Sitting sleepily amid the green, rolling Warwickshire hills, Tanworth-in-Arden is a rural idyll which the twentieth century seems to have passed by. Visiting Tanworth in the sunshine, as traffic thunders along the M42 in the distance, far away enough not impinge on the calm, you half expect to see Miss Marple hastening to investigate a murder at the vicarage, or Mrs Miniver preparing another batch of jam for the church Bring & Buy.
The centre of Tanworth is a tiny village green, in the middle of which stands the parish War Memorial. The green is bordered on one side by the Bell Inn, and on the other by the parish church of St Mary Magdalene. Even the present incumbent, Canon Martin Tunnicliffe, is baffled as to why a small village like Tanworth should merit such a disproportionately large place of worship. A new school now stands next to the church, the cottages by the Green are perhaps more conspicuously gentrified, and the village garage boasts names other than that of nearby Rover; but otherwise little in the village appears to have changed in the forty-five years since Rodney Drake brought his family back from Burma to settle in this tranquil corner of England.
Barely a dozen miles away is Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare too left to find his fortune in London, but returned to end his days in the Warwickshire village of his childhood. Nowadays the contrast between Stratford and Tanworth could not be greater. Stratford is virtually a Shakespeare Theme Park, stuffed with Bardic mementoes, tea rooms and Ye Olde Antique Shoppes. Tanworth remains undiscovered, its few pilgrims drawn by the music of Nick Drake.
Just a handful of miles north of Tanworth begins the scabrous urban sprawl of Birmingham. The coal-black industrial heart of Britain is the nation’s second city, but lacks London’s charm and glamour. Motorways circle the city, turning it into a concrete compound, caught in the Spaghetti Junction of spiralling concrete loops which carry traffic past the city. Aptly enough, given the city’s engineering tradition, this was the first place in Britain where the car took priority over human beings. It was to here that Rodney Drake travelled to work each day.
Far Leys, the beautiful brick-built house in Tanworth where the Drakes settled in 1952, was bought from a Mr Stanton, a BBC director of music, who had purchased the property during the 1940s. The house stands back slightly from the road, on a lane on the outskirts of the village. Although large, it had the friendly feel of an extremely comfortable, rambling, family home, rather than an air of great elegance. At the front a wooden gate with the house name painted on it, stood open, while at the back french windows opened on to a small terrace and then the garden: a huge expanse of lawn surrounded by shrubs and trees which merged into the countryside beyond.
One hint of exoticism which the Drake family imported to Tanworth was their Burmese maid, who came to Britain with the family to act as nanny to Nick and Gabrielle. Otherwise, Far Leys was a typically English household, decorated and furnished by the Drakes in the traditional way. The house was cosy and homely, not ostentatious or particularly stylish; pieces of furniture collected during their life together were kept for their familiarity and comfort. It would remain their family home for forty years.
Gabrielle has nothing but happy memories of growing up in leafy Tanworth. The Drakes were a close family, and from their parents both children inherited a love of music of all sorts. Molly Drake played the piano and sang, and once composed a whole suite of children’s songs for Nick and Gabrielle. During the 1930s, when suave sophisticates such as Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, Al Bowlly and Jack Hylton, were giving the American crooners a run for their money, Molly had even turned her hand to a little amateur songwriting. It is generally accepted that Nick inherited his musical gifts from his mother, but Gabrielle remembers that Rodney also composed, once writing an entire comic operetta about an Englishman who was based out East.
In 1985 Gabrielle, by this time an actress, told TV Times, ‘It was an idyllic childhood,’ adding: ‘It was exciting living abroad, but the really wonderful thing was coming back to England – seeing snow for the first time and being able to drink water straight from the tap. I remember thinking that was extraordinary.’
When, that same year, the American writer T.J. McGrath interviewed Rodney and Molly Drake at Far Leys, he asked them about Nick’s childhood. ‘Well,’ said Rodney, ‘he was always very fond of listening to music’. The voice is bright and well-enunciated, a voice of authority, upper-middle-class, worn and shiny like a much-used cricket bat. The pride in his only son’s achievements shines through.
‘As a baby he was always conducting,’ added Molly, ‘whenever the music started. He always said he was going to be a famous conductor.’ Rodney remembered Nick being frightened as a child by a piece by Sibelius, The Swan Of Tuonela. Written in 1895, the tone poem had its origins in the Finnish epic which tells of the young hero Lemminkäinen, who journeys to the North Country in search of a wife and dies in the attempt, but is brought back to life by the magical powers of his mother. Sibelius used a solitary cor anglais to represent the swan, which glides on the black waters that surround Tuonela, the land of the dead.
‘He was very fond of classical music. He listened to a lot …’ Rodney continued sadly. ‘I don’t know about the early days, but going right to the very end, the night before he died, he was listening to one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.’
