Photos, programmes, sheet music ... these folk are long since gone, but traces of their time in the sun still exist today, and I enjoy 'preserving' them on this page.
Here's one ... a promising tenor
WILSON, Leigh [COCKRAM, William Edward] (b Lower Arcade, St James, Bristol 26 January 1836, d Marylebone 13 February 1870)
On Thursday 16 November 1865, Mr George W Martin and his National Choral Society gave one of their regular performances of Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah at Exeter Hall. Hermine Rudersdorff was the chief soprano soloist for the occasion, with Fanny Armytage in support, while Bessie Palmer took the contralto music and Theodore Distin and Henry Regaldi assisted in the ensembles. But the billing went, noblesse oblige, to Charles Santley in the role of the prophet, and – perhaps surprisingly -- to ‘the new tenor, Mr Leigh Wilson’.
Yet another ‘new tenor’. Most of the previous ones had ended up in touring choruses.
The evening started with a huge disappointment for the gathered audience. Santley was off. His two year-old son had died on the previous Tuesday, and George Renwick had been called in to deputise for the grieving baritone. But the evening that had begun on such a low point was to end in a sensation. Not because of Mr Renwick’s all-of-a-sudden Elijah, although the deputy acquitted himself more than creditably, but thanks to that newest ‘new tenor’. Mr Leigh Wilson. ‘Mr Leigh Wilson who comes we understand from Bristol, and has recently been studying under Mr Martin, possesses that most important of requisites – a fine voice. His upper tones are especially good, and of this he is evidently conscious. Upon what he may become as an artist, it would be premature to speculate; nor would it be fair to criticise him at this early stage of his career. Enough that he created a sensible impression and was unanimously called upon to repeat ‘If with all your hearts ye truly love me’ and ‘Then shall the righteous shine forth’. A more frank success has rarely been won and it must now be the endeavour of Mr Wilson to show that such spontaneous marks of sympathy as he elicited from the densely crowded audience have not been thrown away. Meanwhile, his progress will be watched with anxiety ...’ (Times) ‘We may confidently say a more promising first appearance has never been made ...’ (Era), ‘The most promising tenor that has appeared for many years…’ (Weekly Times), ‘Such a first appearance is a phenomenon in Exeter Hall if not in musical history generally...’ (Illustrated Christian Times), ‘He secured one of the heartiest re-demands ever heard within the walls of Exeter Hall..’ (Advertiser)
Opinion seems to have been unanimous. This was the best new tenor to have come along since ... why, probably since Sims Reeves.
So who was he? Yes, he was indeed, as the Times confided, from Bristol. And, yes, up to a point he was a pupil of Mr Martin. Definitely he was a tenor. But new? Well, perhaps not quite as new as all that. Apart from anything else, he was nearly thirty years old. And ‘Leigh Wilson’? That was a comparatively new nomenclature. ‘Wilson’ had been born William Edward Cockram, the eldest son of John Cockram, a Bristol music-seller ‘of 34 College Green, Music-seller to the Queen’, and his first wife, Mary, he was christened in 1836 at Broad Mead Baptist Church, and he spent his youth and young adulthood in Bristol. In the 1861 census, 25 year-old William can be seen living at number 4 Park Street, St Augustine, Bristol, with his father, recovering in new premises from a recent bankruptcy, his father’s second wife Mary Ann (36 b Salop, Cleobury), his sisters Mary Elizabeth (b 1838) and Elizabeth (b 1840), both, like himself, listed as ‘professor of music’, brother John (b 1842, ironmonger’s assistant) and a non-musical sister, ?Fanny (b 1844, hosier) plus two half-brothers, Edward Purcell Cockram (1853-1932) and Arthur Francis Cockram (b 1856).
