Britain is a country which has failed to say "Goodbye" and pay tribute to its erstwhile 'Queen of Costume Design', Anne Gainsford

Anne, who is listed in IMBD as the 'costume designer' for the ground-breaking television series 'The Avengers', which ran for 161 episodes from 1961 to 1967, died in March this year. During that time she worked closely with the director, producers and other key creatives to see to it that the costumes enhanced aura of modern espionage in Britain in the 'Swinging Sixties'. 

This was particularly evident in the costumes of the character Emma Peel, played by Diana Rigg, whose wardrobe of mini skirts and leather catsuits resonated with the times and turned show into a prominent fashion icon. (link) Yet despite this, Anne's passing in March this year went unheralded, save a brief obituary written by her goddaughter, Georgina Palffy in the Guardian newspaper.  

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Anne was born in Lincolnshire in the district of Horncastle in the winter of 1934, the daughter of Helen and Alfred John Gainsford who was Managing Director of Birley Collieries in Sheffield, South Yorkshire and was the cousin of William Dunn Gainsford, the owner of the collieries. Consequently, Anne and her younger brother John had a privileged childhood, witness by the fact that Somersby House, where she was born, had been the rectory where Alfred, Lord Tennyson had been born seventy-five years before.

Anne was five years old when the Second World War broke out and she was evacuated to the to the Presentation Sisters Convent School in Matlock, Derbyshire run by a Roman Catholic order of nuns founded in Ireland, which had established the school and had been involved in educational and charitable work in the area for many years. She stayed there as a boarder until 1945 when, at the age of eleven, she moved to the Roman Catholic St Mary’s School, Ascot. It had around 200 pupils and a religious community of 60, by the mid-1950s, under the leadership of Reverend Mother Cecilia Marshall as Provincial Superior. 

At the age of eighteen Anne gained a place at Oxford University and in 1952 started her history undergraduate degree course at Lady Margaret Hall. It was an all-women's college founded in 1878 that played a significant role in women's education at a time when women were still breaking barriers in accessing higher education and were certainly, still breaking barriers in the 1950s. 

It was a paper she read on the Italian Renaissance that captured her interest and led Anne to Perugia after she graduated in 1955 where she, no doubt visited the Collegio del Cambio. Here she followed her next great passion, 'opera' and perhaps more importantly, learnt to speak Italian. This certainly helped her greatly a decade later when she worked for the Italian film director, Franco Zeffirelli. No doubt the thirteen years she had spent in the tightly organised world of  private, boarding school education in the hands of catholic nuns helped to provide her for the future the disciplined and highly organised worlds of theatre and film.

On her return to England and still in he early twenties  she joined The Slade School of Fine Art as a student where she explored various artistic disciplines, including stage design, often within a broader context of theatre design studies. 

While the Slade didn't specialize in stage design, it provided a foundation for students who later worked in theatre, like Kenneth MacMillan, who saw a connection between colour, music, rhythm, and choreography. In fact, Anne herself was part of an extraordinary generation of young designers emerging from the Slade in the 1950s.

 Having graduated from the Slade in the late 1950s, she worked as a scene painter for Disley Jones at the Lyric Hammersmith on 'The Demon Barber' in 1959. He was described by The Guardian on his death in 2005 as : 'A theatrical polymath, bursting with informed and idiosyncratic ideas on text, performance and direction; moreover, at any moment he would unhesitatingly take up a hammer or paintbrush and work through the night to put the show on'.

In the 1960s she moved to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon and work in repertory theatre. Then in 1961 she got her big career break when she became the costume designer for ABC Weekend TV, a contractor within the ITV network and worked on the espionage series, 'The Avengers'. 

She benefited from the fact that, as a free lancer it was possible for her to work in TV, film and theatre for different clients concurrently. This meant that in 1964 she worked 'Design Assistant' on Franco Zeffirelli's Italian production of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet', performed at the Teatro Romano in Verona which featured his innovative staging and visual approach that had been presented in his 1960 Old Vic production. 

Juggling multiple demands bore testimony to Anne's strong organisational and time-management skills because, as Zeffirelli's Design Assistant, she would have been involved in anything from set design to costume design and because he was known for his elaborate and visually stunning productions she would have played a crucial role in bringing his artistic vision to life. This involved tasks like researching historical clothing, creating clothing sketches and co-ordinating with costume makers.

