29/03/06 - Hello friends. I realise it's been a long time since I've written on the site, but I'm still here! Thanks to everyone for their emails. Keep them coming, though I don't get round to answering them very often and tend to do them in batches! To those who've given me information and corrections for the site, they'll be added some time soon I hope, time permitting. In the meantime, please keep enjoying the site, and do email if you want, I only keep the site running because of all the joy and memories it seems to bring so many of you.
The only bit of news is that there's talk again of writing a book on Hylton's life. Those of you who know me, know that it's come up before, but this time it may happen! Obviously this will be the only place to get early info, if it comes to fruition. Here's hoping!
Kindest regards to all the visitors to the site over the last seven years, new and old, those who visit often and those who visit occasionally. I promise something special for the 10th anniversary of jackhylton.com! ;-)
07/08/04 - Not much to report of late. I've done a few little changes to the Discography, to incorporate some things people have found missing - thanks to those of you who pointed that out. Today will see "Salvaging Jack Hylton" on BBC Radio 4, with lots of new interviews, and some old stuff. If you miss it, I believe it will be possible to get hold of it via the BBC website, probably www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 or something like that! If I find out for certain I'll try and post, but don't have much access to a computer for a couple of months.
In the meantime, thanks for all your continued support of the site. It's great to receive so many messages from people telling me they enjoy what I've done. Keep enjoying!
Pete
11/06/03 - We've had a piece of sad news this week. A good friend of the site, Andre Budegary (real name Andy Lewis) was one of very few people I'd been in touch with who had played in Hylton's band. Sadly, he died a couple of weeks ago. My good friend and major contributer to this site, Hylton's son, Jack, had these words to say:
ANDRE BUDAGARY
Andre Budagary, who led the violin section of Jack Hylton?s orchestra from 1936 to 1939 died on Wednesday May 21st in hospital. He had been unwell since Christmas and hospitalised since Easter.
His real name was Ernest Lewis. The ?Andre Budagary? name was adopted by him prior to what must have been one of the last European tours the band undertook. Jack made Ernest the lead ?Gypsy Violinist? but the name Ernest Lewis didn?t seem to fit so after much ? well a little ? thought, they took the first part of Budapest, the second half of Hungary, changed Ernest to Andre and ?Andre Budagary? was born. The name Andre was subsequently modified to Andy which became the name his friends and relatives called him by.
Andy came to us through his nephews son finding this website and making contact. Until that time we were unaware that he was still around. A meeting was arranged and I duly went to Andy?s home in Brighton. Age is irrelevant! Andy was still young and his memory was completely undimmed by the passage of more than 60 years. Indeed, after that meeting, Andy became a valuable source of information when difficult questions came at us through the web site.
Although Andy went on to have a long and illustrious career with some of the nation?s leading classical orchestras, it was clear that he remembered his time with Hylton as one of the highlights. As Andy said to me, ?Jack was a very good musician and a very good man?.
I spoke to Andy frequently and we corresponded from time to time. He was always alert and lively and I was sure he was immortal. He was my ?new old friend? (Andy?s words) and I shall miss him a lot. My deepest condolences go to his family and many happy memories stay with me.
JH.
11/06/03 - Today I've added some new pictures to the site, from the archive in Lancaster. CLICK HERE to see them.
11/06/03 - This picture, though not a revelation, is a nice signed example, kindly sent to me by Robert who's surname I deleted just moments ago. Thanks, Robert, email me your surname and I'll put it on!
11/06/03 - A couple of new recordings for you, sent to me, as ever, by the wonderful Dennis Pereyra. Hope you enjoy them.
"Jack Hylton and His Band did the music for a George Pal Puppetoon done for Philips Radio, called "Philips Cavalcade" in the 1930s, and it is so stated in the opening credits. From information on the Web, it is dated either in 1934 or 1939. I believe that the year 1939 was probably correct, since one of the songs in the medley, "Music, Maestro, Please", wasn't recorded by the Hylton band until 1936. Also, the ending is an advertisement for the 1940 Philips International Band Radio. I found this item on a DVD called "The Puppetoon Movie". This DVD includes not only the movie, but a bonus section with 12 complete puppetoons, including "Philips Cavalcade" with music by Jack Hylton and His Band and the "Philips Broadcast of 1938" with music by Bert Ambrose and His Orchestra. I have only found this DVD for region 1 (U.S. and Canada)." - Dennis Pereyra
2 - Ca C'est Paris
Band Code: JHO
Title: Ca c'est Paris (6/8 One-Step)
Recording Date: 06/11/31
Record Number: Decca F-2678
Vocal/Others: none
11/06/03 - A little information about Pat Taylor, singer, actress, one of Hylton's many lovers and mother to Hylton's only son, my good friend Jack. Jack's brief email to me on the subject said this:
"Emily Maud Pope changed her name to Pat Taylor as a stage name. She started on stage at age of 12 in Mrs. Beam's Breezy Babes (yes really!). If you want details I can supply some but prior to retirement she was a major star of West End Stage, had her own radio programme (Taylor Maid - witty eh?), had modelled etc."