My first sighting of W E Cockram being a tenor in Bristol is in the late 1850s, specifically 28 March 1857 at the Pump Room in Bath. He is said to have ‘recently made such a successful debut in Bristol’, and his contribution to this particular evening is ‘Ah! che la morte’ and ‘Rocked in the cradle of the deep’. I see him again in August 1858, when his father promoted evenings at the Victoria Rooms and at Clevedon, with the Brousil family topping the bills. Mr W E Cockram and Miss Megson supported. In November, I spot him teaming with Swanton, Wm Merrick and J K Pyne in dinner music at Colston. In 1859 he is at the Bristol People’s Town Hall Concerts singing ‘Rose of the morn’ and ‘Phoebe, dearest’, alongside Miss Clowes and Mr P M Toogood, and at Cardiff People’s Concerts where the verdict ran ‘evidently a man of some musical skill, [he] executed his songs prettily but was quite unequal to the size of the hall’. He repeated at the Anchor Society of Colston in November (‘Come if you dare’). I see him performing at Newport (‘Ah che la morte’), with the Bath City Choral Society at the Guildhall (1 May 1860 ‘the new tenor’), and back at the Victoria Rooms 26 September 1860, with the Brousils and Rosalia Lanza, when he sang ‘Fra poco’ ‘in a manner which quite surprised us and drew forth the heartiest plaudits’, ‘My Pretty Jane’ and 'The Knight’s Dream’ and joined the lady in ‘Si la stanchezza’. On 18 December, he sang Saul in Bath, with Emily Spiller and Henry Phillips, and 30 April 1861 he was Acis to the Galatea of Miss Banks for the same society. ‘Mr Cockram sings chastely, feelingly and without pretension. He has much to learn but acquits himself pleasingly’ nodded the local critic.
In 1862 Mr W E Cockram is billed at the Birmingham Monday Concerts (6 January) where he is now listed as ‘pupil of Frank Mori’ and in April the local press reported ‘the young tenor from Bristol is progressing. The tenor air from Lucia in which he was encored was given with nice voice and feeling and his execution of ‘My Pretty Jane’ was even more satisfactory’.
I spot him at the Mayoress’s Conversazione , singing ‘My own my guiding star’ and ‘M’appari’ and duetting ‘Mira la Bianca luna’ with another talented local, Ada Jackson, and ‘Mr Cockram of Bristol’ appears at Exeter on 3 July 1863 in a concert given ‘mainly for exhibiting a new organ built by Mr Dicker of Exeter’.
However, I have found earlier evidence of his being a ‘professor of music’, for young Mr Cockram was not just a singer but a songwriter. The archives of the British libraries hold copies of his ‘Onward brothers’ (1855). ‘The Policeman’, a comic song, words L M Thornton (1857), The Sunshine Polka (1857), ‘You’ll not forget’ words by Rev J R Wreford (1857), ‘The Curfew’ and ‘It is not always May’ (1857, words Longfellow), ‘Flowers of pleasure seldom bloom’, ‘Jamie’s coming’ words and music by W E Cockram, and still, in 1862, under the same name ‘Home of childhood’. ‘The Light of yon bright star’, ‘England’s Polka’ and ‘For ever and ever’ to Tennyson’s words, don’t seem to have survived, in spite of being published by Hopwood and Crew and Joseph Williams respectively.
So it seems as if Bill Cockram didn’t become ‘Leigh Wilson’ until 1863. Because the tenor who was supposed to be ‘new’ at the age of 29, in 1865, actually got up on the London concert platform at least as early as that, and in such decidedly prominent circumstances as to make that later ‘debut’ a bit of a fraud. And since this 1863 appearance is not surrounded with the sort of brouhaha given to the later one, although he is mentioned vaguely as ‘a debutant’, I imagine that – under one name or another – Leigh Wilson had possiblybly even been seen out in the metropolis before.
Anyway, my first London sighting of him is on 12 December 1863, when he turns up on the bill at August Manns’s Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts. Anna Caradori and Julia Elton sang an aria and a named song apiece, Arabella Goddard and the orchestra played, and in the middle of it all Mr Leigh Wilson was billed, baldly for ‘song’. The Era noticed ‘a pleasing tenor voice which, under so good a master, he will no doubt sooner or later learn to use to advantage’ but didn’t tell us what the song was. (It was ‘In native worth’). What it did tell us, though, was that Mr Wilson was still ‘a pupil of Frank Mori’. The undeniably ‘so good a master’.