When she just turned thirty in 1967 she worked on her first film, Zeffirelli's 'The Taming of the Shrew', starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In this she supervised the design of the costumes by Danilo Donati, with those of Kate and Petruchio portraying wealth and power through their rich fabrics and detailed embellishments. (link)

It was in 1967 that Anne, with fellow designer, Patti Pope, who specialised as a theatrical hatter set up her own company, the Richmond Studio. Here Patti or  'Patricia', designed the helmet, now in the V & A, used by an actor in the production, 'The Twelfth Rose' Ballet for All in the Swan Theatre, Worcester in 1969. While Anne carved out a niche making headgear for opera and ballet as demonstrated by her work in 'Aida' in 1968 at the Royal Opera House. Here she produced the headdresses for the character of A Priestess in Act I of the Covent Garden Opera Company production of 'Aida' in 1968 at the Royal Opera House and also for the character Amneris in Acts III and IV.

In 1968 she undertook her second film as Costume Designer for 'Inadmissible Evidence', a 1968 British drama film directed by Anthony Page and starring Nicol Williamson and Jill Bennett. John Osborne had written the screenplay, adapting his own 1964 play. The film portrays the collapse of an angry but sad man who cannot maintain decent standards in his life and antagonises everybody. 

In 1971 Anne was the Costume Designer in 'Murphy's War' directed by Peter Yates, with Disley Jones as Production Designer. It starred Peter O'Toole and was set in Venezuela during Second World War, a crewman survivor of a sunken merchant ship. O'Toole was consumed in his quest for revenge and retribution against the Nazi German submarine that sank his ship and slaughtered the survivors. Anne's costume skills were set to work on the attire of O'Toole and period naval attire of Horst Janson as the U-Boat captain. 

In 1978 she was the Costume Designer on the film 'Absolution', a British thriller directed by Anthony Page and written by playwright Anthony Shaffer. Anne worked alongside other crew members like Freddie Williamson for makeup and Betty Glasow for hairstyling. It starred Richard Burton as a priest who taught at a boys' school and found one of his favourite students was playing a nasty practical joke on him and also featured Billy Connolly. Burton set out to investigate the prank and stumbled upon a dead body, leading to his life spiralling out of control. (link)

From 1983 onwards her work was mainly in connection with the internationally recognised Period Costume House, 'Cosprop', founded in 1965 by John Bright.

In her private life Anne had some tempestuous relationships, the most notable was and affair with the author, Sybille Bedford who she met at PEN international. 

In her book about Sybille, 'An Appetite for Life' Selina Hastings wrote : 'Sybille embarked on another affair, with Anne Gainsford, a talented costume designer for films and theatre'. After one of their first nights together, Sybille confided to Lesley Black that "I had again that sense of tenderness and lovingness … an immense feeling not only towards that woman here and now whom I have unaccountably come to love so much, but love tout court". Lesley was Sybille's confidant in the affair who said that after a fortnight in Ireland, Sybille remained infatuated, like ‘a crazy, obsessed teenager’. On one occasion Sybille accompanied Anne to the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, where Anne was delivering some costumes, Sybille enthralled by her first sight of an auditorium from the wings, amazed by the steep rake of the stage. Not long after they met Sybille gave Anne a gold brooch, but when the affair ended she asked for it to be returned.  

From the 1990s onwards Anne became renowned for her accurate creation of historical top hats and she insisted on using period techniques and materials, sewing black on black, even as her sight deteriorated. In 1996 she made top hats for the Die Meistersinger at the Royal Danish Opera and the wearers can be seen holding her creations in front of them.

In 1992 in the American superhero film 'Batman Returns', Danny DeVito played Oswald Cobblepot, also known as 'The Penguin', a deformed orphan abandoned by his wealthy parents and raised by penguins in the Gotham City sewers. The Penguin wore the top hat which Anne designed in numerous scenes as part of his ‘respectable’ guise as the mayoral candidate for Gotham. Made from black felt and finished with a black silk hatband and bow, the hat featured a cream-coloured silk lining with a chamois leather protective strip around the lower portion. 'Danny DeVito' was written in black marker on a name tag at the back, beneath which was printed 'Anne Gainsford at the Richmond Studio'. (link)