When I asked Gabrielle Drake about growing up with Nick, she spoke of the sheer joy of their childhood together at Tanworth: ‘We came to live in England when Nick was about four and I was eight … My dad was offered a job in Birmingham, and if you served out in the Far East, you had to retire earlier, so he knew he was looking for somewhere to settle over here. We were a very close-knit family, a very happy family. I had a most wonderful childhood … Nick and I were sort of opposites, we never had rivalry. I always used to think that Nick was a great deal more talented than I was. I was devoted to him. As we grew up, I became terribly proud of him.’
Once settled in Tanworth, Nick and Gabrielle grew up, safe and prosperous, insulated and content, in the calmly Conservative Britain of the 1950s. Gabrielle remembers Nick composing songs even at this very early age: ‘When he was three or four, two of his great passions were cowboys and food. I can remember two songs he wrote then, one was a song about a cowboy in a book, called “Cowboy Small”: “Oh Cowboy Small, Oh Cowboy Small/All the other cowboys, call Cowboy Small”. The other song was about celery and tomatoes.’
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan took the opportunity of a booming economy to remind the nation that they had ‘never had it so good’. Consumer durables were the tangible proof, and cars, television sets and record players were beginning to be visible across the strata of British society. Further highly visible evidence of the boom came with the advent of commercial television in 1955. Besides breaking the BBC’s stranglehold, ITV offered the public the opportunity to view, in their own home, advertisements telling them just what was available out there to buy. Many feared it was the end of civilization as they knew it. But for the Conservatives, such manifest prosperity ensured an uninterrupted span of government lasting from 1951 until 1964.
The Empire which Rodney Drake and myriad other loyal servants had so diligently served was withering. The demands for independence which followed the end of the war had persisted long into the 1950s, and Macmillan was enough of a realist to discern the ‘wind of change’ sweeping through the African continent. The final flourish of Imperial dignity, and the stagnant end of Empire came in 1956, when Nick was eight. A joint Anglo-French invasion set out to destabilize Egypt’s President Nasser, following his nationalization of the Suez Canal. It ended in a humiliating defeat.
The Suez débâcle occurred the same year that John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger opened in London. Railing against the values around which men like Rodney Drake had built their whole lives, the play was a clarion call to disaffected ‘Angry Young Men’, and the effect was seismic. Nineteen fifty-six also marked the first British sighting of an alien from a planet called Tupelo, Mississippi. It was the year the writing was first sprayed on the wall, the year the English middle classes were all shook up by the two-pronged attack of John Osborne and Elvis Presley.
Little of this sneering, urban rebelliousness percolated to secluded Tanworth-in-Arden. Asked about Nick’s youthful musical influences, Gabrielle grimaced: ‘Well, we are talking about our childhoods, and of course it sounds ridiculous now, but someone like Russ Conway was a great favourite of Nick’s, because Nick used to play the piano a lot as a little boy. We both had piano lessons.’
Rock ’n’ roll was barely tolerated by the BBC. The Drake family listened in to an old-fashioned radio which eventually wound up in Nick’s bedroom, and the music which issued forth was safe and unthreatening: Pearl Carr & Teddy Johnson, Frankie Vaughan, Russ Conway, Ruby Murray … For Nick and Gabrielle, Saturday morning was a favourite time to cluster round the radio, for Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites on the Light Programme. For two hours, songs like ‘Champion The Wonder Horse’, ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Nellie The Elephant’, ‘A Windmill In Old Amsterdam’ and ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ kept the nation’s infants mesmerized. It was all very consoling, seated safely at the knee of Auntie BBC.
British cinema in the 1950s was no less cosy. Thousands of schoolboys like Nick Drake grew up with a fiercely nationalist film industry. Incapable of dealing with the painful legacy of a lost Empire, it dwelt instead on the celebration of a war well won. Films like The Dam Busters, Reach For The Sky, The Wooden Horse, The Cruel Sea and The Colditz Story, seemed so much more reassuring than the ugly questions posed by Teddy Boys, Elvis Presley and the botched imperialism of Suez.
Well into the seventies the final cinema performance of the night would conclude with the audience standing, more or less to attention, for the National Anthem; but by then the comforting, flickering, black-and-white images of steaming mugs of cocoa and duffle-coats were already period pieces. Gritty Northern realism had subverted the mainstream: the male icons of the mid-sixties were Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, not Richard Todd and Kenneth More. The new role models questioned and challenged the status quo, rather than epitomizing established values.