I don’t see ‘Leigh Wilson’ out again for fifteen months. When I do, it is 1 March 1865 and – guess what? – he’s ‘the new English tenor’ and its ‘his first appearance in London’. Again. Once again, he’s buried away in the middle of a programme which includes the ‘new French tenor’ Mons Hilaire, from the Italian opera at Covent Garden, plus several not so new English tenors: William Harrison, George Perren, David Miranda, and forty or fifty other artists, for the occasion is one of Howard Glover’s monster concerts at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. For the occasion, the neophyte chose to sing the serenade ‘The Message’ by Jacques Blumenthal. If it seemed a sensibly modest choice, alongside Hilaire’s ‘Cuius animum’, Miranda’s ‘In native worth’ and Harrison’s Rose of Castille aria, it actually wasn’t. For ‘The Message’ had been, since its publication the previous year, one of the preferred songs of Mr Sims Reeves. Mr Leigh Wilson was evidently not afraid of comparisons. Anyway, as far as I can see, none were made. Yet.
Leigh Wilson made a number of other appearances in concert during the 1865 season, amongst which Richard Blagrove’s concerts at the Beethoven Rooms (24 April, 22 May), the series given by pianist Dr S Austen Pearce at Store Street, the Misses Lachenal’s concertina concert at Myddelton Hall (14 June), and the concert of Dr Wylde’s New Philharmonic Society at St James’s Hall (27 June) on a bill with Mathilda Enequist, Agnesi and a Miss Abbott from Wylde’s Academy. I also spot him at Norwich’s St Andrew’s Hall in concert with Giulia Grisi, Fanny Huddart and J G Patey, and at Cardiff singing ‘The Message’ and another Reeves favourite ‘My Pretty Jane’ alongside Megan Watts. Finally, on 8 July, he turns up at a concert to raise funds for a school for the sons of deceased Freemasons, in good company (none tenorious) and under the aegis of Wilhelm Ganz. Then all goes quiet. Until 16 November when he makes his next and most memorable ‘first appearance’ of all.
So what had happened between July and November to turn this thrice-born, thirtyish, Bristolian vocalist into the most exciting tenorial prospect since Sims Reeves?
The only thing that we know had happened is that he had, in one way or another, come under the aegis of Mr George William Martin, ‘composer, conductor and educationalist’, founder and conductor of the National Choral Society. G W Martin (b Portland Place, London 8 March 1828; d Wandsworh Common, 16 April 1881) had been a part of the British musical world since his childhood. He had begun life as a choirboy (‘deputy alto at St Paul’s’, ‘sung at Queen Victoria’s coronation’) and gone on to be a Deputy and later a Gentleman in Ordinary of Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal, Organist of Christ Church, Resident Music Master of the Training College, Battersea, and a music teacher at Stamford Hill Ladies College as well as a prolific composer of glees and other part songs. In 1857 he put together a choir to give a concert of his glees, and thereafter his name was connected with a series of choral groups (City of London Choral Society, Metropolitan Schools Choral Society, Royal Surrey Gardens Choral Society, St Paul’s Special Sunday Services Choir, Volunteers Choir ‘for the practice of singing choral marches while on the march’ etc) of mostly limited life, of which the point in common seemed to be their size. All Martin’s advertisements emphasised ‘large’ ‘larger’ ‘largest’, whether it was a group of 100, like his original, of or 5,000 such as he on occasion conducted at the Crystal Palace. The choir put together to perform Martin’s own glees and madrigals metamorphosed into the National Choral Union, and on 6 February 1861 it gave its first full-scale performance. The occasion was a benefit for the Coventry weavers, the choir was announced as 800 strong (‘the largest’), the soloists were Helen Lemmens-Sherrington, Martha Lockey, George Perren and Lewis Thomas, and the performance was not glees and madrigals, but the Messiah. Its success confirmed the way the National Choral Society would go, and thereafter, although it annually gave a concert or even two of Martin’s glees, it became first and foremost an oratorio group (‘the largest…’). In the choir’s earliest years, Martin engaged top, proven singers as soloists, artists such as those with which he had launched the choir. But from 1865 he put prominently forward several of his own ‘pupils’ or protégé(e)s, promising artists with everything to prove and to win. All were successful, but the first, and most explosively welcomed of them, was Mr Leigh Wilson.