Seven years later she was commissioned to create a topper for Ralph Fiennes who played Onegin in the 1999 British-American romantic drama film based on Alexander Pushkin's 1833 novel in verse 'Eugene Onegin'. She had to make sure that Ralph's topper was accurate for Russia in the 1820s. (link)

In 2004 it was time to produce a top hat for Johnny Depp in 'Finding Neverland'. Set in 1903, following the dismal reception of his latest play Sir James Barrie meets the widowed Sylvia and her four young sons in Kensington Gardens. A strong friendship develops among them and Barrie proves to be a great playmate and surrogate father figure for the boys, and their imaginative antics give him ideas that he incorporates into a play about boys who do not want to grow up, in particular one named after troubled young Peter Llewelyn Davies. In his persona as a circus ringmaster his costume, was designed by Alexandra Byrne, with a period-accurate ensemble with a pink/red velvet tailcoat, a gold waistcoat and star-motif trousers. Anne's top hat was made of black plush. (link)

As a girl, having been born in Lord Tennyson's house, she was captivated by his poem, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' and when troops were stationed near St Mary’s School, Ascot where she was a boarder in the Second World War, her lifelong interest soldiers' dress was ignited. In 1952, when she was eighteen, she staked out the Musée de l'Armée and was thrilled by Napoleon's chapeaux and Revolution and Empire uniforms. That being the case, she was no doubt delighted to be given the commission to make the bicorne hats for 'Master and Commander' the film which starred Russell Crowe as Aubrey, a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. (link)

According to her goddaughter, Georgina Palffy, although she never retired, when work dried up Anne learned to restore furniture, devoted herself to her very English garden in Richmond upon Thames, and enjoyed visiting historical houses with a string of eager acolytes.

Britain is still a country for the Creator of the 'Glastonbury Music Festival ' called Michael Eavis

 

Yesterday, the 80 year old rocker, Rod Stewart, welcomed the 90 year old, Michael to the Pyramid Stage on what was the Glastonbury Music Festival's 55th Birthday and orchestrated the huge audience to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Michael.(link) 

Rather than work on the family farm at Piton in Somerset, Michael had left home at the age of seventeen in 1952 and opted for a career at sea in the Merchant Navy. 

He recalled : "My mother thought going to sea would be good for me, but I don't think she imagined what I would witness. I'll never forget the time we docked in Mombasa. The Chief Officer came up to me and said : "Eavis, we haven't got any crew, go and find them." I said : "Where do I go?" and he said : "The brothels and jails." I was only 17. So he gave me all this money and I wandered through the streets of Mombasa with a nice, fairly smart uniform on. A little girl came up to me and flighted her dress up at me and asked : "Would I lie with her ?" I don't know how old she was, probably about 13, so I said : "Thanks very much for the offer, but no thank you. But can you tell me where you would lie?", which of course was the brothel. So she took me into the brothel. They were all in there and I hauled them out".

His life at sea only lasted for two years and he said : "When I was 19, my father died of stomach cancer and I had to come home and run the farm. The farm had always been a love of mine. The bank manager said : "Look, are you going to get stuck in because otherwise we'll sell the farm." I said : "No, you can't do that. I'll get stuck in and see what I can do". 

Sixteen years were to pass before the seed of the idea of the farm being used to accommodate an 'al fresco' music festival was planted in 1969 on the day that Michael sneaked through a hedge with his future wife, Jean, to enter the 'Bath Festival of Blues'.  (link) He was inspired, in particular, by the performance of Led Zeppelin to host a free festival on his farm the following year. He said : "Something flashes down and you suddenly change. Bit like St Paul; do you know what I mean? There's a change of attitude, a change of purpose". (link) 

Michael recalled : "I'd been into pop music all my life. I started with Pee Wee Hunt, Elvis Presley and Bill Haley but by the late 60s it was Dylan and Van Morrison and I was very anti the Vietnam war. Anyway, I had such a good time at the Bath Blues Festival in 1969 that when I got home I thought, 'We've got a good site here in Pilton. Why don't we do something similar?' The first problem was that I knew nothing about the music business. I started by ringing up the Colston Hall in Bristol to ask how I could get in touch with pop groups. A chap there gave me the name of an agent, and the agent put me in touch with the Kinks, who agreed to appear for £500, which was a lot of money for me to pull out of a milk churn". In addition, there was local opposition and he said : "I knew I was in for a fight, but my background has always been nonconformist. Our whole family down the years have been Quakers, Methodists, very anti-establishment, always looking dubiously at central government".

