Memory is a trickster, especially when it comes to trying to write a little personal history. A great deal enters the brain but sinks until it is forced to the surface unexpectedly, not necessarily when required. A sound or visual stimulus, even a smell, will often prompt a total, vivid recall -- I re-visit Norwich two or three times a year, having left the city forty years ago, -which revives precise recollections of what it was like to be a chorister fifty years ago in the time of Dr Statham. In the course of twenty four months I probably visit as many cathedrals; I frequent Bristol and Gloucester, Wells and Exeter, Oxford and Winchester. Often it is the sound of the organ, or of the choristers practising as I walk through the cloister: an experience I share with Milton. Sometimes I have the chance at the end of a day's teaching or studying in a cathedral to stay for evensong, and collapse, foot-weary, and hear the choir sing familiar psalms to familiar chants, then perhaps Statham in D followed by Wesley's 'Wilderness'. For a moment as I sit there my voice resumes its unbroken treble, and I experience again the anxieties and joys of singing in a small choir where every voice has a crucial part. But when I come back to Norwich Cathedral I tend to notice things that have changed since I was a boy. I don't like the way the chairs and stalls under the tower have been re-arranged: I preferred it when the stall-fronts and the deep seats with misericords were aligned with those of the choir. In fact the present arrangement of the choir stalls in tiers dates back exactly a century; many details of the re-ordering of the eastern part of the Cathedral are recorded in  the introductory chapter of Dean Lefroy's Echoes from the Choir of Norwich Cathedral (1884) This written record is supplemented by a painting of the re-opening of the choir in 1894 which is reproduced in Herbert Leeds' Norwich Cathedral past and Present (1910) Happily my own knowledge of what it was like to be a chorister at Norwich goes back even earlier than this, because during the years that I was a chorister I was under the dominant influence of one of my grandfathers, Walter Quinton (born 1869), a huge character who had been a chorister in the High Victorian period. I have his signed copy of a Service of Evensong according to the Use of Norwich, dated 1883. Over fifty years later than this grandfather still maintained his connections with the music of the cathedral, especially by singing a bold bass in the Nave Choir for the services on Sunday evenings. Grandfather Quinton had many well-rehearsed stories of life as a chorister, and of such characters as the legendary Dr Buck, a famed trainer of choir boys. Dr Buck's pool of talent was wide, including boys from many of the choirs then so important in many of the parish churches of the city. One of his famed innovations was a curious wooded device designed to ensure that his boys opened their mouths widely enough to let the sound out; Dr Statham had an equivalent - as one was singing he was apt to come up to one, even in the middle of a service, even in the middle of a solo, and stick two fingers between one's clenched teeth. Dr Statham's finger nails were very memorable, lobster like, heavily corrugated. I was always amazed that such blue-pink crustaceous fingers could move so lively across the key-board, so that grizzled a man could still dance across the pedals of the organ with such speed and precision. Grandfather had much to tell too of Dr Statham's predecessor, Dr Frank Bates. I still have his references for my grandfather as he applied for various posts as lay clerk, including for one at Southwell which he got: 'an exceptionally fine bass ....a good sight reader.... well educated as a Chorister at Norwich ...' His copy of Acis and Galatea with ' O Ruddier than the Cherry' ending on a triumphant high G gives one impression of his vocal prowess; an arrow to the lower octave for the 'Worm' in Haydn's Creation gives another. Dr Bates wrote an autobiography, Reminiscences of a Musician in Retirement (1930) in which are produced signed photos of Deans whose names were familiar to me. There is a photo of Dr Bates resplendent in his robes as a TCD Doctor of Music: how, in his turn, Dr Statham basked in his boys' admiration when he put on his own damask ivory and scarlet Cambridge Doctor of Music gown to lead us in procession round the ambulatory on a major festival. The photograph of us repeatedly reproduced in Jarrolds guidebooks to the Cathedral is only in black and white, but Dr Statham knew that his gown outshone the copes of the Dean and Canons behind us. The procession around the ambulatory which I best remember is not the one posed for the photographer but the one before the early communion service one Christmas Day when the only lights we had (because of black-out regulations) were hand-held electric torches. What Cathedral choristers wear is a rather specialist area in costume history: in his autobiography Dr Bates records changes which affected what I wore. Going back further, the photos which I have of grandfather Quinton and his fellow Choristers, under the eye of Dr Buck, standing in the cloister show all the boys dressed the same, in cassocks with twenty large buttons; all of them hold mortar boards, an item of dress long-since