May Walley MBE, Honorary M.Mus (Keele), LRAM, ARCO

21 November 1909 - 10 May 2009

Pianist, organist, accompanist, teacher, producer, director, wife and mother.

Born Irene May Walley in Normacot, Stoke-on-Trent, May was one of four children (three girls and a boy) and spent her formative years in Shelton.

May succeeded her father as organist and subsequently her late husband, Harry, as choirmaster at Ridgway Memorial Methodist Church in Shelton, Stoke on Trent and remained there until its closure. She was heard often to claim: "There was always a Walley at the organ," which, apart from a short period during the First World War, was true.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                           May with sisters Lily (l) and Elsie (r).

 

She began giving piano lessons to fund her own studies locally at first with Dr Leon Forrester and then with Mantle Childe in Birmingham. She had wanted to be a concert pianist but these were tough times and she passed that up to help look after the family.

May married Henry Dulson (1909 -1985) in August 1939 and while Harry went off to war, she set up the family home in Kingsfield Oval, Basford with her widowed mother and elder sister. In 1960, the family, which now included son Robert (b.1946), moved to Victoria House in Victoria Road, Newcastle. It was a house they could ill-afford but she took on extra pupils and Harry worked overtime to meet the bills. May loved Victoria House which was just across the road from her beloved Newcastle High School. As well as the family home where she gave piano and singing lessons, she also made it the venue for a host of other activities including choir practices, rehearsals, meetings, musical soirees, dinners and memorable Christmas parties.

May was founder-conductor of the Stoke-on-Trent Bedford Singers. She created and ran the Penkhull Festival of Music for 39 years, was organist at Ridgway Methodist church in Shelton from her teens until the '90s and was a respected teacher of music both privately and at Newcastle High School (1957-74).

At the time of her funeral in May 2009, her son Robert said: "She instilled a love and appreciation of music in hundreds of people over the years and it’s clear that for many she was an inspiration. She had an extraordinary talent for musical interpretation and was undoubtedly an exceptional teacher. Many of her pupils went on to become full-time musicians. She had little personal ambition, often doing things just for love - in that respect she was a true amateur - but she strove always for the highest standards. I am incredibly proud of her and, in particular, the remarkable things she achieved in and through other people."

It was for her services to music and the community that in 1980 she was awarded an MBE and later an honorary Master of Music degree from Keele University.

As well as being an appropriate piece, the inclusion of Dido’s Lament (from Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas) in the funeral service as the cortege came into the church

had an added significance. It was a role in which the great English contralto Kathleen Ferrier excelled. During the war, May accompanied Kathleen on a number of occasions, as well as the lyric tenor Heddle Nash, basses Owen Brannigan and Robert Easton, soprano Jennifer Vyvyan and others, in concerts arranged through CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts). These were organised in the Midlands by Harry Vincent who in 1926 had founded the Etruscan Choral Society in the village set up around the Wedgwood factory. May, who was accompanist and later conductor of the Etruscans, often talked of happy hours spent with Harry and his family and friends, who included Ferrier, round the fire in the parlour behind his shoe shop in Etruria.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Etruscans at the Victoria Hall, Hanley in the 1950s with conductor Harry Vincent. May is seated just to his right. (Sentinel photo)

 

May’s determination and perseverance were renowned. Her abilities as a natural organiser and "director" were apparent from an early age: As a young girl playing in the backyard of their terraced house in Shelton, she had two little friends playing Peter Pan. She got them to climb on top of a five-foot high wall and told them to "fly". Not content that they just plummeted to the ground, May got them to climb up again and said: "Now do it again - but this time come down SLOWLY!"

She truly believed that if you try hard enough, anything is possible.

For years, Shelton & Etruria were the centre of the Walley-Dulson universe. Ridgway chapel had a prime place in her heart and was the foundation for virtually everything she did. She was the organist, her husband Harry the choirmaster and Sunday school superintendent. Her parents’ funerals were held there, her own marriage, her sister's marriage, her son’s christening, her husband’s funeral. But it was a social as well as a spiritual home. Plays and operettas filled the calendar, harvest suppers and dances too. As well as producing and playing for

these events, she'd also organise the sets and costumes and was found one winter's evening on her hands and knees on the Sunday School floor painting the scenery with a hot water bottle up her jumper to keep warm.

And of course it was the birthplace of the Bedford Singers.

The Stoke on Trent Bedford Singers began as the Bedford Girls Choir when, in 1945, May pulled together 14 girls from the chapel Sunday School to enter a Methodist music festival. They won and from those roots the Bedford Singers (named after the road in which the chapel stood) went on to become nationally and internationally renowned, winning the Llangollen International Eisteddfod on four occasions, a BBC Home Service choral competition and many other festivals.

