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dreadfully restricted homes, with parents who either ignored their children completely, or tried to destroy whatever spark of creativity they had with corporal punishment.

In 1882 the already tall RVW was sent to a preparatory school in Rottingdene, where he learned piano under the forward looking educationalist, C.T. West, who, as James Day reminds us, "..introduced him to the music of Bach, and continued his violin lessons [which he practised in the evenings, so there wasn't much sleep in the Leith Hill Place household] under the Irishman, W.M. Quirke, a well known Brighton teacher of those days." The highlight of the young RVW's school musical career came when "Quirke's young charge performed Raffa's Cavatina, "double- stops and all", as Vaughan Williams insisted in later life.

In 1890 RVW entered the Royal College of Music, which had only been in
existence for seven years and had fewer than a hundred students who, in
those early days, were taught by Sir George Grove (who founded the
college), Sir Arthur Sullivan, Hubert Parry, and Charles Villiers
Stanford; Parry and Stanford were also professors of music at Oxford and
Cambridge. As well as this connection with Britain's two oldest
universities The Royal College of Music also, through Sullivan, kept
links with the stage and, through Parry, with the musical life of the
Church of England, although, as RVWs biographer, James Day, points out,
training,"...a serious composer in the late nineteenth century meant
training him (invariably a him) to write music for the organ-loft and
the festival platform rather than for the stage. Sullivan's operettas -
the real beginning of the English musical renaissance in which Vaughan
Williams was to be a leading figure - were 'sports', freak creations
which it was regarded as neither desirable nor possible for a serious
musician to emulate; even Stanford's gallant attempts to write both
heroic and comic operas met with consistent failure, not on account of
the music, but on account of operatic organization in England, which was
regarded as a rather peculiar business best left to foreigners. The
young composer of those days often tended, quite naturally, and quite
unconsciously, to envisage the orchestra as a kind of team version of
the organ which accompanied lesser choral works within the framework of
the Church's liturgy. If he thought in terms of large-scale
compositions, they were usually oratorios and sacred cantatas rather
than works for the stage." Ralph Vaughan Williams was to change all

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