Percy Hilder Miles

May 28

PERCY HILDER MILES

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composer from Erith

Percy Hilder Miles was born in Crayford on July 12th 1878, the eldest child of George Miles of Northend and Fanny Hood of Bexleyheath. They lived from 1880 at number 18 Queen’s Road, Erith. In the 1970s all these large Victorian houses were demolished and the road widened.

Percy’s mother Fanny was descended from an old Sussex family named Hilder. Fanny’s mother was Jane Hilder, whose surname was passed on to her first son, and has endured to this day throughout the generations of Hood and Miles families as a middle name.

Percy’s father, George, was one of 12 children and was a building contractor by trade and built many of the houses in Victorian Erith. He hailed from a family of fruit farmers from Crayford, whose ancestors farmed various local farms.

*Percy’s house, far right on the end in 1965*

*Venners Farm, in Barnehurst, to the north of Barnehurst station*

This was a farm until the 1950s when it became a housing estate. They also farmed Normandy Farm by Colyers lane and for generations they farmed Whitehill farm in Crayford. This was just off Maiden Lane, on the Dartford/Crayford border, where the Whitehill Estate is now.

However the 18th century farmhouse still survives on Crayford Rd., known as Whitehill House, and is Grade 2 listed. It was used until recently as a doctors’ surgery.

There are many of the Miles relations buried in a line at St Paulinus' cemetery Crayford, and indeed Percy was baptised in St Paulinus. You can just make out “Whitehill farm Dartford” on this grave of Elizabeth and Thomas Miles.

Later in life, Percy came here to “scrape the stones” as he put it, in order to discover his ancestors.

Both the Hilders and the Hoods were artistic and musical families. Percy’s maternal grandmother Jane Hilder, is recorded as being “a fair, amateur artist”. And we know that she also wrote poetry as Percy set some of it to music in 1894 in a song called “The Seasons”.

Jane Hilder married Fred Hood, a baker from Bexleyheath. This was run by his son Edmund Hood at No.1 the Broadway until 1924, - where the Marriott hotel now stands.

*Hoods Bakery, Broadway/Gravel Hill, Bexleyheath .c.1906*

It is likely that Fanny’s brother Fred (who was for a time a violin teacher in Bexleyheath and had inherited a decent 18th century French violin from the Hilder family), gave Percy his first violin lessons. We know that Percy started composing from the age of 8. Fortunately for us, he kept a detailed personal catalogue of all of his compositions and his earliest composition was a duet for 2 violins called “Autumn leaves”. There is also a juvenile Overture, written when he was 9 and dedicated to his uncle, simply called “F W Hood”.

There seems to have been a real closeness between Percy and his uncle Fred (or “Uncle Willie” as he called him, as he was Frederick William), because later in life he would meet Percy at the docks in Tilbury when Percy returned from his travels abroad. He also left him funds in his Will when he died in 1920.

At the age of 13, he performed the Beethoven violin concerto with an orchestra in St James’ Hall, Piccadilly (now demolished). This was no mean feat as it is still one of the most difficult concertos in the repertoire and the fact that he did it as a boy shows a considerably precocious talent. It is even recounted in his obituary that the conductor of that concert, Sir Alexander McKenzie, (who was the head of the Royal Academy of Music at the time) had to “bow his acknowledgements to the audience”, such was the tumultuous applause for Percy.

Two years later, at the age of 15, Percy entered the Royal Academy of Music on an Exhibition Scholarship.

He was taught the violin by the Austrian Hans Wessely, and composition by Walter Battison Haynes and Harmony by H Davenport.

Having grown up in a musical household he was immediately sought after as a chamber musician, playing concerts with his teacher and other distinguished players of the day, in such illustrious places as the Poplar Town Hall, the Bermondsey Settlement Hall and the Greenwich Lecture Hall.

One his contemporaries at the Royal Academy was a young man called Lionel Tertis.

Tertis had previously studied violin and piano at Trinity College of Music, and also in Leipzig for 6 months. We know from his autobiography that in 1895 he decided to switch his studies to the Royal Academy and had the same violin teacher as Percy, Hans Wessely. A friendship had struck up between the two young men and Percy, being a keen chamber music player and not finding a good enough viola-player, asked Lionel to switch from playing violin to viola in order for them play string quartets together. Tertis duly obliged but had to teach himself, as the Royal Acadmy had no viola professors at the time!