The mixed voice choir was formed when the girls (they were always "girls" to May – even in their 70s!) asked if they could take their boyfriends and husbands on a trip to Cork International Choral Festival in the '60s. They won that competition too at their second attempt in 1965 - and memorably serenaded officers and passengers in the Customs Hall at Liverpool's Speke Airport on their return.

It was the sound that the choir produced, particularly the ladies, which won such acclaim.

Brian Hughes, the Welsh composer and choral conductor has paid this tribute, which conveys the essence of her achievement: "I never met May in person but I knew that the competition would be very tough if the Bedford Singers were entered. The sound was unique and unforgettable, as was the authority of the conductor. I felt I knew her through the music."

Of all their accolades, the one which May often said was her greatest experience was in 1954 at Huddersfield, that citadel of choral music, when the adjudicators said the choir had achieved such perfection that they refused to award any marks. Writing later about the performance, one of them, Alec Redshaw, said:

"The singing of her choir was just about the most shattering experience I have ever had. Their singing was of such beauty, so magnetic, that it simply swept one into its own being and held us all inescapably in its grip. It would have been sacrilege to presume to assess it by marks. There is no doubt that Miss Walley has some genius in her. Somehow I don’t think she belongs to this world at all. Not only has she searched for the truth and found it but she has taken the girls with her."

The choir was invited back to Huddersfield Town Hall to give a concert of their own about which the chairman of the Huddersfield Choral Society later remarked that of all the concerts he had heard in the town, one given by Yehudi Menuhin and the other by the Bedford Singers had pleased him most.

In the competitive choral singing arena, other choirs believed that the Bedford Singers’ success was due to the quality of its individual singers. Although there were always a few emerging as soloist material, most were unremarkable. Would-be members never underwent any formal auditions for the choir. May might hear a voice and recognise its potential and, it was often said, she could teach anyone to sing. She was however quite a formidable disciplinarian and her professionalism and unswerving determination to reach the highest standards were awe-inspiring. Former choristers report that if they phoned in to say they couldn’t come to practice for whatever reason, they were left feeling that their absence had sabotaged the whole rehearsal.

May demonstrated similar determination during her time at Newcastle High School. She had been asked in 1957 if she would stand in for a term at the all-male school, while they found another Music MASTER. At the end of the term, she was preparing to write all her pupils' reports when she was told that the school didn't give marks for music. It was seen simply as a recreation. She was not amused. Staff then learned that the headmaster had been "bearded in his den". Thereafter marks were awarded for music; and it became part of the curriculum. May subsequently stayed 17 years at the High School.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the High School in the ‘60s, May had the idea of performing Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream which had only recently been premiered. The publishers Boosey & Hawkes, however, flatly refused to release the musical scores. Undaunted, May took the issue to Benjamin Britten himself. She won his permission and his blessing and went on to stage certainly the first and probably the only ever amateur production of this most remarkable work. Although she left as a teacher in 1974, aged 65, her association with the school lasted well into her 80s.

May’s work at the High School can be seen as typical of her encouragement of talent and her belief that music is fundamental to our spiritual experience. This is the intangible part of her legacy, experienced by countless numbers of individuals in their private lives. The public legacy is the large number of people, pupils and choristers, that she encouraged and inspired and who went on to become successful musicians.

An important part of May’s contribution to the musical life of the Potteries was her championing of the work of modern composers, particularly but not exclusively that of Benjamin Britten.

Regular visits to the Aldeburgh Festival encouraged May’s enthusiasm for new music and inspired her to another venture, the creation of the Penkhull Festival.

Based on a parish church in a district of Stoke on Trent, the Penkhull Festival ran for 39 years. Her ethos with this was simple: to bring a breath of fresh air to the musical life of North Staffordshire with new music and new performers, and to give a platform, whenever possible, to new and local talent. Many young artists she introduced came back to Penkhull again and again, including Alfred Hodgson (contralto), Keith Swallow (pianist), James Bowman (counter-tenor), The Lindsay String Quartet and Yonty Solomon (pianist). James Bowman first met May at Aldeburgh as a young singer in the ‘60s. Speaking at her funeral, he said: "She told me, ‘you’re coming to sing with my choir’. It was not so much a statement as a command. I asked what we would sing and she said, ‘The Lark by Bernstein’. I’d never heard of it but that was her wonderful charm; you were presented with a fait accompli, including a piece you’ve never heard of, and it would take place no matter what. I sang it with the Bedford Singers twice. Penkhull became a fixture in my diary, I came nine or ten times. It was like coming home to a family, it was a festival with an English sense of tradition. May was wonderful, I loved her."

Ill health forced May to abandon the festival in 2005 but it was revived in 2008, using the same principles, by the young musician and conductor Greg Hallam and is thriving. Touchingly, the festival has James Bowman as its president.

Irene May Dulson – May Walley MBE, M.Mus, LRAM, ARCO - died on Sunday May 10, just six months short of her 100th birthday. Until a couple of weeks before her death she was still playing the piano for two hours every day.