jenkins trained at the Royal Academy of Music and two years later achieved his first ambition, to play in the Queen’s Hall Orchestr4. He had played the violin and viola with almost every light orchestra in the country before he achieved his second ambition, and became a conductor. He insists that a musician who wishes to conduct must play in an orchestra first, to get the feel of it as a whole-a precept" passed on from Sir Henry Wood. Listeners to Itma have heard the late Tommy Handley’s simple introduction

of an orchestral selection-"Play, Rae" (Jenkins succeeded Charles Shadwell with Itma). During his holidays and whenever he had time before the war, he used to travel about Europe, collecting gipsy music and folk songs. Now he is an authority on gipsy music and has a collection of about 3000 gipsy melodies. Water Music He has two very different hobbies — layirig parquet floors in winter and fishing in summer, and always ties his own trout flies. This fortunate musician has fished most of the Welsh and English rivers but has yet in front of him the joys of sampling those of Scotland and Treland. He may some day-in view of this country’s apparent attractions for overseas artists-cast a fly in Taupo. Rae Jenkins’s third ambition is to conduct Handel’s Messiah, of which, it is said, he knows every note. Listeners to 3XC on Monday, January 16, at 9.4 pm., will hear the BBC Variety Orchestra, conducted by Rae Jenkins, in Band Call.