A few people have been asking about here, so there's a little to get you started. If you need more, let me know and I'll put you in touch with her son.
11/06/03 - I've done a little fishing into Hylton's parents and siblings. It's not finished yet and nothing exciting or new seems to be happening, but if anyone wants to look at George Hilton's census entry for 1901, download THIS FILE or even download the SCANNED IMAGE.
11/06/03 - This was sent to me some time ago - please email if it was you and I'll give the credit you deserve. It's of no great importance, just something interesting!
1910 Brighton Hippodrome
Music Hall Programme
November 1910
Billing lists the comedian Jack Hylton, Hinton & Wooton (presenting a Football
Match on Bicycles), La Noedia (the celebrated continental artiste), Scottish
Meisters, Maggie Carr (vocalist & dancer), Signor Torti (The Great Italian
tenor), Miss Ada Reeve (The famous comedienne), Joe & Hetty Waldron, Yamamoto &
Koyoshi (The celebrated Japanese Equilibrists), Animated pictures (time
permitting)
10/06/03 - Firstly, a huge apology to all those people who've just had emails replied to from the past few months. Work has been hectic and I haven't been able to make Hylton priority. However, I'm updating today and over the next couple of days, with the obligatory yearly facelift for the site. Nothing special, just a different colour! I'll send out the first mailing list newsletter soon too. Anyone who wants to join the list just send me an email.
2002
05/02/02 - The Music Download page has been massively updated. Hundreds of new songs for you to listen to including excerpts from films. If this doesn't satisfy you nothing will! Also updated are the My Music page and the Buy Music page. In the meantime, the picture that we thought was JH with Edward Elgar, is not. It's actually Sir Henry Coward, conductor of the Sheffield Choir, famously anti-jazz, taken in 1929, at a time when Coward was predicting the end of jazz.
24/01/02 - If anyone would like to join a mailing list for the latest updated Hylton information, just send an email to mailinglist@petefaint.com.
23/01/02 - I've aquired access to some of the recorded output in the archive, thanks to Ian Horsfall of the University Audio Visual Services department which is listed on the My Music page. If I can be of any use to anyone, do let me know
20/01/02 - On the Music To Buy page, there is now a link to get hold of both Hylton's films on VHS, by ordering online from America. I did it and it was a very good service.
19/01/02 - Just to prove a point to myself, I've finished all the bits I wanted to update. Please let me know if there's anything wrong, or any dead links.
18/01/02 - I'm appalled at myself at the length of time since I've updated the site and I apologise to regular visitors for that. The best news is that the archive at Lancaster has come under new "ownership", so to speak. Check the archive page for more details. Also good news is the imminent arrival of new Real Audio samples in the download section. As soon as they arrive from the States, they'll be uploaded. For what it matters, you can now access the site from either www.jackhylton.co.uk or www.jackhylton.com, thanks to JH Jnr. for that. There are a couple of new sections on the site, too, prompted by the kinds of questions I regularly get asked. Not that I don't like being asked, but to pre-empt them is better! I've also given the site a bit of a face-lift, just to keep myself entertained. Since I last wrote, we've found Woolf Phillips living in USA and I hope to interview him soon for the site. I'll take this opportunity to thank him for the advice and help on the site recently. That's all for now, but with hopefully regular visits to the archive and the possibility of some more serious research by me, there may be some interesting stuff dug up over the next few months. Keep visiting, and keep emailing me - pete@petefaint.com. Bear with me for a few days while I get everything uploaded. Enjoy the site.
2/12/00 - Well, I've been away earning a crust as a humble musician, but today I've transferred the whole site to a different bit of webspace. This may cause problems. Anyone using the email pete@val.dnx.co.uk, please change it to pete@petefaint.co.uk which is the only useful one now. If you find any broken links, just let me know.
12/10/00 - Not much been happening of late, but we have unearthed Mr.Andre Budegary, who played violin with Hylton from 1936-1939. He's 85 and still going strong. I will hopefully get to meet him soon and talk through some of his times with Hylton. Anything I do I'm sure I'll report on here. Perhaps there are some more surviving members that we don't know about...?
4/6/00 - The end of a busy weekend, with the Music Downloads Page fully up and running. Install Real Player, then listen till you can't take anymore! If there are any dodgy links, do let me know by email.
3/6/00 - The Picture Archive is now running. Some great pictures, do have a look.