discarded by the boys, though canons still carried them until after I left. All the boys have long tassels on the ends of their knotted belts; when I was a chorister there was by then only a single such belt and tassels; it was by then well-worn, fastened with hooks and eyes and was passed on with significant solemnity to the boy next senior to the four monitors. Another photo shows Dr Buck, grandfather Quinton and the other boys in long surplices with flowing sleeves. In my time, such extravagantly cut surplices denoted that one had been admitted as a full chorister; until one had been admitted chorister, one's surplice was short. We have a photo, taken of course in the cloister, of myself as chorister and of my brother in a short surplice, indicative of inferior status. It was Dr Bates'   'fourth Dean'  -  so he described Dean Beeching, - who re-instated (when did it originate, I wonder ?)  'the old form of gown with bands and ruffles now worn by senior choristers'. On weekdays the colour for cassocks was purple, but on feast days and Sundays it was that extra-ordinary cherry pink which has now achieved artistic immortality in the image created as an L.N.E.R. poster, now produced as a nostalgic postcard. This shows the choir in 1938 processing in the north walk of the cloister towards the Priors' Door. It was during my time as a chorister that the warm felt slippers, black on the outside, red on the inner, all finally disintegrated, partly through being used as missiles, and have not I think been replaced. By now I feel that all visitors to Cathedrals ought to be forced to hire similar slippers to save historical floor tiles and ledger stones. When I first started, - Blyth (not Tony, but another ) was one ? - a few boys still sported Eton jackets and pin stripes, but these were soon superseded by grey shorts and black blazers encircled with black and white piping to echo the Priory shield, a black cross on white. Schoolboys' uniform must be amongst the most ephemeral of historic costumes, but my brother still has his cap, though it naturally is too small for him now. It was made by H. Rumsey Wells of Doggie Cap Fame, whose St Andrew Street shop with its array of military helmets was a special delight. It was on 13th June 1942, soon after the two major Blitz raids, that mother took me for my voice trial. We sat in the Choir School which still looked as it does in the photo of a decade or more earlier in Dr Bates' book; the desks were in rows, iron-framed, with lids of their boxes well-carved with initials. The room is a great tunnel, two bays deep; like the similar room at Gloucester, recently restored, it used to serve as a parlour where the monks could meet visitors. Since 1971 it has been taken over as the Cathedral Shop. I don't admire Cathedral Shops very much, though I suppose that one day I shall look back on current Cathedral kitsch as 'antique'  as I do at my grandfather's mauve egg cup with a view of the spire. But it can't even be said that the new arrangements suit visitors very well:  recently I overheard an old dear ask, as a volunteer tried to cope with the till, 'Which way is the Cathedral?'  I wanted to say 'Not that way -- go through the door and through the cloister; that's the proper way!'  That's the way we and countless generations before us went, so why ever was it thought necessary to cut through an eight hundred year wall just to speed the day - tripper? When I come back to the Cathedral, re - incarnated, I shall block up those horrible openings. It was in the present shop, now so packed with silly things for silly people, that my life as a chorister began. One by one we were asked to stand by the piano, offer a scale or two and a verse of 'There is a green hill.' I remember a plump boy, wearing a black and red school cap which I thought was striking; his plump mother made sure that the Doctor realised that Francis was his surname and his Christian name  Kevin. He was in the event one of the group of six to be selected; we joined the choir on 24th August, St Bartholomew's day, 1942. The limit of our horizon was widened, as we cycled to each other's houses - to Earlham, Trowse, Sprowston ( Regions of Norwich)  No one's parents had a car!  Kevin's father, whom I remember as a funny, philosophic man, was a chemist, and the source of supply in the days of sweet rationing of tiny black liquorice cough  sweets called Negroids, passed from one sticky hand to the next. At first, as probationers we sat at the lowest end of the choir, or sometimes, when we hadn't yet learned the music, rather self -consciously under the tower. When we began, the four monitors sang at each corner of the choir, leading us in and out of services, but one Friday evening, during the rehearsal of the music for the following Sunday, Dr Statham moved the monitors into the middle of the two rows, and then arranged us in order of rank to get the fullest sound from the centre of the choir. Where one stood was very important, for singing together next an older boy educated one and cemented friendships -- next to Adams, and  Jack Castle and John Mason ---   Half the world is forever Decani, and the others still Cantoris! The experience of being in the choir was mainly of relentless repetition, with occasional surprises. One of the boys, David Huke was (still is, I