Right from the start Michael was conscious that the future spirit of Glastonbury was shaped as a reflection of the Eavis family life . He said : "The thing about the Glastonbury attitude was that the ethos came from the dining-room table at Worthy farm. The whole thing has always been very homegrown, so it does have an appeal and it is a family affair". Witness the fact that Emily, his youngest daughter, is now his co-organiser of the Festival. "They're all involved and everybody knows who we are and what we stand for, and we're not ripping people off. I like to think that I have passed that social conscience on to subsequent generations".

"Once I was sure I was going to do it, I realised we needed a stage. I got a local house-builder to put something together out of scaffolding and plywood. I asked him : "What would happen if a high wind came along, would it blow away?" He shook his head and said he didn't really know. None of us knew. So I got him to lash it to two apple trees with some hefty ropes. Another problem was accommodation. Where, on a farm, were we going to put up all these bands and their crews? Luckily, I got a couple of my neighbours to agree to let us use their cottages for the weekend. 

"A week or so before the big day, I had a call from this fellow with a rich local Somerset accent. He sounded very genuine, offering to do security for the festival at two pounds per hour per person. That seemed very reasonable, so I agreed. When the day dawned, he and his mates turned up and they were the ugliest lot of Hell's Angels you've ever seen. What a fright I got. But I had agreed, so I had to take them on. When the fans started to arrive I immediately felt a lot better. These were softly spoken, middle-class hippies. Nice, attractive, interestingly dressed people. I found them very appealing. I felt right away that this was the beginning of something that would change our way of life".

For that first festival in the Autumn of 1970, 'The Kinks', were booked to top the bill, but dropped out after 'Melody Maker' printed a piece describing it as a 'mini-festival' and they were replaced at the last minute by Marc Bolan (link). Michael also had Al Stewart and 'Quintessence' on the bill (link) and said : 

" I regarded the whole event as kind of a cross between a harvest festival and a pop festival, so I had some bales of hay up on the stage and Marc Bolan perched on one of them when he was singing 'Deborah'. Despite my first encounter with him, I have to say that he was wonderful, easily the highlight of the Festival. The sun was going down behind the stage, a red sun. There were only 1,500 people there to see it, but you knew this was music that was going to last. To this day, I reckon it's one of the best things that ever happened here". (link)

Those 1,500 people had paid £1 for a ticket, including free milk from the farm and Michael made a loss of £1,500. During the rest of the 1970s, each meeting consisted of a series of informal events, culminating in the "impromptu" festival of 1978, when travellers flushed out from Stonehenge sought spontaneous entertainment. 

In 1981, the now, properly named 'Glastonbury Festival', gained a political edge as the first Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Festival and Michael raised around £20,000, which was his first of 10 annual donations to CND. During this decade his Festival lived on a knife edge from year to year. Michael had to fight off district council charges that he had breached licence conditions and one year it was overshadowed by a confrontation between security teams and travellers who were looting the emptying site. This resulted in 235 arrests and £50,000 of damage. However, after a 'gap year', it returned with Tom Jones as surprise guest and now in the post-Cold War, with the threat of nuclear war lifted, Michael donated £250,000 raised to Greenpeace, Oxfam and local causes. 

Michael told the New Statesman that his hero in adult life had been the historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner, E.P. Thompson and : "His speech from the Pyramid Stage in 1983 is still the best speech ever at Glastonbury". The late historian and peace campaigner likened the crowd to a medieval army and argued : “With its tents, all over the fields this has not only been a nation of money-makers and imperialists, it has been a nation of inventors, of writers of activists, artists, theatres and musicians". Looking directly at the assembled crowds he told them : “It is this alternative nation which I can see in front of me now”.

The 1990s, saw the Festival moved into the consumer-savvy age of cash machines, retail outlets, restaurants and flush lavatories. Channel 4 televised it, attendances topped 100,000 and the likes of Oasis, Blur and Robbie Williams headlined. Perhaps the defining image of the Festival for many was fixed in 1997, when torrential rain brought the 'Year of the Mud'.

