RAY NOBLE: THE SUMMER OF ’38, by Vince Egan, Toronto
The late Ray Noble, it has often been said, never appeared with his orchestra in Britain, despite the enormous popularity that his HMV records enjoyed with the British public.
The fact is, however, that Noble did indeed tour the United Kingdom. Four members of the orchestra that was led by Noble are still very active professional musicians, and some of them recently reminisced about that tour.
The story starts one week in the spring of 1937. Ray Noble and his touring U.S. orchestra crossed over into Canada to headline the stage show at Shea’s Hippodrome, an ornate vaudeville & movie house that later disappeared to make way for Toronto’s famous New City Hall.
If you were in Toronto then, and if you took dance music seriously, you made a point of going to hear the celebrated British maestro, even though by then his orchestra retained none of the well-known sidemen of the 1935-36 period, such as Glenn Miller, Will Bradley, Charlie Spivak, Bud Freeman, Claude Thornhill, with the exception of Pee Wee Irwin.
One group that eagerly went to Shea’s was the Jimmy ”Trump” Davidson Orchestra, which was then performing at the still-new Club Esquire, a night-club in the city’s Sunnyside section.
After Ray Noble’s stage presentation, Trump went backstage at Shea’s to pay his respects and to invite Ray to drop in at the Club Esquire. One night, not long afterward, the British maestro accepted the invitation, and was obviously struck by the caliber of the Toronto band and not simply because Trump featured a medley of Noble’s compositions.
Then as now, Noble was recognized as a consummate musician, composer and arranger. The men in the Davidson orchestra couldn’t have aspired to any greater praise than his.
So impressed was Ray that he promised that, on his return to the United States, he would try to arrange with his friends in radio for a network pick-up of the Trump Davidson Orchestra. Within a week, he had made good on his promise, and the band was broadcasting coast to coast in the U.S. on the NBC network, from the Club Esquire.
The following winter, however, Noble was to display his admiration for the Toronto orchestra still more strikingly. He called Trump, explained that for the summer of 1933 he was planning to return to England, where union rules wouldn’t permit the entry of the U.S. musicians in the orchestra he was then leading. Would Trump Davidson and his men be interested in going and performing under his baton?
They would indeed. So, early in 1938, Ray Noble’s manager, Bill Harty, travelled north to Aylmer, Que. a suburb of Ottawa where the Trump Davidson Orchestra was playing at the Gatineau Club. The ’’audition” went well, and contracts were signed.
On May 4th the Toronto band sailed out of New York on the French Line’s Normandie.
At the Captain’s Gala during the voyage, they even played one number for their fellow passengers. (Madeleine Carroll and Alexander Korda made personal appearances at the same gala, Sheila Barrett did her impressions, and boxing champion Tommy Farr called out numbers for a bingo game.)
Once in England, the Davidson orchestra was augmented by two British violinists, Cliff Timms and Cliff Cadman plus two U.S. vocalists, Warren Phillips and Marion Manners. (Al Bowlly apparently never came to see the band, and certainly never performed with it.)
Ray Noble, who had arrived earlier, rehearsed the band intensively at the Victor studios in Maida Vale. They worked out a 45-minute stage presentation, consisting chiefly of Noble compositions, and including at least three of the titles that Noble had recorded in the early months of 1938 in Los Angeles, I Hadn’t Anyone Till You (his own hit of the day), Vilia and Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Marion Manners, a former Paul Whiteman vocalist, was featured in, Thanks for the Memory. Tenor saxophonist Ted Davidson (Trump’s brother) was featured on two tunes that Noble was to record a few months later on his return to the United States, By The Waters of Minnetonka, and a then-new Noble composition, Cherokee (at that time being played in ballad tempo).
Then Ray Noble and his, or rather Trump Davidson’s Orchestra were ready to go before the British public. For the British maestro, strangely enough, this was a first; his acclaim in the U.K. was based entirely on his superb recordings rather than on any public appearances.
"Ray Noble was a wonderful man and a fine, fine musician," Ted Davidson said recently. "And he was the fastest musician I’ve ever known. He could write a whole arrangement in no time."
Ted recalls that the band was well received by British audiences and by the press, although local musicians resented the fact that the work was going to outside musicians.
The tour opened June 6 in Glasgow, and continued at other spots on the Empire circuit, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. The high spot was a two week run at the London Palladium, Britain’s top music hall.
The band even crossed the Irish Sea to play simultaneous engagements at two different spots in Dublin, and repeated the feat near the end of the summer with simultaneous engagements at two suburban London houses, the Ilford Hippodrome and the Kilbourne Hippodrome. Ted Davidson has never forgotten the driver they had that week, who would hurtle his bus across London between shows, while the musicians held their instruments tightly and prayed that they’d arrive safely.
So great was the public interest in hearing and seeing Ray Noble and the orchestra that the Sundays, normally an off-day between week-long engagements, were nearly all taken up with concert performances at such places as Llandudno, Blackpool and Margate.