Rock ’n’ roll also created ripples in Britain during the late fifties, but the stone had been dropped a very long way away and the ripples were still very faint. Few authentic rock ’n’ rollers appeared in Britain during that decade – Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were the best-remembered. Jerry Lee Lewis’s tour was cut short after it was revealed that he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin, and Elvis never made it beyond Prestwick Airport in Scotland, where his plane touched down to refuel while taking him home from military service in Germany.
The soundtrack of South Pacific remained at the top of the UK LP charts from their inauguration in 1958 until March 1960; another popular long-player featured numbers from George Mitchell’s Black & White Minstrel Show. For all the hip, café-society image of the nineties’ Easy Listening revival, the real sugary root of that ghastly phenomenon lay in the singalong pulp which constituted the pre-Beatles, musical dark ages.
Home-grown rock ’n’ roll — on television and in the still thriving variety halls – was essentially a novelty act, a bill-filler put on to placate teenagers between juggling and comedy acts. For all the inroads made by Cliff Richard & The Shadows, Johnny Kidd & The Pirates, Joe Brown, Billy Fury and producer Joe Meek, ‘all-round entertainment’ was still the name of the game in Britain as the fifties lapped, like a slow tide on a pebble peach.
In the spring of 1957, at the age of eight, Nick was sent away to prep school at Sandhurst in Berkshire. Until then he had lived at home and attended local primary schools, but for the next five years, holidays apart, Eagle House School would be home. He did well at the school, becoming a prefect, and eventually, in his final term, Head Boy. Already Nick was proving to be an ‘outstanding’ athlete, and gained his colours as a ‘fine wing three-quarter’ for the rugby XV. He was in the school choir, and at thirteen, even appeared in the school play, playing ‘Jack Pincher, a detective’ in the old favourite The Crimson Coconut by Ian Hay.
Twenty-six years after Nick left Eagle House, his former headmaster, Paul Wootton, wrote that he remembered Nick ‘for his fine voice as a leading member of the Chapel choir’. Mr Wootton also mentioned ‘another master … who just may have had some influence on the career in music of Nicholas Drake. This French teacher earned fame, particularly among the boys, for having come second in the Eurovision Song Contest with his song “Looking High, High, High”.’
Rodney Drake remembered a school report from Eagle House, which he found not long after Nick died: ‘He was a very strong character at school, they always said in the reports we got … His first school, he left it when he was just under fourteen, and he was Head of that school, and they said he was a very strong character. In the report, which I’ve still got, the Headmaster said: “Nobody knows him very well.” ’
At the end of the Christmas term of 1961 Nick Drake left Eagle House for the last time. After the Christmas holidays he would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and travel the sixty or so miles from Tanworth down to Wiltshire, to study at Marlborough College. As much a product of his heredity as of his times, Nick thought it only natural to attend a fee-paying public school.
The Duke of Wellington was disingenuous when he claimed that ‘the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’. Like all subsequent military victories, it was won in the slum lean-tos and back-to-back squalor of British cities; in the hamlets and shires of rural England. The officers who blithely but bravely led their troops over the top may well have learned their pluck at Eton (or Marlborough, Harrow, Rugby or Dulwich), but the ‘poor bloody infantry’ certainly didn’t.
The public-school ethos, based almost entirely on a belief in ‘playing the game’, drew its strength from tradition and continuity. And so it was always understood that N.R. Drake would follow his father and grandfather to Marlborough. It may seem incongruous that someone as enshrined in rock legend as Nick Drake should have had such an establishment upbringing, but quite simply, that is what he was born to. Ironically, Paul Weller, a recent convert to Nick’s work, chose to attack the institution which bred Nick in ‘Eton Rifles’: ‘What chance have you got against a tie and a crest,’ he snarled on The Jam’s 1979 hit.
It was in January 1962 that Nicholas Rodney Drake entered Marlborough College, which would be his home until July 1966. Having heard so much about the isolation and introspection which blighted his later years, I was more than a little surprised, when talking to his friends and contemporaries from Marlborough, that their abiding memories of Nick Drake were, without exception, of a shy but happy and convivial friend.
‘My memories are that he was tall, very gentle, a guy who smiled a lot; a guy who seemed to be enjoying himself.’ (Simon Crocker)
‘Nick was reserved. Quiet… Thinking back, how you remember people, when I remember Nick, I remember him with a great big smile on his face.’ (David Wright)
‘I remember Nick very clearly. He was a popular guy, quiet and understated. We were in C1 House together. He had flashes of being very, very funny, clever and charming. Not a swanker. A very respected guy.’ (F.A.R. Packard)
Michael Maclaran, another friend of Nick’s from Marlborough, gave perhaps the most vivid first-hand impression of his teenage friend: ‘Nick was tall and stooped forward, holding his head quite low in his shoulders, as if there was always a cold wind blowing. He had a friendly smiling face and a Beatle haircut … He was always pushing the school clothing and appearance regulations to the limit, with raised seams on his grey flannels, trouser bottoms that were too tight or too flared, did or didn’t have turn-ups and so on. However, he didn’t do this in an extrovert way, and got away with more than some “rebel” types, to the quiet admiration of his peers.’