After recovering from stomach cancer, Michael stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party in the 1997 General Election and polled over 10,000 votes. He then suggested that disillusioned Labour voters should switch their vote to the Green Party to protest at the Iraq War. In 2009, he was nominated by 'Time Magazine'  as one of the 'Top 100 Most Influential People in the World' and in 2010, at the Festival's 40th anniversary, appeared on the main stage with headline artist Stevie Wonder to sing the chorus of  "Happy Birthday". (link)

He started the Festival with a £5,000 overdraft and by 2013 it was up to £1.3m and when asked : "Could he pay it off?" he said : "I'd feel guilty if I did. Isn't it funny? Why? We give away £2m a year to Greenpeace, Water Aid, Oxfam, we do local stuff at schools and housing. It's really important to keep that going. I can't just pay off my overdraft and say, 'Sod that".

He still continued to see himself as a farmer first and foremost and easier to reconcile with his Methodism : "Being a farmer is more authentic than organising Glastonbury. You're rearing cattle, you're feeding people. There's no branding, no sales pitch, it's just a natural way of living. There's no contamination, no transport, trains or planes. The festival has got a lot of other stuff – drugs, drinking, branding. It's a different thing. I love the Festival. That's why it's so successful – because I love it so much. But you offered me a preference, and I'm just telling you why I prefer the farm."

In 2013 it was the turn of the Rolling Stones opening with 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', with Mick Jagger prowling the stage in a green sequinned jacket and after 'It's Only Rock 'N' Roll (But I Like It)', joked that the organisers had "finally got round to asking us to play." He then belted out a total of 20 songs on the two hour set. After 'Satisfaction' he said : "We've been doing this for 50 years or something. And if this is the first time you've seen a band, please come again". Michael's comment was : "They finally did it, and it was fantastic. My God, did they deliver." Speaking immediately after the band came off stage, he called it "the high spot of 43 years of Glastonbury".(link)

Michael said : 

"I'm a bit of a Puritan, but I do enjoy myself immensely. I have a hell of a good time. I've got the best life anyone could possibly have. I'm not moaning. This whole Festival thing is better than alcohol, better than drugs. It's marvellous".

Britain is a Country where old men remember the year 1963, when an actor/songwriter called Trevor Peacock told "Mrs Brown you've got a lovely daughter"

Trevor, who died in 2021 at the age of 89, had a long career as a stage and small screen actor, screenwriter and songwriter and was best known and best loved for playing Jim Trott in the BBC TV comedy series, 'The Vicar of Dibley' alongside Dawn French, who has read this post and tweeted : ‘This is fab’ and it is ironical that much of Trevor's early life was dominated by church.

He was born in Edmonton, North London, eight years before the outbreak of the Second World War in the Spring of 1931, the son of 'Queenie' and Victor, a commercial traveller for a drugs company and lay minister of the Baptist Church. In addition, to preaching in the church, Trevor recalled : "My old man was the organist and" and to manually maintain the air pressure, "I was always pumping, pumping. Didn't have electricity in those days". "I used to peep out and watch the old girls and the faces they pulled when they sang hymns and so suddenly my Dad would shout : "Trevor. Blow, blow, blow". So quickly I would pump".

Trevor's was a musical background : "In singing hymns 3 or 4 times a week and without knowing it, I suppose one got to know about tunes; middle eights; when to sing loud; when to sing low; the whole idea of creating a tune. I'd never thought I'd use it". His father was a good pianist, as well as being an organist, as was Trevor's brother, while he himself played a mouth organ. He concluded that "music had been going into my head at an early age".

Victor was 9 and living in Tottenham when, in 1940, after the outbreak of War, the aerial bombardment of London started and during the Blitz, he and his family sought shelter in the White Hart Lane underground station. 

He recalled : "I did put on shows during the Blitz time and it was great fun and they, (his parents), thought : 'He's enjoying himself'. But I took it very seriously. I don't know why. I think, though, a church is rather like a theatre. There's music and there's a platform and a big audience". His street entertainment with his friends was well received and he said : “The local papers would print stories like :

TREVOR PEACOCK AND HIS GANG HAVE MADE ANOTHER ONE AND NINE PENCE FOR THE RED CROSS

He drew inspiration from the comedy his parents had taken him to see at the theatre and recalled : "I loved the Crazy Gang and I wrote to them asking for signed photographs. They sent me these huge black and white photographs. I wrote notes on all their scenes and how they could improve their comedy. I think I was only eight". (link)

When it came to the big screen, Trevor recalled that his parents "didn't like to go into the cinema. In fact, I was banned from it because the cinema was wicked".