The schedule left little time for purely dance dates, although the orchestra did squeeze in a brief guest appearance at London’s Hammersmith Palais de Danse and at a ballroom in Glasgow.
At the stage presentations, as the curtain rose a solo spotlight would discover Ray Noble, in white tie and tails, seated at the piano playing The Very Thought Of You, as the orchestra went into a medley of some of the maestro’s most popular compositions. Then, as Johnny Burt, slipped into the keyboard spot, Noble would leave the piano and front the orchestra for the rest of the presentation. The sidemen wore double-breasted white jackets and dark trousers.
Early in the program. Noble would introduce Trump Davidson to the audience, without, however, disclosing that Trump was in fact the leader, or that the band had come from Canada. After some chit-chat, Trump was featured on trumpet and as vocalist on a novelty number of the day, How’d Ya Like To Love Me?
(At the appearances in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Tramp got a second chance to be featured, as the orchestra played his arrangement of Loch Lomond as an encore.)
Bill Harty, as always, was Ray Noble’s band manager and drummer. Trump Davidson’s drummer, Reef McGarvey, recalls that he and Harty formed a two-man percussion team during stage presentations, with Reef in charge of the tympani and chimes.
Unfortunately, the orchestra made no commercial recordings during that summer of 1938. But every morning for two weeks of the London Palladium engagement, the band would be in a studio to record, on one of the earliest wire recording machines, commercial broadcasts sponsored by a British biscuit manufacturer, Huntley and Palmer, for later transmission over Radio Luxembourg.
By September, the period of validity of the Canadians’ tickets on the French Line had nearly expired, and it was time to go home. But Billy Bissett, the Canadian maestro whose orchestra had been featured at the Savoy in London throughout much of 1937 and 1938, invited Ted Davidson and Johnny Burt to stay behind and join his band when it opened Oct. 6 at the Cafe' de Paris, where Ambrose and his orchestra had been appearing during the first half of 1938.
Both accepted, but the Musicians’ Union abruptly changed its minimum residency requirement for non-Britons, to 12 months from six, thus blocking Ted’s acceptance of the Bissett offer. Johnny Burt, however, had been born in London, although his parents had taken him to Toronto as an infant and so the union was unable to deny him membership. He went to work for Bissett.
Ted Davidson, however, faced a problem. Thinking that he was going to stay and work in London, he had made no booking for the voyage home. His troubles with the union forced him to change his plans. On, going to the steamship booking offices in Trafalgar Square, however, he found huge throngs waiting to get inside. It was the time of the Munich crisis, and large numbers of Britons suddenly wanted to emigrate to the New World. Remembering Bill Harty’s uncanny ability to do the impossible, he turned to him for help, and shortly afterward found himself sailing from Liverpool aboard the Duchess of York on an 11-day crossing in third class a decided contrast to the accommodation on the Normandie just five months earlier.
Some of the other Canadians, meanwhile, treated themselves to a week’s sightseeing trip to Paris, while trombonists George Guerette and Jack Madden visited Belgium. Re-united, they sailed for New York on the lie de France.
Ray Noble himself went on to the U.S. West Coast to resume his comedy roles on network radio. By Oct. 11, he was in a Los Angeles studio to record the future hit, Cherokee, and three other titles. (In the American Dance band Discography, Brian Rust mistakenly lists the personnel on that recording date as being the members of the Trump Davidson orchestra. In fact it never recorded commercially under Noble’s baton, nor ever travelled to Los Angeles.)
Trump Davidson and his Orchestra went on to a long and distinguished career in the Toronto area (and elsewhere in Canada), performing almost constantly as one of the city’s most prominent dance bands, and recording a number of titles on transcription for the Canadian Talent Library under executive producer Lyman Potts.
As fate would have it, Trump Davidson’s death on May 2, 1978, came only 29 days after Ray Noble’s. But the band carries on under the direction of his talented associate and long-time pianist, Harvey Silver.
And it still features two of the stars of that summer of 1938, Ted Davidson and Reef McGarvey, both as talented musicians today as they were then. Jack Neilson has for many years played in the string section of the Toronto Symphony. Johnny Burt, after a stint as arranger with Paul Whiteman and war-time service in the Royal Canadian Navy, has been one of Toronto’s top recording arrangers and studio conductors.
All four of them speak of Ray Noble as having been a fine man to work for, and recall their British tour in the summer of 1938 as one of the highlights of their careers. Jack Neilson has a special reason for remembering Noble’s thoughtfulness; when Jack was having a dental problem during the engagement in Liverpool, the maestro brought in a friend, a local dentist, who visited the theatre every night to treat Jack.
Here is the personnel of Trump Davidson’s 1938 orchestra: Trump Davidson, Gordon Connell and Frank Barnard - trumpets; George Guerett and Jack Madden- trombones; Herb Mason and Vern Kahanen - alto saxophones; Ted Davidson and Howard ’’Cokey” Campbell- tenor saxophones; Jack Neilson - viola; Johnny Burt - piano; Red McGarvey - guitar; Joe Niosi - bass and Reef McGarvey - drums.
Vince Egan,
Toronto