The viola in those days, was was normally played so badly that it was not taken very seriously as a solo instrument. No other viola player before or probably since has done more to change that opinion than Tertis, commissioning composers to write for an instrument that many felt wasn’t even worthy of being heard! He achieved legendary status on the instrument, even designing his own type of viola and went on to live to the ripe old age of 98, staying friends with the Miles family.

Once at the Royal Academy, Percy immediately won the first of several prizes for composition - firstly the Hine prize for his song: “Greeting”, then the Charles Lucas prize for a piano quintet, and subsequently he won the first ever Sauret violin prize, the MacFarren Scholarship and the medal of the Worshipful Company of Musicians.

In his final year, he was made a junior professor and won the biggest prize of all, the Mendelssohn Scholarship. This enabled him to study abroad for 3 years with the masters of the day. We know from his manuscripts where he travelled as he often wrote on the pieces where they were composed. He spent his first year in Vienna, then Berlin, and finally a year in Paris and Milan.

Upon his return Percy took up a full Professorship at he RAM in October 1903.

At this time, Percy’s father George was one of the directors of the Erith Public Hall, built in 1871. This is now demolished but ended its life being used as part of Hedley Mitchell’s Department store set back from Erith high street until 1971.

*Poster advertising two Miles family concerts in the Hall in November 1903*

Both of Percy’s younger brothers, Douglas and Maurice played instruments - Doug the viola, and Maurice the cello. In fact Maurice at this time was studying at the Royal Academy.

In June of 1903, there was some upheaval in Percy’s family- his aunt Isabella died giving birth to her eighth child, Averil, leaving her husband (Fanny’s brother George Hilder Hood) to bring up all 8 children. To alleviate the situation Fanny took in some of the children, and one of them, this little girl on the right, Vera, lived at Queens Road into her teens -

*Colourised photo of the Miles family in their Erith back garden. L to R: Percy, “Donny”, George, Fanny and Vera, c.1906*

And in 1904, Percy’s brother Douglas emigrated to Canada to carry on the Miles tradition of farming. Emigration to Canada really took off at this time, helped, no doubt, by the introduction of the Railways and the lure of free farmsteads. The Canadian government also started a concentrated policy to promote immigration.

A year later he was followed by his brother Maurice. He emigrated to Winnipeg as a theatre cellist and eventually settled in Vancouver where he also became a conductor.

In 1903 Percy was recommended by his old violin teacher Hans Wessely to become an examiner for the newly established Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music , this required months travelling across Europe and the empire. On one of these trips he met Joseph Clarke, an American amateur musician living in Harrow who told Percy of his talented violin-playing daughter Rebecca. Percy was invited to the house and soon became the family’s “musical friend”.

Given Percy’s influence at the Royal Academy, he helped Rebecca find a place to study there in 1903. She duly started and had Percy as her harmony and counterpoint teacher and Wessely as her violin teacher.

All went well until 1905 when Percy could contain himself no longer and at the end of a lesson he suddenly kissed her and proposed marriage.

Rebecca went home and told her father, (who was at best a difficult man), and he was outraged and promptly removed her forthwith from the Academy. She was only 19 after all, and Percy eight years her senior.

Rebecca went on to study at the Royal College of Music and became a successful viola-player and composer in her own right. However this was curtailed when she was permanently thrown out of her home when she called her father out on the love-affair he was having!

She had to make ends meet and in 1912 auditioned, along with 131 others to become one of the first women to play in Henry Wood’s Queens Hall Orchestra, the predecessor to the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Henry Wood, inspired by the practice in Belgium at the time, was one of the few conductors at the beginning of the 20th century to encourage women in orchestras. Initially the men in the Queens Hall Orchestra were unhappy, not with their playing but because they thought the women would be paid less and therefore “undercut” the men. But they were in fact paid the same!