However, when he was about 12 years old he was shown how to get into his local cinema through a side door. He recalled : "I saw the screen for the first time. An enormous screen. Clark Gable was the great hero those days. There was his head, as big as the wall and I thought : 'This is for me. This is exciting'". 

Trevor set about replicating the cinema at home : "So I used to hang a sheet up and I'd say to the kids : "You come in from that side and you come in from that side" so it looked just like it did in the films "And you just talk" and they said : "What do we talk about ?" "Anything. It doesn't matter what you talk about". And that's the magic. I didn't think that I'd actually do it and be paid for doing it".

His passion for theatre continued when he took his place, in 1942, at Enfield Grammar School for Boys and he wrote and performed in school plays. The school had been founded at the time of Queen Elizabeth I and its motto was 'Tant Que Je Puis' / 'As Much As I Can'. The time he spent on dramatics clearly prejudiced his academic work and he recalled that when he was in the sixth form, with his final school certificate exams approaching, one master had said to him : "Peacock. You must do some work. Time to do some work. Never attending the classes. You must get to work". To which he'd replied : "Get to work ? I'm writing the plays. I paint the scenery. I'm playing the lead".

Having left school in 1949 he was called up for his two year's National Service in the Army where he served as Corporal Peacock, was a crack shot and, much to his pleasing, was put in charge of entertainment for the troops with whom he was stationed. After returning to civilian life, and without any discernible training, he spent several years teaching classes of at Cuckoo Hall Primary School in Edmonton, Middlesex. 

By the mid 1950s he'd put teaching aside and described these financially lean years as his "poverty in the East End". This was broken when he got his first break on the professional stage in 1956, when he and the future rock 'n' roll impresario, Jack Gold, teamed up to put on a comedy double act at the Windmill Theatre squeezed in between the scenes with female strippers. Trevor had met Jack through their mutual friend, the composer, Vernon Handly, who was at school with Trevor and became involved with Jack in the Dramatic Society at Oxford University after which he'd gone on to study at the London Academy of Music,.

Despite their different routes into show business, Trevor and Jack formed a fruitful partnership and worked together to produce scripts for BBC Radio and Jack's career prospered when he became a Light Entertainment Producer at BBC Television and in 1957 introduced rock 'n' roll to Britain with his innovative series aimed at the young audience called the '6.5 Special'. Jack employed Trevor to write the scripts for the weekly show. This was the time when, as Trevor recalled : "Me and my mate Jack Gold co-discovered these fellows called Cliff Richard and Adan Faith and we laboriously taught them how to sing and gyrate" 

In 1959 Trevor himself compered the BBC television series 'Drumbeat' which aired for 22 episodes and was the BBC's answer and rival to Jack's new ITV' series 'Oh Boy!' When the composer John Barry, who had worked with Trevor on 'Drumbeat', scored the film 'Beat Girl' in 1960, as a vehicle for Adam Faith, Trevor was employed to write two of the songs, including the hit, 'Made You'. The film, incidentally, featured a young actor called Oliver Reed. (link) 

The following year Jess Conrad had success with Trevor's  'Mystery Girl'. Trevor also wrote 'Stick Around' for Billy Fury and 'That's What Love Will Do' for Joe Brown.   

With the coming of the 1960s Trevor concentrated more on his stage work. In 1961 he met the theatre director, Michael Elliott at a party and when he told him that he wanted to be an actor, Michael responded with : "You start next week at the Old Vic", which was where he was working on a series of plays as Artistic Director. These were the years when he played small stage roles and, for example, in 1962 was the old servant Grumio in 'The Taming of the Shrew', in the relaunched Open Air Theatre, in Regent’s Park. 

In addition, he started to make appearances in television drama and in 1963 had an opportunity to both act in and provide songs for an episode in The ITV Television Play called 'The Lads' and is seen here with Tom Courtenay. He recalled : "I started to act on TV and they made a television play about the troubles in Cyprus". It was 1963 and this focussed on the British Army role in the conflict on the Mediterranean Island between the Turks and the Greeks. He continued : "The play was about these soldiers : that you're there to keep the peace. No flirting with local girls. That's forbidden". It was important that the soldiers were entertained by music on their portable transistor radios. "There were three soldiers, Tom Courtenay, Johnny Thaw and myself". Trevor was asked to write six songs for the soldiers, Dobely, Barritt and Adams and was given a week to do it.