presume) a brilliant musician, but addicted to such groups as the Ink Spots. Huke (we tended to use surnames or nicknames, like China, the origin of which was never clear) would frequently play his sort of music on the grand piano before practice began -- until interrupted by the smiling Dr Statham: 'Great talent but complete lack of taste!' One day, Dickey (for that was Dr Heathcote Dicken Statham's nickname) came in with a new piece of music which he thought we might like to hear -- the fugue from Britten's    'Young Person's Guide' After nine o'clock practice, we sang matins  three or four times a week; evensong daily, with full practice with the Lay Clerks on Wednesdays and Fridays; evensong at half past three on Saturdays meant we never saw Norwich City (football team)  Holidays were short -- inside a week after Christmas and Easter, three weeks (two sundays) in August. Every month we were given a 'months money,' half a guinea (Fifty two and a half pence) which was divided between the 22 boys on a sliding scale devised by the senior boys who got ten pence (5 p) against tuppence for a Probationer. Other fees were still on the scale which grandfather remembered as being current in his youth -- two guineas for 'singing in' a canon. Funerals were preferred to weddings since the undertaker would always pay up while  some best  men claimed to have no cash to hand. If a solo went well, one of the Lay Clerks, particularly Mr Shackleton, would slip one a half crown (twelve and a half new pence)  and once or twice Dickey did the same. An extra fee could be claimed by the Head Chorister for going to fetch the Bishop -- in my time the aristocratic Percy Mark Herbert -- from his Palace and bring him through his own private door in the north transept into the Cathedral. I'm sure there's something wrong with the effigy of the Founder, Herbert de Losinga, now it has been removed from its proper position and placed in the ambulatory: he shouldn't be wearing huge boots but be treading on coiled beasts. After the early celebrations on major feasts we were taken out for a full breakfast, usually at the Maid's Head  (an old coaching Inn / hotel within 150 metres of the Cathedral)  which was  "stuffy", but sometimes to Gundry White's (in Queen's Street), which smelled of stale beer and cigars One Christmas we were distributed between all the Cathedral staff; it was so cold that Mrs Statham, to my ill-concealed mirth, cooked and ate breakfast wearing her fur coat. I also had to cope with the memory of one of my grandfather's stories, of Dr Buck putting his solo boy into a separate room so he would know what he had eaten before his solo, but the boy didn't fancy porridge and poured it into the piano. Dr Statham usually saw the amusing side of life. My parents asked how I was doing as his 'book boy,' making sure he had the correct music for each service: 'I've known worse.' His highest praise came as he passed on a critic's comment:  two or three of us had sung from the organ loft down a Nave full of audience, and been described as 'that excellent lady soprano' -- the sort of compliment which would have pleased Dr Buck, one of who's pupils, Edward Bunnett, commemorated by a plaque in St Andrew's Hall, sang the contralto line in the Elijah trio with Charlotte Dolby and non other than Jenny Lind in 1849. Alas, we never made a record: today's choir is probably on video. Yet it is good fortune that posterity needed not know that I had as recurrent failure in producing the high note at the appropriate moment in 'And sorrow and shall sighing flee away.' The Choir school had a coke fire, lit for us before we arrived by Hardy, a Dickensian little man whom we teased. Canon Parr who taught the upper class used to lift the skirt of his cassock to warm his backside by the fire. He taught me Latin which later teachers let me forget. He wore an elegant boot. Upstairs (now the refrectory 2002) the juniors were taught, from a high - chaired desk by Miss Bagge Scott, whose father had been an artist and Dutch; so we prayed for the Queen of the Netherlands (and for the Emperor of Ethiopia), and like Winston Churchill learned geography by remembering the map of New Zealand. A school with 22 pupils and two teachers could not of course satisfy the stringency's of school inspectors and it closed in 1951, so all, not just the chosen few, became choral scholars in the 'Grammar School' While the school was still in existence we were in fact regularly inspected by the Dean, D.H.S. Cranage in apron and gaiters. He too wrote an autobiography, Not only a Dean (1952) but managed to do so without mentioning the choir. He used to tell us about the Cathedral as a building, and would show us around, often with Mr Whittingham, the Cathedral architect, in the group. It is a happy coincidence to discover that in the 1930's Dean Cranage taught (as I do now, 1994) courses on Cathedral architecture to Extra Mural classes at Bristol University. As I learned much from Dean Cranage, even though he was so  remote a figure, as I did too from the Precentor, A.G.G. Thurlow, who first interested me in Italian renaissance art by showing us his films of visits to Florence. In the 1940's the Precentor was still locking boys in cupboards, as Dr Buck is reported as having done, but the habit was abandoned when my brother