Blog by Rosa Kurowska Kyffin, interviewer for National Life Stories.

Today, 7th March, would mark the 71st birthday of Rory Young: sculptor, stone carver, letterer, and building conservator, who sadly died in 2023. In the autumn of 2022, I had the opportunity to interview Rory for the National Life Stories collection Artists’ Lives. We arranged this interview following Rory’s terminal diagnosis earlier in the year and a concerted effort by his friends and family as well as the team at National Life Stories to ensure his memories were recorded for the archive.

Portrait of Rory Young at interview, by Rosa Kurowska Kyffin, October 2022.

The number of different professions that Rory Young mastered and the difficulty of finding one simple word for his work are evident in his many titles above. Indeed, Rory found it difficult to limit his focus to one career while having such a myriad of interests in the arts and built environment; he viewed himself, in his own words, as ‘an artificer’. His magical home – an early nineteenth-century stone town house, carefully restored over four decades and brimful with diverse works of art, objects and gifts from a wide network of beloved friends – speaks to this glowing interest he had in life and the world.

It was a difficult interview in some ways. His deteriorating health was an obvious factor, but also was the sheer scope of his view: it is hard to contain – even in many hours of recording – the variety of a life so richly lived. Rory burst with energy and ideas that sparked from one another, leading us forward or backwards decades at times; or leaping from debates on the nature of art/craft and the growth of conceptualism to anecdotes from his deep knowledge of architectural history; to lyrical descriptions of his work designing, limewashing, painting, carving. Sometimes recordings would be interrupted as he leapt up to dash off around the house to bring back an object or image for us to examine; thankfully, most times I managed to catch the microphone before he took our kit with him!

Rory was born and brought up close to Cirencester, his interview revealing a deep connection to the locale. His interest in both art and historic buildings was encouraged in childhood by his artist mother, Jill Young, who had trained at Wimbledon Art School in 1940s and who was inspired by Gerald Cooper, the Principal during her time there. She encouraged Rory and his sister Katrina by covering the walls of their home with paper for them to adorn and decorate. Jill Young hated the normal female pursuit of shopping in the town; instead, she spent time in the many historic buildings of Gloucestershire, educating her small children about the design and meaning of the architecture. This interest went to such an extent that Rory remembers, when just a small boy, his looking up at the ceiling in a local church and exclaiming ‘Look Mummy, fan vaulting!’, to the surprise of passers-by.

Later, during his study at Camberwell College of Arts in the 1970s, he became the youngest member of the Camberwell Preservation Society. This early interest developed into a passion for vernacular architecture. He saw the greenest way of building as restoring the old – thus lamenting the waste he saw as different fashions swept through architecture during his lifetime. This interest grew from his early days at Camberwell, when he would cycle around the desolate docks of East London, often at night, to sketch and paint the buildings being pulled down there.

Rory Young describing the London docks

Download London Docks transcript

Rory Young, Sketch for Thames-side Warehouse Demolition, 1976

As soon has he finished his studies, he pursued this fascination on a greater scale, embarking in 1976 on a two-year tour of the north of England, partly inspired by visiting the ‘Destruction of the Country House’ exhibition at the V&A. Living out of a van and recording meticulous notes and sketches, Rory travelled the length and breadth of England to visit the historic buildings and observe the industrial landscapes that were disappearing from England at that time. His descriptions of England at that intersection of the decline of heavy industry with the beginnings of a new market for heritage in the 1970s are a striking record of the time.

Rory’s fascination with buildings continued throughout his career. Creating works like the ‘Genesis Cycle’ at the west door of York Minster and the ‘Seven Martyrs’ for St Albans Cathedral, he saw himself adding layers of beauty in a century-spanning continuum of artists and craftspeople. His effort was to honour those buildings that formed the ‘biggest material evidence of our ancestors, of our past civilizations.’ He was, perhaps unsurprisingly, often frustrated with the contemporary art world’s conception of what constituted art: the move to conceptualism and resulting debates on the boundaries of art and craft did not align with his deeply held understanding of art that was not a snapshot of a moment, but of a record of long-lived history.

Rory Young on the nature of art

Download Nature of art transcript

Rory’s commitment to creating works of art that constituted ‘the huge broad sphere of the built environment’ did require huge effort, often over many years to achieve large commissions. We discussed the sheer physical toll of his output: working with stone or in clay; lifting and moving pieces or spending many hours deep in concentration carving a piece; the realities of stretching himself to finish jobs; and struggling when commissions went over time and budget. Despite these difficulties, it was clear that Rory found great joy in his work, a realisation he had from a young age when a chaplain had tried to help him understand the concept of heaven by pointing to the state of timeless concentration Rory would fall into when working on his artworks during school. This passion for work, friends, and beauty animated our time recording. I was inspired by such a vision: his lyrical, vivid way of speaking that meant he could explain history, as well as his own story, in his own words.

Rory Young on finding heaven in work

Download Heaven in work transcript

National Life Stories would like to extend our gratitude to all Rory’s friends and family for their dedication and support in raising the funds to record this interview.

Rory’s life history recording can be listened to on-site at the British Library (collection reference C466/425). Please contact the Listening and Viewing Service for more information.