2/6/00 - This page has been moved from the title page, to make room for a little more detail. Hope you like it. Do keep coming back - early summer is likely to dig up some great JH stuff! The first thing to appear will be a new picture for the title page.
30/5/00 - Please visit the Music Downloads page, which is at last up and running. Not all tunes are there, but we're getting there! All the tunes from A-S should be working as you read this, with the rest to follow within a week or so.
25/5/00
Billy Munn (1911-2000)
Billy Munn, who has died aged 88, was a prominent pianist in the pre-war British dance-band world, a member of Jack Hylton?s orchestra and a pioneer of jazz broadcasting in this country.
Munn was one of a remarkable generation of Scottish-born musicians who seemed to have a natural affinity with the jazz idiom. This group, which also included the trombonist George Chisholm and trumpeter Tommy McQuater, had a profound effect on the development of jazz in Britain.
William Munn was born in Glasgow on May12 1911, the son of a music-loving father who ran an amateur orchestra. He claimed to have been able to sing Alexander?s Ragtime Band at the age of two, and began taking piano lessons at seven.
Four years later he was playing the piano for children?s matinees at Glasgow?s Black Cat Cinema. There was never time to rehearse and he was obliged to improvise throughout the show. This experience, he believed, served as an excellent grounding for his later jazz career.
At 14, Munn joined his first dance band and was soon virtually a professional musician, although still at school. His early ambition to qualify as a chemist soon faded and by the age of 17 he was in London, playing at West End clubs and hotels and making his first recordings as a member of Jack Roseberry?s band. The following year he joined Jack Hylton as pianist and occasional accordionist, remaining until 1936.
Hylton was Britain?s most famous bandleader and his band was the star attraction wherever it appeared. To play for Hylton was to be accepted as among the cream of the music profession and led to demands for freelance recording in London with such visiting American artists as Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins and Adelaide Hall.
With Hylton he toured widely and appeared in the film She Shall Have Music, but a projected three-month American tour in 1936 foundered on the protectionist policies of the American Federation of Musicians, which insisted that Hylton use only American players. Hylton agreed, suspending the contracts of his British band until his return. Munn resigned and joined Sydney Lipton, remaining until 1941.
It was with Lipton that Munn developed his talents as a composer and arranger, contributing many scores to the Lipton band?s repertoire. He also recorded under his own name for the Regal Zonophone label, his records of Night and Day, and his own composition, Berceuse, being particularly well received.
During the war, he took work with a firm making aircraft instruments, though he continued to play. One group with which he recorded was the improbably named Victor Sylvester?s Jive Band, formed to cater for the new dance styles, then being introduced to a startled nation by visiting GI?s.
The efforts of Billy Munn and George Chisholm managed to save the project from complete ignominy. Munn also played regularly with the French violinist Stephane Grappelli, stranded in Britain by the outbreak of war.
At the end of the war, Munn formed his own band to appear at the Orchid Room, Mayfair, and later at Ciro?s Club and at the Casino in Deauville. In March 1947, the BBC launched a weekly radio programme, Jazz Club. The show was introduced by the bandleader Harry Parry, with Billy Munn acting as musical director, or ?club secretary?.
Jazz Club had an influence out of all proportion to its half hour length, because Munn ensured that all kinds of jazz had a hearing, even the new bebop style, regarded at the time as incomprehensible and outlandish. It was the first chance for most jazz lovers to hear the musicians they read about.
In 1949, he accepted a job as bandleader at the Imperial Hotel, Torquay. Intending to stay for a season, he remained for 30 years. After retiring in 1979, he lived in south Devon, acting as musical director for shows at the Prince?s Theatre, Babbacombe. He finally retired in 1994, aged 83, returning to live near his family in Ayrshire.
Billy Munn was married four times, twice to the same woman, and leaves one son.15/5/00
It is with regret that I have to write this section. I was informed today (May 15th) that Beverley McKay, Hyltons second wife, died today at the age of 67. She had been unconscious for almost a week, and died peacefully, never regaining consciousness.
I was lucky enough to meet Beverley on several occasions, and despite her health problems was a beautiful, engaging, warm person who still loved life. She was most accomodating to me and was happy to talk candidly about Jack Hylton and answer my most brutal of questions.
Despite re-marrying several years after the death of JH, one always got the impression that it was him that she loved. His portraits adorned her flat in Chelsea and she spoke of him as if she had seen him only a few days before, not almost 40 years previously. Despite their age difference, the couple were truly in love and she was the only woman who seemed to have "tamed" Hylton through his long career. Beverley was a magical person and will be greatly missed by her friends and family.
What follows is the obituary from The Times, May 29, 2000.
