I don’t have as much information as I’d like about my father’s early life. The start of his musical career is sketchily documented and I don’t remember him talking about that period much. Much of his first musical training was from his father, and included, as we’ve seen, serving as organist and choirmaster for at least one local church.

He attended Maidstone Grammar School, and the age of 13 he became a pupil of the music master there, H.F. Henniker Mus.Doc., ARAM (Associate of the Royal Academy of Music), and acted as his deputy organist. He passed with honours the musical theory section of the Cambridge University Senior Examination, and obtained his LTCL (Licentiate of Trinity College London). There is mention of conducting successful choirs in New Hythe, and he taught for a time at Wateringbury School (in Kent), at that time one of the leading schools for music in England. I think the photograph below may show him attired for conducting.

If this all sounds rather driven and singleminded, he did have other interests. I don’t know whether he actually played tennis or whether the racquet in the photograph below is just for show, but he definitely was a keen footballer (the game that until recently many of us called soccer). In fact I believe he played for Kent. He used to chuckle about of an account of one of his team’s games in a local paper, which spoke of “Oliver’s educated toe”.

He also made no secret of his youthful admiration for Sybil Thorndike, the daughter of the vicar of nearby Aylesford. He was able to meet her again years later when as actress Dame Sybil she and her actor husband Sir Lewis Casson toured New Zealand, and they shared many reminiscences.

All the places mentioned so far are within quite a small radius of his birthplace, Eccles. But in 1911 or 1912 he left for Canada.Was the picture below taken on that occasion? If so, Uncle Bernard would have been in his early teens, which looks about right. Stanley would have been in his eary 20s.

There are frustratingly incompletenotes on the back, in writing I don’t recognise (perhaps Jesse Hawkes’):
Mother, born January 14 1826.
Leah Harry Stanly (sic) Berni
Garden at Fair …

Why did Stanley go to Canada? Perhaps he wanted new and bigger opportunities. He was certainly influenced by his three Hawkes uncles who had made the journey years before, John, Allen and Arthur. And perhaps, like those uncles before him, he was also getting away from the restrictive Methodist beliefs of some of is family and the conflicts they caused.

Note: the documents referenced above, and many others that will be referred to later, are now in the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

Sources
The above is partly based on articles in the Montreal Star and a publicity release by Alma College (St Thomas, Ontario) when he held a teaching position there, with a little help from Wikipedia about some of the people and places.

Next