Nick’s housemaster at Marlborough was D.R.W. Silk. Although he went on to become Warden of Radley College and President of the MCC, like James Hilton’s immortal Mr Chips, Dennis Silk still has clear and fond memories of the hundreds of Marlburians who passed through C1 House. Thirty years after last seeing him, his face lit up at the mention of the teenage Nick Drake: ‘My abiding memory is the degree to which everybody liked Nick. One can honestly say that he had not an enemy in the place. I suspect he had one face for the staff, and another for his chums, who found him very amusing. It was not what you would call a sparkling sense of humour, but a rather dry, ironic sense of humour.
‘He was reasonably industrious, but his heart was not really in anything academic except English. A very dreamy pupil. Very. “Wake up, Drake.” “Oh sorry, sir.” Always very polite … But deep down, there was something we never got near to. And there was a whole way of life there that I can’t claim … to have penetrated, although we always got on well.’
Marlborough College was founded in 1843 for the purpose of educating impoverished clergymen’s sons. The school was housed in a Queen Anne-style mansion which, according to Marlborough archivist Dr T.E. Rogers, had been ‘an aristocratic home until about 1751, when it became a very fashionable coaching inn on the London to Bath route. The coaching inn went bankrupt when the railways killed off the coach trade.’
The portents for Marlborough were ominous. Some of the school’s early buildings were designed by the architect who went on to build Wormwood Scrubs prison. Like many of its predecessors, and successors, Marlborough was founded on a system which bordered on the brutal. Flogging and birching were commonplace, conditions spartan and ascetic; it was all part of the high-Victorian belief that mortification of the flesh helped enlighten the soul and elevate the moral spirit.
Hopes of a benign beginning for the school were almost immediately dashed by ‘The Great Marlborough Rebellion’ of 1851. In his definitive history The Public School Phenomenon Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy wrote: ‘By 1851, Marlborough was like France in 1789 … Years of savage, unjust, but also inefficient tyranny were about to be overthrown.’ Over a period of five days Marlborough pupils rebelled against the vicious regime of near-starvation and brutality. It was the most violent upset in the history of Britain’s public-school system. Order was eventually restored, but as Dr Rogers noted, there were ‘very Spartan conditions right up until 1975’.
Eminent Marlburians who preceded Nick at the school include the craftsman, poet and political activist William Morris; poets Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley, Louis MacNeice and John Betjeman; Conservative politicians R.A. (‘Rab’) Butler and Henry Brooke; round-the-world yachtsman Sir Francis Chichester; and the travel writer Bruce Chatwin. During the 1920s the school was attended by one Anthony Blunt, later curator of the Queen’s pictures, and later still the most infamous British spy since Kim Philby.
Betjeman loathed his days at Marlborough; the old dining room, he later recalled, always smelt of Irish stew. The school spanned the main road through Marlborough, and the road was straddled by a bridge known to pupils as ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, as it took them from the boarding houses into their classes.
During Nick’s time the school’s population was 800, all boys, all boarders, all away from home. Dennis Silk recalled the routine: ‘Classes until lunchtime, classes after lunch on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Half holidays on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and after lunch on half days, games. So it was work, work, games, prep, house prayers, more prep, bed. We bored them silly.’
It was while at Marlborough that Nick really began to blossom and bloom. Here he was exposed to friendships and influences which would endure. Nick was one of a freewheeling group of pupils who shared a love of rock ’n’ roll, smoking cigarettes and draught beer. There was a mutual antipathy to school regulations, lessons and homework. David Wright remembers listening with Nick to the Cassius Clay—Henry Cooper bout of 1963, on a transistor radio on top of the Mound, one of the many medieval sites which circle Marlborough.
Set amid the rolling Downs in the lush and still rural county of Wiltshire, Marlborough was another idyllic backwater. With a population of barely over 6000 in Nick’s day, the town was quiet and untroubled. But by the middle of the 1960s, and to the delight of its schoolboy inhabitants, a mere three hours away, down in London, things were beginning to get seriously swinging.
At the school itself, Dennis Silk recalls, ‘We used to have a House Dance with a local girls’ school, the usual sort of cattle market, and I can remember one such occasion. It went like a dream. It was about 1964, when the House was still biddable, and we were still in charge. We had this dance, and ensured that no girls were hurt by being left on the side, and programmed dances, and every boy had to dance with every other girl at some stage of the evening. I can remember … lovely quiet music, “Sleepy Lagoon” and things like that, and my wife giving them dancing classes before.
