Jared GeorgeARMSTRONGOur friend, Jared George Armstrong, a secular polymath, died on the 9th of April, just short of his 99th birthday. Born on Mayday, 1926, in Sunderland, he was brought up in Newcastle. He always considered himself a Geordie. His father, during the Great Depression of the twenties and thirties, had to become a commercial traveller, and money was always tight.. He used to recall the poverty he saw with children coming to school shoeless and in worn-out clothes. But there was always music in his home; his father sang and his mother accompanied on the piano. His musical talent was encouraged. And from State Elementary School, where he started with the Tonic Sol Fa and what was to become the Kodaly method, he was auditioned for the Newcastle Cathedral choir in 1936.
He attended Dame Allen's, a high-achieving grammar school that was twice evacuated after 1939. With the second evacuation, he won a place at Durham School in 1940, so that he could remain a head chorister at Newcastle Cathedral. After School certificate in 1943, Sir George Dyson offered him a place at the Royal College of Music, where he studied organ with Sir William Harris and met Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells. Expecting call-up in 1944, he was granted a delay to take his ARCO.
After call-up, he was eventually posted to Burma with the Intelligence Corps in the Autumn of 1945, where he served with a Field Security Section in the north east, in the Yunnan-Burma border area, where he remained for two years, integrating with the local population and Chiang Kai-shek's across-border forces, and sending back intelligence. He eventually returned to the UK and was demobbed in January 1948. He was then the recipient of an Organ scholarship at Exeter College, Oxford. Here he read Military History and French, with a parallel study for the BMus, as music at this time was not a tripos subject.
He went down with a pass BA in 1952, sufficient to be taken on as an Assistant music master and school organist at Oundle School, and in 1954, he passed Part II of the BMus with the completion of a String Quartet, not to be heard in public for the first time until 2016, when it appeared on YouTube.
In the early 1960s, he arrived at Cranleigh School, where his most notable achievement was a production of West Side Story, widely reported in the national press, including the Times Educational Supplement and The Guardian in June 1964. He then moved to Wellington College, at the invitation of the then Master, to bring college music into the twentieth century. In 1967, he founded the Crowthorne Choral Society and began tutoring and mentoring with the National Youth Orchestra. He was always deeply involved with his pupils and, in school holidays, led climbing expeditions to various parts of Europe. His pupils were so fond of him that they stayed friends for life and became his family. Indeed, the singer, Jonathan Louth, visited him in the Tunbridge Wells Hospital and sang for him.
When he retired from Wellington, he came to East Sussex. Music continued, and he found a post at Skinners School in Tunbridge Wells. He was, for a time, Musical Director of the Heathfield Choral Society and in April 1990 conducted their Anniversary Concert. In 1985, he conducted the LPO at the Tunbridge Wells Assembly Hall, in a production of Jabberwocky by Derek Bourgeois ( a former pupil).
The 1990s saw health issues, with a bowel cancer successfully removed, and then a stroke and a heart attack. Although he recovered, he was left unable to play the keyboard again. This left him depressed until, at a Christmas party in 1999, Valerie and I showed him a Python skin-covered box, made by the Wiener Werkstaette that I had inherited. It contained more than 80 handcrafted dedications, drawings and musical scores of the period that had been given as a 50th Birthday Festschrift gift to Dr Josef Bach, a Viennese Journalist, Musicologist and refugee to this country in 1938. Jared was so excited and insisted that it not go back in the bank vault where I kept it. He would research it. And during the last 25 years of his life, he did just that, culminating in an invitation to give a lecture on the Box and its background to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to which I had given the box.
Jared never married. His former pupils and friends were his family.
Philip Marriott
At Jared's request, there was no funeral, but a direct cremation.
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