His method in song creation was to look for a good line in a play as a starting point, since he considered that all his songs were basically stories. He recalled : "I read this thing and it wasn't 'Mrs Brown' it was "'Mrs So and So' you have a lovely daughter" and that was in a line and as I drove to work I kept saying "Brown""Brown" "I like that and as I drove I sang : "Mrs Brown you've got a lovely daughter". No, no, no, no good. I suddenly found myself singing : "Mrs Brown you've got a lovely daughter. Lovely daughter" and so that's good, that's good".

Four of the songs were released on a 45 Decca vinyl record with Tom Courtenay singing his version of the song and if you listen carefully you can hear Trevor's distinctive voice audible in the refrain and which he described as "I helped him with some bits". It is  accompanied here with stills from Tom's film, 'Billy Liar', which was released in the same year and starring him and the beautiful Julie Christie, who doubles up as Mrs Brown's daughter. (link)

Trevor recalled about 4 months after the release of the record : "Someone rang me up and said "You've got a song in the American hit parade". They said : "Listen out and you'll hear it" and I said : "Which song ?" and they said : "Mrs Brown". So I said : "That's me and old Tom Courtenay. That can't be true."

This is the best-known version of the song by Herman's Hermits, who took it to Number One on the US Billboard Hot 100 in May 1965 and number one in Canada the month before. The Hermits had never released the track as a single in Britain. It was recorded as an afterthought, in two takes and featured Peter Noone with his Lancashire accented lead vocals, with backing vocals from Karl Green and Keith Hopwood. The band never dreamed it would be a single let alone hit number one in the USA. 

In 1963, when John Barry was given the task of creating the score for the next James Bond film he contacted Trevor and asked him to supply the lyrics which led Trevor to what he called his "greatest failure as a writer". He recalled the conversation with John : "I said : "What's it going to be called ?" He said : "Goldfinger". I said : "The song, it's called 'Goldfinger' ?" He said "Yes". For Trevor the problem was to find lyrics which rhymed with 'finger'. He said to himself : "Finger, inger, linger, twinger. There's no rhymes and at any rate he's a villain". He tried hard to write it but in the end, picked up the phone and said : "John, I can't find the lines for it" and he went to a much better writer than me, Leslie Bricusse, and he wrote 'Goldfinger' and Shirley Bassey sang it. So I missed out on that one". 

In 1964, the year 'Goldfinger' was shown at the cinema Jack Good contacted Trevor to ask him if he would take part in a programme for ITV featuring the Beatles. The Shakespearean sketch featuring, Trevor opened with an an image of the Globe Theatre, with Ringo Starr unfurling a flag with the legend 'Around the Beatles'. What followed was a humorous rendition of the 'play within a play', from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', with Paul as Pyramus, John as his lover Thisbe, George as Moonshine, Ringo as Lion with Trevor in the role of Peter Quince.

The following year John Barry contacted Trevor to ask him to contribute the lyrics for his first stage musical, 'Passion Flower Hotel', which was to be performed first at the Palace theatre in Manchester and then the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. The musical was based on Rosalind Erskine’s 1962 novel about the girls at a boarding  school who hit upon the idea of losing their virginity by setting up a brothel to attract the boys of a nearby school. It starred Francesca Annis, Pauline Collins and Jane Burkin, who would later marry John and it was not a great success, running for only 148 performances. Trevor (left) was caught on camera at the theatre, in discussion with fellow lyricist Bob Russell, singer Johnny De little and John Barry (right).

Despite disappointment, Trevor, however, had the pleasure of hearing Barbra Streisand record his song ‘How much of the dream comes true’ on her 'Barbra Two' album in the same year.

When it came to his inspiration for 'Mrs Brown', Trevor recalled that the poet Shelley had written : '

'Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought' 

His "was a sad song about this bloke who loves the girl and she doesn't want him and it's sad and if you get the right minor key to sing it in, that's what works. It's amazing".

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In acknowledgement to Mike D McGinty whose 2011 interview with Trevor provided substance and insight into his work and thinking.