‘A year later, the dispensation had changed, and against my better judgement, allowed electronic music. No one could speak to anyone at all, the records were so loud … The whole atmosphere of the House had changed, and we were no longer in control, we were swept away by this amazing new liberating thing.’
The public-school ethos hardly lent itself to the dropped aitch rowdiness and two-fingered rebellion of rock ’n’ roll. Public-school rock ’n’ rollers are at best a footnote to any rock encyclopaedia: Genesis first convened in the hallowed halls of Charterhouse, the school which would later offer house room to World Party’s Karl Wallinger. Harrow played host to Island’s Chris Blackwell; Peter & Gordon and Shane MacGowan attended Westminster; Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera and This Heat’s Charles Hayward studied at Dulwich College; Kula Shaker’s Crispian Mills was at Stowe. But in general there wasn’t much room for the hoity-toity in the hurly-burly of rock ’n’ roll.
The Beatles had rewritten the rule book. Far from trying to hide their provincial origins, they revelled in them, and theirs were the first defiantly regional accents to be heard regularly on the upper-crust BBC airwaves. One of The Beatles’ oddest gigs was at Stowe. At the height of Beatlemania in 1963, following a request from a pupil, the Fabs played to a sedate, seated audience of public schoolboys. But The Beatles soon came to embody the new classlessness of the sixties: suddenly it didn’t matter where you were from – only what you did. Cockney photographers and pop stars became the new aristocrats.
Jeremy Mason was Nick’s closest friend during his early days at Marlborough. The friendship was forged over cigarettes, and as the two teenagers puffed away on Disque Bleu in ‘smoking holes’ dotted around the college, the conversation invariably turned to the music they both liked: ‘At that time, Nick played the saxophone and the clarinet. The alto sax I think it was … Which meant that a lot of the music we liked early on was definitely sax-based: One of the records we liked was called Giant Steps by John Coltrane … But I remember going to listen to a John Coltrane record with Nick at Liverpool Street Station, which must have been on the way back to school. I think it was called Ascension, which was one complete barrage of sound, and we rather lost interest.’
Michael Maclaran also remembered music always being a priority for Nick: ‘We spent hours in common rooms and studies listening to records (45s were 6/6d) and the Top 20 on Sunday afternoons.’
With no television in the House in Nick’s time, and Film Society shows limited to a couple each term, pop music was all-important. Nick’s housemaster, Dennis Silk, couldn’t help but notice the intrusion of pop music in his house: ‘It was as much as your life was worth not to know what was in the Top 20. You lost face terribly.’
Cigarettes behind the bike sheds and listening to pop records were crucial, but the public-school tradition of team sports was also an integral part of Nick’s life at Marlborough. David Wright recalls that once on the sports field, Nick was an enthusiastic participant: ‘One thing Nick was very good at was running, he was very quick. While I was playing cricket, which he wasn’t remotely interested in, he was on the athletics track. He was a very quick 100-yarder. And he used to play rugby, on the wing, because he was quick.’
Cricket has became irrevocably associated with the English public school, but the ponderous process of a cricket match held little allure for Nick. He would sprint in track events or tear off alone on the wing of the house rugby team, and on occasion he could even be found on the hockey field; but, perhaps surprisingly, cricket never appealed to him.
‘In the summers we used to meet on the athletics track for training and for competitions against other schools,’ Michael Maclaran recalled. ‘No one liked to admit to having to train – it was assumed that natural talent would get you through. But Nick had good motivation and a competitive streak and achieved great success in sprinting, with his long stride, high knee action and powerful build.
‘Rugby was the main winter game, but I turned to hockey after some rugby injuries and often played with Nick for Marlborough Second XI. I think Nick played centre half, which was a key position, and he could hit the ball hard and well. He may well have been captain, because he had leadership qualities in a persuasive rather than dictatorial way, as well as talent.’
Confounding the familiar image of Nick Drake as a withdrawn and virtually catatonic individual, Michael Maclaran’s recollection of his ‘good motivation’ and ‘competitive streak’ paints the very different picture of a vigorous, even ambitious teenager.
Nick’s days at Marlborough were, by and large, happy ones. A bona fide rock ’n’ roll rebel may have rejected the rowdy rugby field and striving for victory on the athletics track, but although he was shy and fairly quiet, Nick’s instinctive sporting abilities enabled him to fit in quite happily. It was over short distances that Nick really excelled; not for him the sustained endurance of the marathon, rather the quick-burn glory of the sprint.
Dennis Silk: ‘He was a very distinguished sprinter. He played on the wing, away from the hurly-burly. It meant very little to him that he was a super athlete. He could have done anything athletically. He was very well made, tall — very tall, as a teenager about six foot two – strong, very quick. When he caught the rugger ball, he could run round the opposition. Dreaming a bit, he sometimes dropped it … He played rugger, I suppose you would say, apologetically.
