Alan Yorke-Long (1924–52) died of cancer about a fortnight after this letter was written. The child of Plymouth Brethren parents, Yorke-Long was an ebullient, joyful character, who planned to produce a comprehensive history of eighteenth-century court music, and seemed inexhaustible as he studied and wrote during long days at the British Museum. He renovated a mews house in Park Crescent Mews West, near the Regent’s Park and Broadcasting House, where he held evening concerts: he was a striking host, standing well over six feet tall, and proportionately broad, with an unruly shock of very fair hair. He also delivered BBC commentaries, and befriended music-lovers including Trevor-Roper’s brother Patrick (known as Pat), Edward Sackville-West, and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. His health failed before he could finish his book, fragments of which were published posthumously, with a preface by Pat Trevor-Roper, by Weidenfeld as Music at Court: Four Eighteenth-Century Studies in 1954. Hugh Trevor-Roper, who helped to prepare the book for publication, wrote the following letter to amuse a dying man.
Christ Church, Oxford
My dear Alan
I was very sorry not to see you the other day when I was in London,—especially as I afterwards heard that you didn’t have your treatment that afternoon after all; so I must write to you instead, being at the moment in Lincolnshire, where the churches (I find) all smell rather high: doubtless a residuary whiff of our old friend the Clerical Student of Ch. Ch.,1 who first preached the Word (incrusted indeed with a good deal of superstitious rubbish) to the web-toed inhabitants of these dismal marshes. How different, I am sure, was good old great-aunt Adelaide who, in her quiet distaff way, was no doubt a sound two-bottle-orthodox evangelical churchwoman (the two bottles being of home-brewed parsnip wine!).
Meanwhile, what gossip can I tell you from Oxford? Has Pat told you of the great Lewis Carroll trouvaille? If so, skip the next few paragraphs; if not, attend and I will expound.
The day I left Oxford for Constantinople there appeared in Ch. Ch. a drab-looking figure whose accent, accoutrements and nose all betrayed a Glaswegian origin: and indeed a little research soon revealed that he was in fact Prof. Norman Black, of that great university on the Clyde, the Athens—or should I say rather the Thebes—of the North.1 He was, he said, engaged on academic research; and when he elaborated further, it did indeed seem to me very academic indeed; for not only was he preparing a thesis on the subject (which in itself I regard as pitifully unpractical) of Proportional Representation, so dear to the hearts of Liberals, Common-wealthsmen,2 Plymouth Brethren, & other minorities; but he was particularly seeking to rediscover for posterity a particularly abstruse form of Proportional Representation mathematically devised, anno 1870 or thereabouts, by Lewis Carroll, as a suggested method of electing Students of Ch. Ch. However, even the Students of Ch. Ch. thought it too academic for actual use, and it was rejected by a few unanimous canonical snorts, and the precious secret was, as it seemed, lost in everlasting oblivion…
But no, for we have forgotten Prof. Black. This tiresome scholar (not to put too fine a point on the matter) nagged away like a gadfly, if I may mix a metaphor or two, until the Clerk of the Ch. Ch. Treasury, exasperated by his importunity, ultimately agreed rather testily to open a dusty old crate on which tenant-farmers had been accustomed, on visits to their landlord, to deposit their sheepdogs, saddles, wives, vegetable-marrows and the other usual impedimenta of bucolic life. And what was discovered therein? What indeed but a couple of thousand or so MSS in the holograph of Lewis Carroll, the value of which, in America, has now been estimated at some £30,000.
But who, you naturally ask, is the owner of this rich cache? The answer is simple. Lewis Carroll deposited these documents in his capacity not of Student of Ch. Ch., or of C. L. Dodgson tout court, but of Curator of the Senior Common Room. Ergo, the documents belong exclusively to the S.C.R. Therefore the proceeds cannot constitutionally be used for any such improper purpose as, for instance, educating the proletariat, or buying incense for cathedral, but must be invested in port! Think of the debates about to break out now at the crowded SCR meeting specially summoned to discuss this important topic on the very first day of term! I particularly look forward to the painful dilemma of Mich. Foster.1 What course will he advocate? Keep the papers as treasured exhibits? But how often has he inveighed against any suggestion that Ch. Ch. should add to its store of books, pictures, MSS, furniture, or any other dangerous reminders of those insidious and pernicious pursuits, so rightly condemned by St Gregory and other Fathers of the Church, Culture and Learning! Sell them at market rates? But might we not then be in danger of elevating our standard of living on the proceeds, and thus causing grievous offence to Almighty God? It is a sad quandary for the old bird. I expect he will advocate burning the lot, as useless vanities, in a great bonfire in Tom Quad, like Savonarola,2—and yet might there not then, as in the case of that tiresome Florentine killjoy, be, in the same place, a little later, another bonfire…? But I think Michael Foster would like to be burnt—he would enjoy both the pain and the opportunities of forgiving them as knowing not what they do….
I hear that you, with exquisite 18th century elegance, are choosing your own epitaph. May I take part in this competition and offer this lapidary but, I hope, premature inscription:
Here lies
Alan Yorke-Long
a Scholar
Whose intimate knowledge of Operatic Music
at the Courts of Europe
was, alas!
unseasonably required
at the Court of Heaven
or do you prefer Latin, marble’s language as the poet affectedly expresses it?1
Sub hoc Tumulo
Alanum Yorke-Long
in sectam Fratrum Plymouthianorum natum
post vitam epicuream
et mortem scepticam
Anglicanissime sepelierunt
Amici insolabiles.2
I am getting pretty facile at this branch of art, for although I began this letter in the flats of Lincolnshire, I am now finishing it among the disconsolate ruins of Jedburgh Abbey; although the inscription on the tombs of Cheviot shepherds are, I pique myself, less exquisitely turned than those compositions of mine.
I hope you are comfortable. Get better; and I shall visit you, if you will see me, on my return to the South.
yours ever
Hugh