Making music has been Roy’s life (From Echo)

Making music has been Roy’s life

10:00pm Friday 16th October 2009 in

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HEFTY, solid and with its bottom end firmly grounded, the double bass is an instrument built to last, and so, to judge by Roy Dowling, are the people who play it.

Roy, from Thorpe Bay, will be 80 this year, though he looks perhaps 20 years younger. “I suppose you could say I am an example of the preservative power of music,” he says.

People may call Roy youthful, but nobody would accuse him of being flighty. For 60 years he has occupied the same seat in the same orchestra.

When Roy first played with the Southend Symphony Orchestra in 1949, George VI was king, Clement Attlee prime minister, and Stalin ruled Russia.

On Saturday, the orchestra will pay a tribute to this veteran presence by playing one of Roy’s favourite orchestral works, the Academic Festival Overture, by his beloved Brahms.

Roy acknowledges this tribute with a return compliment. “It’s really a tribute to the orchestra itself. Southend Symphony has had its ups and downs over the years, like any orchestra, but the fact I’ve stayed with it for 60 years says everything about the quality this orchestra has been able to sustain.”

The quality of Roy’s own music making can be judged by the fact that, on several occasions, he has been offered the chance to turn professional. “But I made the decision to keep music simply as a pleasure,” he says.

“I wanted it to remain a joy, not be subject to the pressures and stresses that would have applied if it had been my living.”

Instead, he built an office career in the Agricultural Mortgage Corporation, where his flair for figures took him to a top job.

All the time he has also led a hectic musical life in the evenings. He ran the bass section of the Barbican orchestra for ten years and he played with both Southend orchestras, as well as the Essex Symphony orchestra.

“I also sing,” he mentions, almost nonchalantly. With his wife Joy, a trained singer, he performed the lead role in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with a Canvey group.

He has also been a regular in the theatre orchestra pit, supporting all the local amateur operatic companies. “At one time, I would be playing non-stop for four weeks during the main musical season,” he recalls.

Roy will be back in the pit once again for My Fair Lady, Southend Operatic and Dramatic Society’s November production.

As if this wasn’t enough, Roy is also an established teacher. Several generations of bass players in Southend have been tutored by him.

“Luckily,” he says, “I don’t need much sleep.”

The double bass has been at the centre of Roy’s life, but it wasn’t his first choice of instrument.

As a child from a musical family, he was encouraged to play the violin. He stuck to this instrument throughout his schooldays in Rayleigh. The switchover came one night, when he was 16.

“A local orchestra was short of a bass player. They could not locate one for love or money. My teacher said to me ‘You’re comfortable with string instruments, you can play the bass.’”

Indeed he could. On that life-changing night the teenager discovered the instrument and the instrument found Roy. But although he has been inseparable from the double bass ever since, Roy is hard put to define its compelling appeal for him.

“I like the fact it is the foundation of the orchestra,” he says. This, though, is only a partial explanation. In the end, the rapport between a particular instrument and a particular player remains quite mysterious. “You simply find the instrument that is right for you,” Roy says.

Roy’s 80 years, orchestrated to the sound of music, seem to have passed happily and largely smoothly. “I’ve enjoyed my work, and away from work I’ve had this wonderful hobby,” he says.

“My work colleagues used to say, ‘you jammy bugger.’”

The one trauma was the theft of his beloved double bass, after 42 years in 1994. The instrument was somehow filched from a locked room in the Cliffs Pavilion. “It’s still on the Metropolitan Police’s schedule of stolen arts and antiques,” he says.

“But I’ve been told that there is no likelihood of ever getting it back. It will probably be somewhere in Germany or America now.”

Eventually, after testing scores of instruments and journeying around England, Roy tracked down “a worthy successor”.

As well as youthful looks, Roy at 80 is also blessed with hands that remain as flexible as ever. He says: “I hope to keep playing until I know that my standard is in decline. My ambition is to play with the Southend Symphony at its centenary concert, in 2020. I’ll be 91 then. After that, I’’ll be ready to retire. Maybe.”