‘Nick was a very poor cricketer, a joke cricketer. He found cricket rather amusing, but it would be six or out. He played in gym shoes rather than cricket boots. He was quite a good hockey player, and of course, Marlborough was the outstanding hockey school, and he played in the school team, as he did in the rugger side. But his real forte was sprinting. He was rather a stately sprinter. Very upright, not leaning at forty-five degrees … upright, and like a ship in full sail.’
As a member of C1 House, Nick was a member of the winning Senior team in the school’s summer 1965 relay race. He also set a school record for the 100-yard dash which remained unbeaten for some years. The school magazine noted that: ‘In the Open Team, N.R. Drake is developing into a very useful performer over 100 and 220 yards.’ The same account of athletics activities at Marlborough noted that M.A.P. Phillips, Captain of Athletics, had achieved a long jump in excess of twenty-two feet, before concluding: ‘N.R. Drake has been awarded his colours.’ Seven years later Nick’s exact contemporary, Captain Mark Phillips, would marry HRH Princess Anne.
Photographs of Nick during his years at Marlborough show a chubby-faced teenager, smiling – shyly but photogenically – at the camera. Invariably he is part of a group: whether displaying a rugged pair of knees in the 1964 photo of ‘C1 Cock House Upper League Rugby Team’ or, the following year, celebrating victory in both the ‘House Shout’ (a unison singing contest) and the Junior and Senior Relay Races. The N.R. Drake that stares at you from these photographs is no different from the boys around him, except that his rugby kit is noticeably cleaner. He sports a Beatle cut, the fringe of his thick, straight hair almost reaching his eyebrows, but in deference to school regulations, the back and sides are well clear of his collar.
He looks chubbier here than in the later, more familiar photographs, and a half smile is evident on the head emerging from the striped rugby shirt. We are so used to the image of Nick as a haunted and doomed figure, stalking the pop landscape of the early 1970s, that there is real shock value in these school photos. The face is recognizably his; the strangeness comes from seeing Nick in company, relaxed, smiling – in the mainstream of life and apparently enjoying it. In the later pictures Nick was always alone.
The year after Nick went to Marlborough, I followed my father and uncle by attending Dulwich College. Trying to pull together the strands of Nick’s life, I found myself drawn back, rather reluctantly, to those public-school days. I was several years younger than Nick when I started, but lucky enough – and close enough – to be able to continue living at home. The similarities, though, were legion: the ritual formality of posed team photographs; the rigid etiquette of the school magazine; the dogged determination to preserve cherished traditions; the absolute refusal to concede that the world outside was changing.
Over the years I had grown familiar with the tales told of Nick by fellow-musicians and record company types, but talking to his schoolfriends for the first time, it seemed to me that they had known a quite different Nick. Musicians always admire Nick; they are often in awe of him and frequently perplexed by how he did what he did and who he really was. But listening to Old Marlburians talking, what struck me time after time was the warmth and genuine affection they had felt for him long before he was famous, or doomed.
Perhaps that old chestnut about the child being father to the man is more than usually valid when considering the life of someone who died so early. Nick survived only eight years after leaving Marlborough, and much of that time he was in the grip of an illness which all but blanked out his true self. Tempting though it is to blame the insensitivity of the archaic public-school system, or the trauma of being sent away from home at such an early age, for his eventual fate, all the evidence suggests that, for Nick, his schooldays really were the happiest days of his life.
The Officer Training Corps met weekly to drill Marlborough’s young officers in the making. War Games were played, parades undertaken, and the habit of accepting and obeying orders was hammered into the teenagers as they marched around the parade-ground in musty uniforms. Simon Crocker was in the Corps band with Nick and remembers them both hating it: ‘We managed to get out by going on a conservation detail at an old building called the Mount House in Marlborough. There were four of us, and we had to repaint it every year. They were the funniest afternoons … I just remember us spending the whole time laughing …’
Marlborough had suffered terribly during the First World War, losing more old boys than any public school except Eton. Between 1914 and 1918, 733 boys were lost, most barely out of their teens. Fresh-faced subalterns, straight from public schools like Marlborough, were hewn down in their thousands by German machine-guns during the Great War. The life of a Second Lieutenant on active service on the Western Front was estimated at a mere two weeks. Peter Parker’s The Old Lie quotes old Marlburian G.A.N. Lowndes reflecting that early in 1915: ‘It was uncanny to look across Chapel to the back row opposite and realise that within six months probably half the boys there would be dead.’
