Preface

Summary

In 1991, Bedford Choral Society celebrated its 125th anniversary. A year earlier, as part of my degree with the Open University, I had studied the Arts Foundation course, which included units on musical performance during the Victorian period and on provincial music-making. This prompted me to ask questions about the formation of Bedford Choral Society, of which I was a member. To my surprise no-one knew very much about its origins. When I started to investigate, I found that the date chosen to celebrate the anniversary was incorrect: the Society was actually founded very early in 1867. It was a commonly held view that it was founded in 1866.

I set out to write an article about the Society's history for The Bedfordshire Magazine, and began research early in 1991 in the local studies section of Bedford Central Library. My article was published around the time of the main celebratory concert in November 1991. Soon after I had started work on the article, I had a fascinating discussion with Kate and Hans Freyhan (both long-term members of the Society) whom many people thought would be able to give me a large amount of background information. They were not as knowledgeable about the history of the Society as I had hoped, perhaps because they had escaped to England, from Germany, just before the Second World War. They did, however, pass on to me many of the Society's early concert programmes, which proved to be enormously helpful.

I soon realised that my article only ‘scraped the surface’ and decided that I wanted to write a fuller history; this present book is the outcome. Since 1991, the history of Bedford Choral Society has been a constant companion, but as I was elected as general secretary of the Society following retirement in 2002, I was not able to do much work on the book during the six years that I held that post.

Undertaking the research for this book has taken me to places, libraries and archives that I would not otherwise have known about or visited, and this experience has been invaluable.