Leslie Heward

Heward was born in Liversedge, Yorkshire, the son of a railway porter and organist. He showed remarkable musical promise as a child. By the age of two he was playing the piano, by the age of four he was playing the organ, and by the age of eight he was accompanying a performance of Handel's Messiah on the organ in Bradford. At 12 he was a choir boy at Manchester Cathedral, supported by the organist there, Sidney Nicholson. In 1917 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. There he was one of the first pupils in Adrian Boult's conducting class, and was described by Hubert Parry as "the kind of phenomenon that appears once in a generation". Heward served as Assistant Conductor for Vladimir Rosing's Opera Week at Aeolian Hall in 1921, where he ably reduced the scores of four operas for Adrian Boult's small orchestra.

After leaving the College Heward took teaching posts at Eton and Westminster, became chorus master and subsequently a conductor for the British National Opera Company, and (from 1924 to 1926) was appointed conductor of the Cape Town Orchestra and director of music to the South African Broadcasting Corporation. He broadcast so frequently there that he had to conceal his identity under half-a-dozen aliases. Returning to the UK, Heward took over as conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra when Adrian Boult left to become Music Director at the BBC in 1930. Heward gained the respect of the orchestra's players, introduced bold programming, with 28 Birmingham premieres in his first season, and attracted front-rank soloists. In 1934 the BBC asked Heward to conduct the Midland Orchestra, which shared many players with the CBO. However, the orchestra lost much of its funding and many of its players at the outbreak of World War II. At the same time Heward's health was in decline, his tuberculosis aggravated by smoking and heavy drinking. At the end of 1942 he was offered the post of Conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, but was too ill to take up the post. He died at his Edgbaston home (43 Harborne Road, Five Ways, Birmingham) in May the following year, aged just 45.