The unflinching public-school code of honour fuelled the patriotic zeal which swept the nation during the summer of 1914. One of the first to enlist at the outbreak of the war was the poet and old Marlburian Siegfried Sassoon, though he would later come to question its inevitability. Sassoon’s education mirrored that of Nick Drake — Marlborough and Cambridge — and Nick’s housemaster, Dennis Silk, was a friend of Sassoon’s and an expert on his work.
Another old Marlburian poet who died in the conflict was Charles Sorley. Barely twenty when he was killed in 1915, his only collection, Marlborough And Other Poems, was published posthumously. The old school was the only life the teenager knew when he enlisted in 1914, but soon he had discovered another, more brutal, existence:
When you see millions of the mouthless dead,
Across your dreams in pale battalions go …
Sorley’s was a short life, and only the poems he left behind distinguish him from the countless others who foundered in the Flanders mud.
Though as distant as the Hundred Years War to the generations who have grown up with McDonald’s and the Internet, the First World War cast a shadow over the twentieth century which was long and searing. Such was the scale of the slaughter that death reached in and touched every community. Visiting Nick’s birthplace, I paused by Tanworth’s War Memorial, to find inscribed nearly forty names of men from that one village and its surrounding fields who fell in the Great War. Think of the losses in that tiny Warwickshire village, and in all the other hamlets which linked up to form the nation in the early days of this century, and consider the waste.
Siegfried Sassoon’s near contemporary, the poet and soldier Wilfred Owen, targeted the public-school lies which he believed had led thousands of the brightest and the best to their deaths on the battlefields of France:
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Born in Shropshire, and killed at the age of twenty-five, just seven days before the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Owen is celebrated now as one of the key poets of the early twentieth century. The association with ‘doomed youth’ inevitably draws comparisons with Nick Drake, especially as Owen’s work was likewise only really appreciated posthumously. Indeed, in a 1992 assessment of Nick for Record Collector, Chas Keep noted that Nick’s original song, ‘Strange Meeting II’ took its title from Owen’s poem ‘Strange Meeting’.
While at Marlborough, Nick divided his spare time between the athletics field and his growing interest in music. At this stage his musical tastes were very catholic, as Jeremy Mason pointed out: ‘He very much liked The Graham Bond Organisation. He loved “St James Infirmary” – there was a very good sax line in it… But the record he really liked, and we played it absolutely into the ground, was The Sounds Of ’65 by The Graham Bond Organisation. This was the record, followed by Zoot Money & The Big Roll Band.’
Perhaps less surprisingly, Jeremy remembers Nick loving Odetta: ‘ “Auction Block” was his favourite. I knew none of these people, but another record we adored was Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue. Charlie Parker we liked. John Hammond we both liked: the one with him sitting on a motorbike. We thought he was pretty cool. We also bought a Segovia record together. Jimmy Smith was a great favourite of his. “Green Onions” by Booker T. & The M.G.’s he liked. We rather fancied Astrud Gilberto too, as I recall.’
Besides the popular Top 20 favourites which came courtesy of the pirate stations Radio Caroline and Radio London, Jeremy Mason explained how Nick began to develop an interest in the burgeoning folk, blues and R&B scenes: ‘What people don’t understand nowadays is that there seemed to be room to accommodate almost everything. At that time I had a passion for Jim Reeves at the same time as Bob Dylan – can you imagine? Old Jim was frowned upon at the time, but I had fourteen LPs of his! Nick was particularly keen on that Dylan album with the line “She wears an Egyptian ring …”, Nick loved that – Bringing It All Back Home.’
Nick’s growing interest in listening to records was accompanied by the desire to play music for himself. This interest soon grew into an obsession, and the ability to play an instrument — any instrument – was swift and instinctive. As well as the guitar, during his time at Marlborough Nick learnt the clarinet and alto saxophone. David Wright only remembers Nick playing the guitar towards the end of their schooldays: ‘I presume he must have started music lessons on the piano, got bored, and taken up the clarinet when he was fourteen or fifteen. The clarinet was his instrument … Then, deciding, I imagine, that the clarinet wasn’t very hip – it was all a bit Acker Bilk and “Stranger On The Shore” — he took up the sax.’
As well as the mainly classical pieces Nick played during his clarinet lessons, there were occasional forays into jazz; in particular, friends recall his fondness for Stan Getz’s ‘Desafinado’. Dennis Silk remembers that whenever jazz musicians came to play at the school, Nick was always there. However, an account in The Marlburian during the Lent term of 1966 was rather less relaxed about modern trends in music than Nick’s erstwhile housemaster.
