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The Mike Sammes Singers eventually made the charts in their own right in 1966:Wally Ridley at HMV played me Somewhere My Love

The Mike Sammes Singers eventually made the charts in their own right in 1966:Wally Ridley at HMV played me “Somewhere My Love”, which sounded like an old Victorian pub song, but someone else had recorded it like a bull at a gate He wanted a more sympathetic approach. The melody was “Lara’s Theme” in Dr Zhivago and it was a hit twice: once, in 1966, when the film was in the West End; and then, a few months later, when it was on general release.The Mike Sammes Singers made several albums including Let’s Get Away From It All (1962), Somewhere My Love (1967), Songs That Live Forever (1973), Cole (1974), Sammes Songs (1976), which was based on a Radio 2 series, Just For You (1987) and The Songs We Love (1988).In 1969 John Lennon passed the second-rate tapes of the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions to the American producer Phil Spector and asked him to turn them into a decent album. Spector added the Mike Sammes Singers to “The Long and Winding Road” and although it became the Beatles’ biggest-selling single in America, Paul McCartney hated the backing vocals, likening the record to one by Mantovani. Sammes took it philosophically: “We found out later that it wasn’t what McCartney wanted, but that’s not my problem. He had a different idea for the arrangement and because of the friction in the Beatles, he wasn’t consulted.” The Mike Sammes Singers also provided the chants on Lennon’s “I am the Walrus” and the harmonies on Ringo Starr’s “Good Night”.Windsor Davies was more appreciative. In 1975 the Mike Sammes Singers were asked to work on the cast album for It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and, Sammes recalled,We found out that Don Estelle had the most beautiful voice.

He had recorded “Whispering Grass” and Windsor Davies had come in at the beginning and at the end. I told Wally Ridley that it would sound better if he appeared throughout the record and so I added a few comments and “baba-ba-booms”. The record went to No 1 and Windsor sent me a lovely letter telling me that when people were complimenting him on his “baba-ba-booms”, he would smile bashfully and say, “Thank you very much”.Sammes wrote songs and commercials with over 30 lyricists, but he never wrote a hit record. The New Seekers’ “Out to the Edge of Beyond” just failed in 1972 to become the UK’s entry for the Eurovision Song Contest.

“The week that they were featuring my song, there was a power strike and only about three people saw the broadcast.”As the years went by, the Mike Sammes Singers found there was less call for their work, as artists tended to perform their own backing vocals and also, for them, the fun had gone out of recording. “With all the multi-tracking, it was rare to meet anyone at a session anymore,” Sammes said. “We might be called in to do the vocal backing and never meet the main artist It’s the same for the musicians. Everyone is working in limbo and I do feel that you lose an awful lot through that.”Spencer Leigh.

Kathleen Mary Constable, English scholar: born 3 April 1906; part-time Assistant, then Junior Lecturer, Bedford College, London University 1929-39, Lecturer 1939-47, Reader 1947-58, Hildred Carlile Professor of English 1958-71 (Emeritus), Fellow 1971-2001; FBA 1965; OBE 1983, CBE 1991; FRSL 1984; married 1933 Geoffrey Tillotson (died 1969; two adopted sons); died London 3 June 2001. Kathleen Mary Constable, English scholar: born 3 April 1906; part-time Assistant, then Junior Lecturer, Bedford College, London University 1929-39, Lecturer 1939-47, Reader 1947-58, Hildred Carlile Professor of English 1958-71 (Emeritus), Fellow 1971-2001; FBA 1965; OBE 1983, CBE 1991; FRSL 1984; married 1933 Geoffrey Tillotson (died 1969; two adopted sons); died London 3 June 2001.
Kathleen Tillotson, one of the finest scholars of Victorian literature in general, and of Dickens in particular, that the world has ever known, was the daughter of a Yorkshire journalist, Eric Constable. It was, she wrote in the preface to her ground-breaking study Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1954), thanks to him that she grew up “among the classics of the last century”. To her Quaker parents, too, Kathleen Constable owed an upbringing and education that bred in her a profound regard for truthfulness in every aspect of life, humane concern for others, modesty about her own achievements and a strong distaste for all parade and ostentation.After attending Ackworth School and the Mount School, York, she proceeded in 1924 to Somerville College, Oxford, to read English, where she had a distinguished undergraduate and graduate career, winning the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship in 1926, and graduating BA in 1927 and BLitt in 1929 Among her Oxford friends was A.J.P. Taylor, later to describe her as “the cleverest woman I have known”.Such were the financial exigencies of the time that it was not until 1939 that she achieved a full-time, tenured post as Lecturer at Bedford College, London University. Before that she survived on part-time teaching at Somerville, St Hilda’s and Bedford.

In 1933 she married Geoffrey Tillotson, then an Assistant Lecturer at University College London.This was the beginning of an immensely happy and fulfilling marriage (“Their shared interests and sympathies,” wrote Mary Lascelles, one of their closest friends, “were inexhaustible”), as well as of a great literary partnership, exemplified in their splendid Riverside edition of Vanity Fair (1963) and a joint volume, Mid-Victorian Studies (1965), full of riches for everyone interested in the period.During the Second World War Bedford was evacuated to Cambridge, where Kathleen Tillotson, with her beautiful and abundant red hair, cut a striking figure cycling around the town with baby Edmund, the elder of their two adopted sons, safely secured in the bicycle basket. Visits to Geoffrey, working for one of the ministries in war-torn London, would often involve readings aloud of their beloved Victorians, something movingly described in his poem, “Homage to Tennyson, 1940. For K.T.” : “Bombers, the enemy’s loaded arm, / flog to bright blood the bones of streets, / While you worn fatal to the blitz / In room blacked out and over-warm / Humour my sudden bent to hear / From Tennyson’s extent of song / Whatever lyric-loosened tongue / Liked most to read, in teeth of fear. .”Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson, like their second adopted son, Henry, were keen walkers and lovers of Hampstead Heath, with the Lake District as their favourite holiday destination. In the 1950s and 1960s, before Geoffrey’s so untimely death in 1969, he and Kathleen were regularly to be seen walking in from Hampstead to Regent’s Park, where she would turn off for Bedford while he continued on to Birkbeck College. A Reader in English at Bedford from 1947, Kathleen Tillotson succeeded her admired friend Una Ellis-Fermor there as Hildred Carlile Professor of English in 1958.Tillotson’s first published work was on the Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton. Her editorial contribution to the great Shakespeare Head Edition of Drayton won her the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize of the British Academy (1943).