See also
| Husband: | Arthur Beresford KING-SMITH (1931-2021) | |
| Wife: | Margaret Ede MORRISON (1932-1985) | |
| Marriage | Q2 1960 | Bathavon, Somerset, England |
| Name: | Arthur Beresford KING-SMITH | |
| Sex: | Male | |
| Father: | Philip KING-SMITH (1897-1971) | |
| Mother: | Rosemary BOUCHER (1905-1998) | |
| Birth | 10 Jun 1931 | Keynsham, Somerset, England |
| Residence | btw 2002 and 2021 (age 70-90) | Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, England |
| 8 South Parade | ||
| Death | 30 Sep 2021 (age 90) | |
| OBITUARY Beresford King-Smith, who died earlier this week at the age of 90, was an employee and chronicler of the CBSO for half of the Orchestra's entire history. Born near Bath in 1931, he left the family paper business to join the CBSO's management in January 1964. By the time he retired, in January 2014, he had served the Orchestra as Concert Manager, Deputy Chief Executive and latterly Honorary Archivist for an unprecedented (and unsurpassed) 50 years. Beresford joined the CBSO under the conductorship of Hugo Rignold, and took a hands-on role in the running of the orchestra from his very first day - fixing and managing the musicians, as well as organising extensive tours in Europe, both East and West of the Iron Curtain: a formidable task in an era before email or fax. Beresford handled the situation when Rignold was briefly arrested by Soviet border guards as a suspected spy during the 1968 Czechoslovakia tour, and negotiated with Yugoslavian officials when players were mistakenly detained during the 1972 Eastern Bloc tour. He played a leading role in the establishment of the CBSO Chorus in 1972; somehow he'd also found time to write the first official history of the CBSO in 1970, and to design the organisation's first ever logo. He was also the man on the spot in March 1978, when he arrived at work to find that both the general manager and the music director Louis Frémaux had resigned over the weekend. Beresford's professionalism as acting general manager steadied the CBSO in the most serious crisis of its postwar existence, and led to the appointment of Edward Smith as general manager and Simon Rattle as chief conductor - and all that followed. After serving as part of the team that implemented the expansion of the Orchestra in 1988 and the move to Symphony Hall in 1991, Beresford took early retirement in 1993 to write Crescendo!, the first full-length history of the CBSO, which was published by Methuen to mark the CBSO's 75th anniversary in 1995. He continued to work, unpaid, as the CBSO's Honorary Archivist for a further two decades and he was a familiar and friendly presence at CBSO Centre - creating a superb archive of CBSO documents and recordings, fielding public inquiries about the orchestra's history, and writing a regular history column in the CBSO's in-house magazine Music Stand, which he founded and (for many years) edited. Semi-retirement freed Beresford to involve himself even more deeply in the musical life of the West Midlands. He was a gifted composer and choral conductor and between 1955 and 1963, as founder of the (still active) Bath Cantata Group, he conducted pioneering performances of Schütz, Gabrieli and Monteverdi. Early music and choral music remained a passion after he moved to Birmingham. From his home in Sutton Coldfield, which he shared with his wife Margot and (after Margot's death of cancer in 1985) his second wife Kate (who died in 2017), he served as Chair of the Midlands Early Music Forum until 2004, and music director of the Circle Singers of Royal Leamington Spa. Beresford was a member of Sutton Coldfield United Reformed Church, and his faith inspired both his charitable work (he was a co-founder of the Christian African Relief Trust) and his compositions, which ranged from the choral Psalm Symphony (2005) to hymns, anthems, chamber musicals and carols – many of which have been performed in the CBSO's annual Christmas concerts. But to all who worked with him at the CBSO, he will be remembered principally as a wise, generous and utterly unflappable colleague; a living embodiment of the CBSO's history, and one of the quiet heroes of musica in the Midlands (and the wider UK) over a long life of devoted service to the art, and the community, that he loved. Richard Bratby |
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| Name: | Margaret Ede MORRISON | |
| Sex: | Female | |
| Father: | - | |
| Mother: | - | |
| Birth | 21 Nov 1932 | |
| Occupation | violinist; National Youth Orchestra1 | |
| Death | Sep 1985 (age 52) | Lichfield, Staffordshire, England |
Beresford King-Smith, leading light and guiding spirit of the CBSO for more than half a century.
Over the decades he filled various roles with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra-including acting as chauffeur to .Simon Rattle.
By Telegraph Obituaries, 10 October 2021.