‘Every week of every term, Marlborough’s 6 resident and 13 visiting music teachers instruct 115 pianists, 16 organists, 3 singers, 13 students of harmony, 26 violinists, 3 violists, 13 cellists, 5 double-bass players, 18 flautists, 10 oboists, 4 bassoonists, 30 clarinettists, 8 horn-players, 15 trumpeters, 7 trombonists, 6 tuba players, 4 saxophonists, 3 euphonium players and 30 guitarists (330 in all). These numbers have changed surprisingly little over the years and the only interesting (or ominous?) change in recent years is that there are some thirty fewer pianists and thirty more guitarists, some of whom are tempted to attach amplifiers and speakers to their “machines” in order to convey their message without ambiguity to those who are hard of hearing.’
Written in the year that The Beatles released Revolver, The Rolling Stones Aftermath, and Bob Dylan Blonde On Blonde, the report adds: ‘We are forced to the conclusion that boys are disinclined to listen to all but the most trivial music’. For ‘trivial’, read ‘pop’. Within two years Nick Drake would himself be entering a recording studio for the first time.
Meanwhile he continued happily at Marlborough, remaining on good terms with the staff and the institution. Dennis Silk was aware that Nick kept in close contact with his parents too: ‘He was obviously the centre of a very loving family. I don’t know what they made of the pop music … but they must have worried. Father was very conventional, a delightful businessman, who adored his son. And the son adored him … They worshipped the ground Nick walked on, without spoiling him, and Nick adored them. So it wasn’t a sort of rebellious youth giving hell to his parents …’
There were some rebellions, of course, but they were small, one might even say traditional. The days at Marlborough were familiarly mundane, and like most of his fellow-pupils, Nick leavened the dismal round of lessons and sports with sporadic interruptions for illicit pleasures. The most popular of these, back in the innocent mid-sixties, were cigarettes, puffed in quiet corners, and trips to the tearoom known as the Polly. David Wright recalls that, for the strong of heart, there was also the occasional jaunt to a town pub: ‘Nick liked his ale. After lunch a bunch of half a dozen of us would go off to this pub in Marlborough, the Lamb, which had a sympathetic landlord, where you could go into the back bar, and scarper if someone came in the front.’
Jeremy Mason too has fond memories of Marlborough watering-holes: ‘Almost every day after lunch, Nick and I used to go to a splendid place down the High Street, which had a bay window, so we could see if anyone was coming. And we’d sit there for our afternoon fag, smoking our Disque Bleu cigarettes. Saturday evenings we’d go drinking at a pub that’s no longer there, called the Cricketers. The Buffalos had a room there — they were a bit like the Freemasons — and had this room, done up like a courtroom. It really was the most extraordinary place to begin your drinking career.’
The four and a half years Nick Drake spent at Marlborough were remarkable only for their ordinariness, and for their similarity to the schooldays of previous generations of British upper-middle-class males. The changes which were shaking the walls of cities outside, had as yet, left Marlborough largely untouched. But by 1965 the foundations were beginning to shake, largely due to the beat of Vox amplifiers and Rickenbacker guitars.
‘We weren’t rebels, that would give us too much credit,’ admitted Arthur Packard, a Housemate of Nick’s from C1. ‘But we were interested in smoking cigarettes, John Player’s – not marijuana — and nipping out for a drink, just a pint, at one of the local pubs. I suppose it was our attempt at a quiet revolution, not like the US campuses. We were slightly iconoclastic listening to Rolling Stones records, trying to grow one’s hair slightly over the collar, sporting Chelsea boots, stuff like that.’
In January 1962, when Nick first entered Marlborough, The Beatles were a buzzing beat group, popular only in Hamburg nightclubs and Liverpool cellars; The Rolling Stones were still lolling around in their legendarily squalid flat in London’s Edith Grove; and Bob Dylan was a chubby-faced kid who had barely begun writing his own songs. By the time he left the school in July 1966, the world had turned upside down: The Beatles were finishing their days as a touring band; The Stones had copyrighted snotty rebelliousness; and Dylan was reinvented as an electric Messiah.
It was a turbulent world where traditional values were being overthrown and institutions were foundering, but long on into the sixties the public schools remained little changed. Old Etonian Prime Minister Harold Macmillan watched his government brought down in the aftermath of the Profumo Affair in 1964; but the militant Schools’ Action Union, the corrosive undermining of Lindsay Anderson’s film If, the challenging of the established order by angry students — all this would wait until 1968, the year of revolution, by which time Nick Drake was long gone.
His contemporaries at Marlborough paint an achingly normal picture of the schoolboy Nick. Shy certainly, retiring even; but the monosyllabic, almost catatonic figure of those final years, hunched on a Hampstead bench, strikes no chord with those who shared their formative teenage years with the boy from C1 house who had a penchant for French cigarettes, sprinting and Bob Dylan.
‘You didn’t think about the future then,’ Simon Crocker recalls. ‘You hardly thought about your bloody exams … You presumed you were going to go: school, university … and then there’d be something.’