Mr Martin’s protégés were, as we have seen, not beginners. ‘Leigh Wilson’ was nearly thirty and ‘a pupil of Mori’, and the other two most prominent, contralto Lucy Franklein and bass Joseph Lander, had come respectively from the stables of T A Wallworth and the Westminster Abbey choir. It seems that Mr Martin – who alongside his choral and composing activities, also operated as a vocal teacher – put these rising performers under one of the ‘apprenticeship’ contracts current at the time. He would use his experience and influence to train them, launch them, promote them, in return for a percentage of their earnings. Such ‘apprenticeships’ could last anything from two to, more usually, four years, and during that time the performer’s career was effectively managed by the ‘teacher’.
Whatever Mr Martin’s abilities as a solo vocal teacher (and it seems unlikely that he could have improved upon the coaching of such as Frank Mori, nor even the conscientious Wallworth), he certainly fulfilled the part of the bargain which required him to promote his singers. Wilson, Miss Franklein and Lander were all used as featured soloists with the National Choral Union, repeatedly and almost to the exclusion of all others, over the years during which Mr Martin controlled their destinies, and they repaid him by helping to make the oratorio performances given by his choir in the years between 1865 and 1869 the high point of his career.
None of which explains, of course, the sudden and miraculous evolution of Mr Leigh Wilson, in a course of months, from an agreeable ballad singer at Store Street and Myddelton Hall, to a star on the hallowed platform at Exeter Hall. How did it happen. I can only imagine that Martin had ‘placed’ him correctly. That oratorio in the vastness of Exeter Hall -- where he could ‘chuck’ what was evidently a large voice with a showy top register – was much more suited to his talents than ‘My pretty Jane’ at the Beethoven Rooms.
The Musical World, too, was now hedging a touch. Having written of The Messiah: ’The new tenor, Mr. Leigh Wilson, fully justified what has already been said of him. He won a well-merited encore for his vigorous delivery of “Thou shalt break them.’, its critic now wrote ‘My opinion of ‘the new tenor’ remains unchanged. His voice is perhaps to be envied, but it must be used with care, and lacking as it does the high cultivation necessary for a perfect artist and which can only be the result of time, it is to be feared, unless Mr. Wilson possesses a strength of mind and firmness of purpose altogether exceptional, that the vigorous applause which greets his every effort may be ultimately productive of more harm than good.’
Events, however, only added to the spreading fame of ‘the new tenor’. The next evening, Mr Wilson went to a concert given by Henry Leslie’s choir. Sims Reeves was to sing but, as so often, scratched, allegedly at the last moment. In spite of the fact that Wilbye Cooper, so often a stand-in for Reeves under similar circumstances, was to hand, Mr Leigh Wilson came out of the audience and on to the stage and gave Reeves’s celebrated ‘Come as you dare’ and ‘The Message’. The encores flowed, and the press didn’t challenge the circumstances, but reported ‘Such a voice as he possesses deserves good husbanding, and he is already master of a commendable quality that of articulate enunciation of the words set down for him’ (Times) ‘Mr Leigh Wilson certainly made by legitimate means an impression which will result most favourably for him’ (Era).
Mr Wilson had become a personage in just a short couple of months. When he visited Gloucester the local critic reported ‘the concert was rendered peculiarly attractive by the engagement of Mr Leigh Wilson and the room was filled by a brilliant and fashionable audience anxious to hear the new tenor in whose praise the London critics have written so highly’, and when he ‘did a Reeves’ and scratched from one of Howard Glover’s concerts the audience almost howled the house down.
The National Choral Society concerts continued – Lobgesang/Stabat Mater (21 February 1866) with Parepa, Franklein and Weiss, the Passion week Elijah and Creation (although Wilbye Cooper did The Messiah), and on 23 May the Prize Glees concert (‘the new tenor on whom Mr Martin and his patrons set such store’). Wilson sang ‘The Message’ and ‘My Pretty Jane’, to his own piano accompaniment, and for the first time in a while found himself not the sensation of the show. Martin had engaged Maria Vilda from the Italian opera for the occasion, and Vilda could out-chuck any tenor on earth. The National Choral Society ended its season with a concert performance of Acis and Galatea (4 July) in which Wilson sang Acis to the Galatea of Parepa and the Polyphemus of Santley.