resented the incarceration and kicked his way through the door. Under Michael Nicholas the choir's horizons are unrestricted;  twice they have sung their way round the USA. Our minds were opened during the war by the USAAF ; the Bishops Palace was a rest centre for the air crews, and we had American Lieutenants as supernumerary layclerks. We went to sing carols to the airman, in the Palace and out on the air bases, coming home with gifts of sweets and gum, and a selection of ammunition, all carefully drilled and made safe. We watched the bombers leave, and as we cycled into school in the morning could see the tell-tale gaps in the squadrons. Occasionally we were bombed. Once we watched as a plane came over low, its bomb bay open, and piled under the grand piano; 'Never mind,' said Canon Parr, 'its going to hit the Congregational Church.' It did. One of the first signs of a change in the tide of the war was being shown a headline and a map by Mr Jones, the Decani Bass:  the allies had captured Pantelleria. There were increasingly frequent huge services in the Nave, and we learned to save our voices while the organ dragged along the military singing rude words to patriotic hymns. To celebrate the end of the war a major concert was arranged, and after many hours we were ready to sing our piece, accompanied by a full-scale symphony orchestra -- Vaughan Williams if I remember right. The concert was in the Nave, and it was our honour to file in to sing, standing in a row between the orchestra and the audience, in the front of which were the elderly Queen Mary and the young Princess Margaret. With the end of the war, concerts resumed in St Andrew's Hall instead of the Nave. One surprise was Verdi's Requiem, but even more memorable was a performance of Messiah, a work we could judge since so much of it was in our repertoire. The performance was conducted by Dr Statham, and  as the tenor soloist was indisposed, Mr Shackleton took his place. We were all introduced to one of the  lady soloists and then listened, amazed: Kathleen Ferrier. Other traditions were revived, including the Three Choirs Festivals, with Peterborough and Ely. At Ely I first made friends with another ex-chorister from Norwich, Mr Franklin, who of course knew grandfather. Over the next decades Mr Franklin always welcomed me at Ely, and let me clamber to parts of the building other beers do not reach, even to the top of the octagon. When I went down to Chichester to do National Service, the Dean there welcomed me and made me help guide my fellow conscripts round the Cathedral: he had known Dr Statham as a young organ scholar. Years later I met our old Precentor, A G.G. Thurlow, in retirement at Chichester, and he pulled a string to get me and some of my class into the Bishops Palace Chapel to see that lovely wall-painting of the Madonna; in the meantime Thurlow had been Dean of Gloucester, and I remembered him last summer (1993) as I stood on the roof of the presbytery at Gloucester inspecting the stonework and leading just as we did when he took us to exactly comparable parts of Norwich Cathedral. Many of the other members of the Cathedral clergy are happily remembered. Dean Holland, with whom I kept in contact for many years, even when he had retired to Mull -- and whose ashes are in the ambulatory -- left me his grandfather clock. When I hear the prayers at Evensong 'Lighten our Darkness ...' the intonation or the length of a pause reminds me of voices long stilled: the boom of a Precentor's litany voice is something special. I haven't heard the Commination Service for half a century. Canon Clayton held the speed record for getting through evensong, and when he was blind-folded after operations on his eyes, his pace slacked not at all. Canon Busby would be led to the lectern, push  up his gold rimmed glasses onto his shiny bald head encircled by silver curls, and recite, rather than read, the lesson with a slight lisp..' Do men gather grapes of thornss, or figss of thistlesss ? 'We all grew up on the bible; at the barbers shop which grandfather and all the choristers patronised there was a message on the mirror: REMEMBER ABSALOM. As I begin a new term teaching first-year undergraduates I am to lead what we call a 'remedial course'  on Christian Iconography, basically what is the bible, what is in it? For one session, on the Nativity and Passion and on Typology, the set text is the  Gospel of St Matthew; the critical commentary I use is that by Canon F.W. Green, whom I remember not so much for being a New Testament scholar but as being patron of the Choir football team. 'Mention my name' was one of my grandfather's phrases. Mention Statham, Cranage , Thurlow -- no door is closed. One wet September three of us -- China , Huke  and myself -- were allowed a week off to cycle to visit three  Cathedrals -- Lincoln, Southwell and Peterborough. I still travel in the same pursuit and get the same welcome wherever I go. Michael Quinton Smith. 1994.                                     Article from   ECHOES MAINLY MUSICAL               from     NORWICH AND AROUND          Local Studies                for        Michael Nicholas Organist at Norwich Cathedral          1971- 1994    Edited by Christopher Smith                   COPYRIGHT © THE SOLEN PRESS NORWICH. 1994                ALL RIGHTS RESERVED