On Christmas Eve 1818, Austrian priest Josef Mohr asked his church organist Franz Gruber to set a poem he had written to music. That evening during the Christmas Eve service ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht’ had it’s first ever performance. The first English translation of the song, ‘Stilly Night, Holy Night’ was made in 1858 by Emily Elliott. Elliott was the daughter of an English clergyman, who started off writing hymns for her father’s church and went on to publish extensively under the pen name E. S. Elliott. A year later in America, Episcopal priest John Freeman Young published what has become the most commonly sung English-language translation.

This is the first recording of ‘Silent Night’, made in 1912 on Edison’s Blue Amberol, performed by soprano Elizabeth Spencer, tenor Harry Anthony and baritone James F. Harrison, accompanied by the Venetian Instrumental Quartet. The Edison Phonograph Monthly, a trade publication for the burgeoning market of recorded music, describes the trio number as ‘unsurpassed for beauty of harmony.’ In 1912 Christmas music hasn’t quite yet found it’s niche marketing value. Instead it’s classified as ‘sacred music’ and sits alongside a varied selection that includes opera, instrumental and popular band selections – advertised as a ‘great pot-pourri of Phonographic entertainment’.

A mere two years after this recording, on Christmas Day in 1914, British, French and German soldiers are said to have sung the carol in their respective languages during the famous World War I Christmas truce. 

You can listen to a larger selection of early wax cylinder Christmas songs put together on our Sound Cloud playlist Songs for Christmas. 

 

 

Portrait of W. J. Holloway, taken in 1893. Copyright National Portrait Gallery.

It is not often that you can hear the voice of someone born more than 180 years ago. Actor W. J. (William James) Holloway was born in Westminster in 1843 but at the age of thirteen his family decided to settle in Australia, a voyage on which his mother died. He took up acting in 1862 and the following year married, a union which produced four children. His second wife already had a daughter known as Essie Jenyns (1864-1920) whose talent Holloway developed - apparently driving her to fame as Australia’s greatest Shakesperean actress, and exhaustion. When she married brewery heir John Robert Wood in 1888 she gave up the stage altogether. The Holloways returned to England the following year and W. J. Holloway stood in for an indisposed Henry Irving by playing King Lear at the Lyceum in 1892 opposite Ellen Terry for a short period. His company continued to tour, most notably in South Africa, and he managed Terry’s Theatre in London from 1894. W. J. Holloway died at Clapham Common in 1913.

In 1909 Holloway made some speech recordings for the Odeon label. While many famous recordings exist from this period of great Shakesperean actors such as Lewis Waller, Sir Henry Beerbohm Tree and even private recordings of Henry Irving, these all display aspects of theatrical, declamatory delivery that sound almost risible to the modern listener. Holloway’s discs do not, and this may be because they were made with the object of reproducing the spoken English language in the clearest possible way for study purposes, rather than as a souvenir or an entertainment, as in the case of those mentioned above.

Holloway label, Seven Ages of Man

W. J. Holloway, Seven Ages of Man

 

Holloway label, Polonius's advice to his son

W. J. Holloway, Polonius's advice to his son

From a technical point of view and date of recording, the recorded sound is extremely clear and it seems that the discs were recorded in a special way developed by Wilhelm Doegen. I am indebted to Jolyon Hudson for unearthing the following information about this process.

Until the introduction of electrical recording in 1925, the recording process remained almost unchanged since its invention by Edison in 1877. Essentially, this process consisted of a horn, usually conical in shape, which funneled the sound to a recording diaphragm mounted at the horn's apex. Through a stylus, this diaphragm cut the groove into a wax master.

The energy available for cutting the record was limited to the small fraction of acoustic energy picked up by the horn. The experimental distance test recording that Nellie Melba made in 1910 vividly illustrates the reduction in amplitude and the loss of frequencies as she moved away from the horn.

In addition to this limitation, there was the difficulty of capturing both upper and lower frequencies, the distortion created by the mechanical process, and the significant challenge of recording sibilants.

We do not know exactly how Wilhelm Doegen achieved the enhanced recording quality in his work. However, a photograph of Doegen and fellow linguist Alois Brandl, taken in 1916 during the First World War at the Wahn prisoner-of-war camp as part of the Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission project to collect recordings of the languages and dialects of internees, provides a clue.

The internee is shown standing with his face very close to the recording horn, while Doegen holds the back of his neck with his left hand. In his right hand, Doegen holds a prepared text for the prisoner to read. As someone by then well-versed in achieving satisfactory speech recordings, Doegen presumably adjusted the prisoner’s head position relative to the horn, giving him greater control over the process. He may have pressed the prisoner’s head closer to the horn to emphasize sibilants or achieve better sound quality where the recording process was at its weakest sensitivity.

Doegen also developed a special gramophone for post war recordings, known as the Doegen Lautapparate. The gramophone, like his records, was produced by the Odeon company. It featured two separate reproducing horns connected to the tone arm and reproducer, or ‘sound box.’ One horn, made of wood, was directly connected to the tone arm, while the second horn, made of metal, was connected to the tone arm via a longer route through a metal tube.

The design had two main purposes: first, the faint sibilants reproduced through the metal horn would reverberate more, and second, the slight delay caused by the different horn lengths would create a subtle echo effect. It is possible that a similar arrangement was used in reverse for the recording process.

Outside of speech recording, none of Doegen’s improvements would have made any difference to the sound quality of music recordings, the mainstay of the recording industry then as now. Moreover, persuading artists to record under such conditions would have been virtually impossible.

Blog by Jonathan Summers and Jolyon Hudson