I am the music ma’am

MUSIC MAESTRO: Eileen Bentley, director of the Oldham Choir

Martyn Meets EILEEN BENTLEY — back in charge of the Oldham Choir
IT didn’t take long for Eileen Bentley to get back into the swing of things, literally, for music is ingrained into the very fibre of this remarkable woman.

Two years after she retired, vowing to walk away from music teaching and conducting, Eileen is back in charge of the Oldham Choir — and, as you would expect of one about whom the pop hit “Music is my First Love” could have been written — is relishing every minute.

Not that Eileen ever really walked away. She is, and will be for a long time I suspect, organist in residence at St Chad’s Church, Uppermill — Saddleworth Parish Church to most of us — and has spent much of her time in “retirement” as an adjudicator at music events and festivals the length and breadth of the country.

After all, when music courses through your veins, how can you possible take away the lifeblood?

I recall a conversation with Eileen in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the night of her final concert, when she vowed: “This is it: no comebacks!”

Yeah, well: two years into splendid isolation at her beautiful house in Moorside, the telephone rang and Chris Johnson, the incumbent conductor of the Oldham Choir — which can traces its roots way back to before Eileen became a legendary part of the Oldham musical scene — made a fateful request.

Piano lessons

“Will you take over?” was his plaintive plea and Eileen was back with her one and only love, The Voice.

Rehearsing once a week and preparing for five or six concerts a year is just about enough, for although Eileen’s life has been a tempo of music from the age of seven, when she started piano lessons, she does want to do “other things”.

What these are I never actually discovered during our time in her conservatory overlooking a magnificent enclosed garden, an oasis of calm I suspect, and perhaps an escape from the cacophony of conflicting demands on her precious time.

Time she never had during a glittering 38-year career with the Oldham Music Service.

An Oldham lass born in Waterhead, and a member of a chapel family who would spontaneously sing hymns on their regular Saturday evening drives, Eileen’s introduction to a role that consumed her life — and influenced the lives of hundreds if not thousands of Oldhamers — had an inauspicious beginning.

“I was buying my first house and my solicitor Tony Adler knew John Boyce, who was head of the music service in Oldham and said he would introduce me,” recalls Eileen.

At the time Eileen was working in a Jewish school in Prestwich, her first post after completing her course at the Royal Manchester College of Music where she studied voice, piano and organ.

“There was a notice on the board at college asking for a music teacher so I thought ‘That looks interesting’ and so off I went.”

For three years she was the only non-Jewish person in the school but after her first chat with Mr Boyce he offered her a job as a voice teacher in Oldham.

“At the time they were setting up teaching in schools for instruments, but not for voice, which is the first instrument of music, and I had this idea.

“In those days things were very different — I was offered a job and four schools took up the offer, Blue Coat, Counthill, Kaskenmoor and Grange.”

And so it came to pass that Eileen became the first “travelling” music teacher in the country, setting a standard which the rest have followed.

Two years later she became head of the newly established voice department and she has been at the heartbeat of the service ever since. Well, until two years ago when she stood down to general acclaim as a living legend.

In those early days the service was delivered from ramshackle premises in Westwood and it was to Eileen’s eternal delight that the Lyceum in Union Street became the focal point of the service in 1989, returning the Oldham Music Centre to it roots — for this is where the original Oldham School of Music was sited.

“Our base at the Lyceum was the envy of everyone in the country — the Lyceum has been a thread throughout the whole of my life.”

And what a life!

Eileen has inspired generations of singers, many of whom remain life-long friends, and her memories run deep.

Her proudest moment came when the Oldham Girls’ Choir, which she founded in 1974, won an international contest at the world’s premier choral event, the Llangollen International Eisteddfod and followed this up by taking titles at the Elgar competition in Worcester and an international choral contest in Malta.

These same girls, whom Eileen conducted for 21 years, were finalists in the inaugural Sainsbury’s Choir of the Year and were invited to sing at the Royal Albert Hall, London, as part of the School Proms.

Recordings followed, and appearances on television and radio, and tours to grand concert halls in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Gibraltar and Malta.

And all the while she was working for the music service in Oldham, becoming assistant director in 1976. Two years later her mentor, Tony Boyce, died suddenly of a heart attack. “I said goodbye to him on a Friday and returned on the Monday as acting director,” she recalls, and the sadness of the memory remains very real.

With the music service flourishing and more and more Oldhamers flocking to the sound and joy of music, Eileen had little time to brood on her loss.

Sadly, for one so immersed in music, Eileen found herself spending more time “ticking boxes” then teaching and when the time came to end her career it wasn’t a hard decision.

“I knew it was time to go, to let someone else take up the mantle, a younger person with new ideas.”

Most of us who knew Eileen never believed her at the time, but after this interview I do now.

She had devoted her life to music, being the organist at Waterhead Congregational Chapel from the age of 11 and for around 40 years organist at St Paul’s Church, Scouthead, where she had family connections, from the age of 14.

“I grew up surrounded by music — my family didn’t have a lot, but we had a piano, I will always remember that.”

It was only later in life that Eileen realised that her whole extended family, grandparents, aunts and uncles, had rallied to find the money to send her to private lessons . . . music teaching in schools in those days was a little, shall we say, scratchy.

Now a Doctor of Music, awarded by Manchester Victoria University for her services to the development of music in the curriculum during the 20th century, Eileen is content.

As I said, the memories are myriad. One such is of four young boys whose voices broke but had been so infused by a love of singing they insisted that Eileen coax them through to the next stage.

They became the forerunners of the first Oldham Mixed Choir for it was Eileen’s genius to spot their development and fit them with four girls of similar age into a double-quartet which captivated a huge audience with a rendition of Silent Night at the Christmas Festival in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

This was one of Eileen’s proudest moments.

When retirement beckoned Eileen knew she had her commitment of being organist at St Chad’s.

“And that’s a story in itself — the organ at Saddleworth was in desperate need of replacement and when the congregation knew that St Paul’s was to close the people at St Chad’s showed an interest in our organ.”

As you can imagine, Eileen had kept the instrument in immaculate repair.

“They said they would take the organ — only if the organist went with it!’ she laughed, and so Eileen took over from the legendary Harry “The Handbell Ringer” Franklyn.

Since taking over the choir, when numbers were already at a healthy 35, Eileen has seen numbers swell to 52.

“People started ringing and asking if it was true I was taking over?” she told me, in a genuinely surprised voice.

And so the combined voices of Oldham soar once more to the baton of a truly inspirational woman, a woman awarded the MBE in 2006 for “outstanding service to music education”.