Beauty queen who worked tirelessly for good causes and was at the centre of Australian life in London
LADY
McKAY
Lady McKay, AM, charity worker, was born at Mackay, Queensland, on September 27, 1932. She died in London on May 15 aged 67
NATURAL warmth, vivacity and glamorous good looks combined with ambition and determination to carry Beverley McKay from small-town Australia to a briefly lavish international lifestyle, before she became one of the best-known and most generously involved members of London's expatriate Australian community in the Seventies and Eighties.
She made international headlines in 1963 when she married the millionaire English showman Jack Hylton: he was 70 and she 31. Despite inevitable murmurings, this was a true love match. But they had less than two happy years together before Hylton's death.
In 1973 Beverley Hylton married her fellow-Australian Alick McKay, the deputy chairman of News International, and developed another facet of her variegated life by working for a range of charitable and cultural activities linked to the lively Australian presence in London.
Her most notable achievement was the conception and organisation of the spectacular Bicentennial Ball at Grosvenor House in 1988, as part of celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of the founding of Australia. A dynamic organiser with a knack of enthusing colleagues, Lady McKay raised ?120,000; the Australian Government matched this to help to establish the Australian Bicentennial Scholarship and Fellowship Trust. Up to six students have been chosen annually since then in both Australia and Britain, to further studies in the other country. Lady McKay retained a keen interest in the scheme.
She was made a Member of the Order of Australia for her efforts.
Beverley Prowse was born in the Queensland sugar centre of Mackay in 1932, but her family moved south to Toowoomba, and in 1953 she settled in Melbourne - "to learn poise", as she put it. Her ambition was to become an actress or top-flight model, but although she worked with Melbourne's Little Theatre, and later had one minor film role (in the 1959 Rank comedy, Operation Bullshine), her acting was never going to achieve fame.
In 1954 she won the Miss Victoria title, in an age when the Miss Australia contest and its State preliminaries were increasingly significant, but did not provide a place in the Miss World finals in London for the national winner.
A year later Beverley Prowse and the reigning Miss South Australia, Pat Doran, made their way to London, and a Fleet Street paper asked its readers to decide from photographs which should represent Australia in Miss World.
Miss Victoria was chosen - and although she came only seventh in the international competition, her career was boosted by the publicity and she was regularly engaged in London, especially to model Australian fashions, notably swimsuits, and in promotional work.
She began travelling between her native and adopted countries as her career took off, giving her celebrity status and ensuring her regular appearances in both the British and Australian press.
She made headlines in 1958 when she was invited to model for the royal fashion designer Norman Hartnell.
The tall, lively and elegant young Australian inevitably attracted many English suitors, but she was escorted for some time by her fellow-countryman, the dashing young cricketer Keith Miller. In 1956, when Miller was touring England with the Australian Test team, he introduced his companion at Ascot to the danceband leader turned theatrical entrepreneur, Jack Hylton.
Hylton invited Miller to stay at his Geneva home, carefully extending the invitation to include Miss Prowse. She made several return visits as Hylton's guest before he startled the world on April 10, 1963, by marrying her at Geneva Town Hall.
The first Mrs Hylton, the former Ennis Parkes, had died in 1957, although the couple had formally separated in 1929, and Jack Hylton had indulged his freedom with a string of romances, which was why the second marriage surprised many.
The new Mrs Hylton greatly enjoyed the theatrical world of which she was now a part, with a home in Grosvenor Square, and international travel, luxury hotels, and all the trappings. She found her husband endlessly rewarding: "I never thought of him as being as old as he was," she once said. "He was much younger than me in a lot of ways. Jack made life so much richer, so much fuller."
Hylton died on January 25, 1965, aged 72. In 1973 Beverley Hylton married, at Caxton Hall in London, the News International newspaper executive Alick McKay, whose first marriage had ended in bizarre tragedy when his wife Muriel was kidnapped on December 29, 1969. She was never seen again, but two brothers were found guilty of her murder.
McKay was a leading figure in London's busy Australian social and business world, and his new wife moved cheerfully into expatriate life, increasingly involved in its charitable and cultural affairs.
Alick McKay, who was knighted in 1977 for his services to the media, died in January 1983.
Long based in Chelsea, Beverley McKay kept up an extensive string of social, cultural and sporting activities: she was a superb skier, a fine shot, a useful golfer, tackled fencing, archery, squash and water-skiing, and played bridge keenly. A life member at Queen's Club, she continued to play tennis even as diabetes increasingly affected her eyesight.
Publishers periodically sought to persuade her to write her autobiography, or allow it to be ghosted, but she was sadly aware that their interest was primarily in potential headlines linked to the relationships she had enjoyed, and she declined.
She is survived by her mother, Wynn Prowse, and stepchildren from both her marriages.
20/3/00 - www.jackhylton.co.uk registered - update your bookmarks!