But in between his bread-and-butter Exeter Hall performances, Mr Leigh Wilson was in demand. He did further concerts with Henry Leslie, in the place of the originally booked Reeves, singing the pieces originally set down for the famous but fragile tenor (‘But thou didst not leave his soul’, ‘Waft her angels’, ‘Ti prego’ with Sherrington and Whytock), he touted the J R Thomas ballad ‘Ah never deem my love can change’ around the town and country concerts, he appeared at Jullien’s Benefit at St James’s Hall billed as ‘the new tenor who has created such a sensation’ and singing ‘Come if you dare’, and on Mayday he went with Martin to the Crystal Palace and sang the solos in the Luther Hymn with his master’s choir of 5,000 London schoolchildren and teachers.
During the autumn, Wilson took part in Alfred Mellon’s Covent Garden promenade concert series (‘a very successful debut’), alongside Carlotta Patti, Caravoglia and others. Billed as ‘the popular tenor’, he delivered the classic Braham-cum-Reeves tenor repertoire -- ‘Come if you dare’ ‘The Death of Nelson’, ‘The Message’, ‘My Pretty Jane’, ‘The Pilgrim of Love’ ‘The Bay of Biscay’, ‘In native worth’ ‘O tis a glorious sight to see’ – and a Charles Salaman ditty entitled ‘Celia’. At Mellon’s Benefit on the last night of the season he repeated the Salaman song and joined Frau Liebhart, Mlle Georgi and Henri Drayton in the Spinning Wheel quartet from Martha.
The 1866-7 season of the National Choral Society got under way with an Elijah on 20 November, but Leigh Wilson was not there. Both he and Mme Lemmens-Sherrington scratched, and Martin’s newest tenor, J Kerr Gedge, had to take over. He was back for the season’s first The Messiah on 12 December, however (‘he raised a considerable amount of enthusiasm with his rendition of ‘Thou shallt break them’ and sang throughout with care and intelligence’) and, after leaving the second to Gedge,while he visited Bath for a performance of the same work with Mme Lemmens, Janet Patey and Weiss, he returned to his place for The Creation (3 January 1867), Judas Maccabaeus (17 January), Acis and Galatea (13 February as Acis to the Galatea of Louisa Pyne), Stabat Mater/Lobgesang (27 February), Elijah (15 April) and the Prize Glees (29 May). The Times still referred to him as ‘perhaps the most successful protegé of Mr G W Martin’ but The Musical World was harping: ‘Mr. Leigh Wilson was also encored in ‘Sound an alarm,’ which he sang with vigour. In the other two no less trying airs, ‘Call forth thy powers’ and ‘How vain is man,’ Mr. Wilson certainly left much to be desired. It is a matter of regret that this gentleman, for whom nature has done so much (in the way of voice), should have done so little to turn his fine natural gift to the best advantage. Without study,-- downright hard work,-- the finest voice in the world is ‘but as naught.’’
His ‘outside’ work during the season included his first performance of the role of the Christian Guard in the Walpurgisnacht with the Musical Society of London, and the regulation number of concerts, topping up his standby performances of such as the self-accompanied ‘My pretty Jane’ and ‘My own, my guiding star’ with at least one new piece, Edwin Matthew Lott’s ‘That other shore (‘composed expressly for…’) and his rather frillied-up version of ‘Rocked in the cradle of the deep’. But when he visited Glasgow to sing St Paul he gave out after the first pages of the performance and Hermine Rudersdorff ended up singing the tenor part as well as her own.
Martin launched his new season, in November 1867, as usual, with Elijah. But this year it was Kerr Gedge who sang it. Leigh Wilson went instead to Oxford for a Messiah and Norwich for a Judas Maccabaeus and to the Lecture Hall, Tottenham Court Rd for a concert with the Brousil family. He was back in his place at Exeter Hall on Christmas Eve with Ann Banks, Bessie Palmer and Santley for the Christmas Messiah but when he returned to sing Acis and Galatea in May, he was again taken ill and this time Madame Rudersdorff, his Galatea, really couldn’t fill in!