Beresford King-Smith, who has died aged 90, was for more than 50 years a larger-than-life presence with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, serving as concert manager, administrator, acting chief executive and archivist; he also designed the orchestra’s first logo and wrote the official history, Crescendo!, which was published in 1995 to mark its 75th anniversary.
King-Smith-a bearded Father Christmas-like figure who often wore a comforting cardigan and had a bulging satchel under his arm-was calm and unflappable. He needed to be. When Louis Frémaux and Arthur Baker, the CBSO’s chief conductor and general manager respectively, departed abruptly one weekend in April 1978, it fell to King-Smith to pick up the pieces.
He and George Jonas, who headed the council of management, brought in Erich Schmid to hold the baton, while the arrival of Ed Smith as general manager five months later led to the appointment of a young Simon Rattle as music director in 1980. Over the next 18 years King-Smith often drove Rattle, who did not drive, from concert to concert, and he came to know the charismatic conductor well.
To many music lovers in the Midlands and beyond King-Smith was, after Rattle, the public face of the CBSO, giving talks about its work to clubs and societies. He recalled that after becoming archivist in 1993 he was given a document entitled “Birmingham and its Civic Managers 1928”. It included a series of headings that began “schools, finance” and ended with “sewers, mental defectives, cemeteries, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra”. As he told Nicholas Kenyon’s biography of Rattle: “So we’ve moved up a notch since then.”
Arthur Beresford King-Smith was born in Keynsham, near Bath, on June 10 1931, the younger of two sons of Philip King-Smith and his wife Rosemary (née Boucher); he was a cousin of Dick King-Smith, author of The Sheep Pig, which was made into the film Babe (1995).
He was educated at St Peter’s School, Weston-super-Mare, where Roald Dahl had been a pupil, and Sherborne School (School House), singing in the chapel choir each day. After National Service with the Royal Artillery in Gibraltar he started a degree at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but dropped out and joined the family business, Golden Valley Paper Mills, in Bitton, South Gloucestershire.
Meanwhile, he was becoming involved in local music groups, and in 1955 was the founding conductor of Bath Cantata Group, booking soloists such as Janet Baker, Alfred Deller and John Shirley-Quirk to appear with them. In 1964 he joined the CBSO, where he was responsible for the practical details of the orchestra’s concerts, ranging from setting up music stands and organising refreshments to ferrying soloists around the Midlands and further afield.
In 1968 he was on the orchestra’s tour of eastern Europe when Hugo Rignold, the conductor, was briefly arrested by Soviet border guards on suspicion of spying after they had performed in Czechoslovakia at the time of the Prague Spring uprising. Four years later he negotiated with the Yugoslav authorities when some of the players were detained during another tour, and in 1973 he helped to start the CBSO chorus directed by Gordon Clinton.
King-Smith, who was subsequently appointed deputy general manager and later deputy chief executive, took early retirement in 1993 to complete his history of the orchestra, expanding on a pamphlet he had written in 1970. He also became honorary archivist, remaining in that unpaid role until January 2014, by which time he had completed 50 years with the orchestra. A genial man who always had time for a chat, he was of assistance to this newspaper’s obituary writers on many occasions.
Away from his day job he was a committed singer, conductor and composer, including at Sutton Coldfield United Reformed Church, where he had worshipped since 1994. He had a strong faith, wrote two Christian musicals, and was involved in the founding of the Christian African Relief Trust, a charity based in Huddersfield that distributes food and clothes to areas of need in Africa.
He had a strong interest in early music, especially the works of JS Bach, and from 1988 to 2004 was chairman of the Midlands Early Music Forum, which puts on regular one-day workshops. His other performing groups included Merrie Madrigall, a semi-professional group of costumed singers that featured on Songs of Praise in July 1990; Quadro, a small instrumental group; and the Holborne Consort of Recorders, where he was known as “Uncle Beresford”.
In retirement he took on another chamber choir, the Circle Singers of Royal Leamington Spa, which provided fresh impetus for his own composing. In 2006 the Sutton Coldfield Choral Society gave the first performance of his Psalm Symphony, a work that incorporates the traditional calls of the Jewish shofar, or horn, and in 2019 he returned to the Bath Cantata Group to hear them perform that work. Beresford King-Smith married Margaret (Margot) Morrison, who had been a violinist in the National Youth Orchestra, in 1960 and subsequently set some of her Christian poetry to music. She died in 1985 and in 1991 he married Kate Lucas, who died in 2017. He had no children.
Arthur Beresford King-Smith, born June 10 1931, died September 28 2021.
From The Old Shiburnian Society web page.
| 1 | Peter Murray, Peter Murray. |