Henry Wood had his finger on the pulse and was always on the lookout for young talent. He knew Percy, and what’s more had faith in him as a composer because in 1907 he commissioned him to write a cello concerto for the 1908 Proms. Herbert Withers, a noted soloist at the time, and someone with whom Percy had played chamber music, was to be the soloist, but Percy sailed to Australia in May and did not complete the orchestral parts in time for the October performance and it was replaced with the Dvorak concerto. We know that Percy finished the piece as it exists in a complete version for cello and piano but the orchestral score is lost. We know too that Bertie Withers played through it and liked it, as Percy refers to this several times in his letters, saying: “Withers is raving about my new concerto!”

Yet, curiously, the dedication is crossed out in the catalogue:

By 1909 Percy had made two 9-month trips to Australia and had enough money to pay off his father’s mortgage and debts, help his struggling brother in Canada, buy a grand piano and also a Stradivarius violin.

We don’t know exactly what he paid for it, but in those days, according to auction records, a Stradivarius was going for around £500, a sum worth approximately £57,000 today. Most Strads have names, normally after a distinguished player or owner, and this one is called the “General Kyd” after Lt. General Alexander Kyd, who worked for the East India Company in the 1800s as part of the Bengal engineers.

Amazingly a letter of provenance survives in Percy’s hand, tracing the ownership of his Strad right back to Kyd, so we know who owned it before, when, where and from whom he got it- he bought it in a private sale from a lady in Newport, Salop (modern day Shropshire).

*Part of the letter of Provenace for Percy’s Stradivarius, the 1720 “General Kyd”*

According to Percy’s Will of 1912 he bequeathed the Strad to Rebecca Clarke, which would likely imply that 7 years on from the rejection, he still had feelings for her. She sold it in America to NY dealer Jacques Français in 1936 when she needed the money.

Percy’s father George retired from the building trade in 1900 and became a member of the Erith Urban Council and also treasurer of the Erith Conservative Club, (this was in Pier road) and putting his carpentry skills to good use, he made string instruments, and in the 10 or so years before his death, he made over 90 violins, violas and cellos.

It seems Percy managed to sell most of them by placing this advert in “The Strad Magazine” -only £18 each!

A letter survives from Percy’s brother Douglas in 1958, (the year in which both of his brothers died) where he states that one of his father’s violas is being “done up” by none other than Lionel Tertis. George died in 1911 and is buried in Erith cemetery in Brook St in an interesting-looking family grave which 11 years later received his son Percy and 2 years after that, his wife Fanny.

Miles family grave, Brook Street Cemetery, Erith

Also in 1911, the Royal Academy moved to its current site at Regents Park (on the site of an old orphanage) and during the first world war, continued training its students. Percy, being 36 at the outbreak of hostilities was too old to fight, but alas, his young cousin Frederick George Hood of the Kings Royal Rifle Corps, lost his life in Belgium in March 1918. He is remembered on the Bexleyheath War Memorial.

It may well have been this family loss that moved Percy to write two songs in the beginning of 1919: “In Flanders fields” to words by Lt Col. John McCrae, “England and Flanders”.

Despite his age, Percy presented himself for service several times at Woolwich but failed the medical each time, either because of his lungs or eyesight. Yet he seems to have increased his examining across the whole of the British Empire, also taking in visiting his relatives in Jamaica and Canada, and we know that he sailed to Australia no fewer than 6 times, sailing aboard the SS Macedonia, the RMS Orvieto and the SS Otway.

He even travelled to Australia during the first world war, in 1915. This was to be his final visit. Whilst examining there he met up with his Australian cousin, the famous Water-colourist, Jesse Jewhurst Hilder (1881-1916).

At the time of this death, Percy left in excess of 150 compositions. The question arises as to why he, a prolific and gifted musician languishes in obscurity? This letter to the Musical Times in 1937 from an old school friend, may provide some clue -

As a result of this reluctance to “publish and be damned”, Percy only had a total of 4 pieces published in his lifetime and one after his death. Two of them are still available, The 3 Fantasy pieces for Violin and Piano and the String Sextet (both Stainer & Bell). The latter piece was his greatest success as in 1920 he entered it into the All-Empire Carnegie competition where it won alongside such notable composers as Holst and Stanford.

Sadly, in the beginning of 1922, Percy went blind in one eye - possibly from an inherited eye condition called Retenisis Pigmentosa and then contracted pneumonia again, dying from it on the18th of April of that year.