On 3 July 1868 Mr Leigh Wilson gave a concert of his own at the Queen’s Rooms. The guest list included sufficient stars – Luise Liebhart, Edith Wynne, the Pateys, Bessie Palmer, Caravoglia – plus Miss Mina Mellis and Mlle Corolina Felice, but it was scarcely one of the season’s most fashionable gatherings. It had all, it seems, gone wrong. That dazzling beginning… So Mr Leigh Wilson did the fashionable tenorious thing. He packed his bag and set off to Italy. Presumably, hopefully, in search of the kind of teaching that George Martin was obviously unable to give him. Or that he was unable or unwilling to take.
So, where did Mr Wilson go, and how many years did he study with whom? I can answer most of that. He went to Florence. And he was back in London in less than three months, and advertising ‘Mr Leigh Wilson announces his return from Italy and, having concluded his engagement with Mr G W Martin, requests all communications respecting oratorios concerts be addressed to his residence 91 Wimpole Street…’ I don’t think there were very many communications. I’ve spotted him doing a Creation at Canterbury on 29 December 1868, and a Messiah in Liverpool on new year’s day 1869. Martin had him back for Judas Maccabaeus on 3 February, but this time it was the newest ‘discovery’, bass Joseph Lander, who was in big letters above the title and Mr Leigh Wilson, Arabella Smythe and Bessie Palmer got the leftovers. He sang The Creation at Preston in February 1869 (‘not in good voice’), and in May he gave a concert in Bristol, with Mlle Liebhart as his companion, ‘Recently returned from studying in Italy’ he advertised. Not that recently, and, as we know, not for long. The reviewer noticed that he had a cold. Again.
On 15 June 1869 Leigh Wilson sang at a concert at number 40 Welbeck Street, put on by the Misses Evans. I don’t know. Maybe he sang somewhere else in the next six or seven months, but if he did I haven’t tracked it down. And six or seven months was all he had. On Sunday 9 February 1870, William Edward Cockram ‘was confined to his room’ at 91 Wimpole Street, suffering from ‘brain fever’. One week later he died. His body was taken home to Bristol for burial. A sad end to a sad story. His life had been short, but his career – his fame – had been much, much shorter. For one season, he had been the sensation of the day, and then… the road to obscurity.
‘Brain fever’. I wonder what they meant. Meningitis? Hum. I keep thinking of all those colds. All those times he was off. I know Sims Reeves did it too, to an infamous degree, and Reeves lived to a great old age. But…? I suppose I’ll never know.
During the years in which he was ‘Leigh Wilson’, William Cockram had continued to write songs, only now he signed them with his new name. Oddly enough, I’ve never seen a record of him actually singing any of them himself, but the archives record the following titles under his name: ‘Brighter Days Will Come’, ‘Could a distrustful thought arise ‘, ‘Fear Not’, ‘Good Night and good morrow’, ‘Heaven’, ‘Love me little, love me long’, ‘The murmuring river’, ‘Sunshine through the clouds’, ‘Sweet Linnet’, ‘The Tap at the Door’, ‘Wayside flowers’ and ‘Why should we repine’.
None of them, obviously, was any kind of a hit. But a hit there would be in the Cockram family. Young half-brother Edward Purcell Cockram, a music teacher in Bristol all of his life, and sixty years organist at Clifton Down Congregational Church, set Herrick’s poem ‘Passing By’ to music and the resultant song has lived to this day.
Coda: George William Martin’s days in the sun lasted little longer than those of his first protégé. The National Choral Society, latterly rehoused at the Albert Hall, wilted away in 1871. The sister with whom he had shared his bachelor life, in their home at 68 Glo[u]cester Crescent, Regents Park, died, and somehow his considerable fortune – reported to have been as much as L16,000 – wilted away, too. Martin began to suffer from nervous troubles. He attempted to launch new concerts of his glee and part music, without success, he attempted to start another Choral Society, with even less success. Without funds or family, he was even reduced to advertising for work not as a conductor but as a singer. In April 1881 he ended up in Bolingbroke House Hospital, on Wandsworth Common, and he died there on 17th of the month aged 53.
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