John Drummond 1934-2006

It is a great shame that John Drummond was never the director of the Royal Ballet. He was our nearest equivalent to Diaghilev in Britain; an impresario, an entrepreneur, a gifted television producer and author, director of the Edinburgh Festival, controller of Radio 3 and the BBC Proms. When he worked in the BBC's old Music and Arts department, he had the great foresight to interview many of the survivors of the Ballets Russes, then still alive, later publishing the transcripts in his Speaking of Diaghilev. Chapter 1 is available on the New York Times book site and gives a flavour of his insight, good judgement and irascibility. It's fair to say he didn't suffer fools gladly - indeed, he didn't suffer them at all.

I was in awe of him and remember longing to introduce myself at an Edinburgh Festival press conference but shyly drawing back, only to be struck by the extraordinary courtesy and attention with which he spoke to a ten-year-old girl moments later. What might I have said? Only that I had been touched in my marrow by the documentary he and his partner Bob Lockyer had recently made about Nijinska's Les Noces. It was extraordinary: a rigorous documentary about Noces, followed by concert and danced performances of the work itself. As soon as I joined the BBC,I made for the archives to see it. It's hard to imagine the BBC making anything like it now. To function creatively in the Corporation, you really had to have Drummond's force of personality, and he deployed that force in the very best causes.

There was also something of the frustrated dancer in his personality. He joked that he would have loved even to have been an extra - perhaps a Russian Orthodox bishop in the closing moments of The Firebird.

This morning on BBC Radio 4's Today, John Tusa, his longtime friend (and one who similarly stood for the BBC at its best), remembered Drummond's 'Byronic quality and Diaghilev-like supershowmanship' and how 'he made the rest of us feel like appeasers'. Isaiah Berlin, Tusa remembered, would remonstrate with Drummond: "Please can you not be so critical about everything all the time, and you might be happier". Drummond replied 'Not yet - it's too soon'.

His autobiography, Tainted by Experience, rings with savage indignation. It ends:

"I believe it still matters to demonstrate that some of us have not lost faith. After the onslaught of recent years, it might have been much easier to give up. But for someone like me, born in the 1930s, the word 'appeasement' will always hang in the air like smoke. The lowest-common-denominator, accessibility-at-any-price, anti-intellectual laziness of so many of today's leaders - not only in politics, but also in education and the arts - is for me a form of appeasement. Failing or refusing to differentiate between the good and the indifferent, while sheltering under a cloak of spurious democracy, is simply not good enough. It is a betrayal of all our civilisation has stood for."

May he rest in peace.

Guardian obituary by Humphrey Burton
Times
obituary
Glasgow Herald obituary
John Tusa's obituary for the Independent
Champion of music, cleaner of floors: Guardian reminiscence by John Tusa
John Drummond interviewed by Ismene Brown in 1997

1 October: The closing section of Les Noces was among the pieces played at the ceremony before his cremation.