Kenneth Shenton writes:
HENRY SANDON, who died on Christmas Day, aged 95, was a man of many parts. While renowned as a world expert on ceramics, particularly Royal Worcester porcelain, he was no less devoted to music.
He was a classically trained singer, and his early professional career included a bass lay-clerkship at Worcester Cathedral, teaching music at the city’s Royal Grammar School, conducting choral societies, and performing as a soloist throughout the locality. In addition, his scholarly, yet practical, translation of the text of Palestrina’s Missa Aeterna Christi Munera, published by Oxford University Press for the Church Music Society in 1969, helped to renew interest in this neglected Renaissance master.
Born in the East End of London on 10 August 1928, Henry George Sandoni was the only child of the Italian-born jobbing actor, dog trainer, and shopkeeper Augusto Sandoni and his wife, Clara. Henry’s family encompassed a range of talents and skills: Augusto’s most famous animal, a mongrel named Bob, briefly became Britain’s answer to Rin Tin Tin; his maternal grandfather, George Mellish, was a renowned professional violinist; and one of his aunts became the noted society photographer Vivienne.
Evacuated to High Wycombe during the Second World War, Henry Sandon, as he now became, did his National Service in the army, had a brief career in insurance, and then won a scholarship to study singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
In 1953, he successfully auditioned as a bass lay clerk at Worcester Cathedral under David Willcocks, singing ten services a week with two long rehearsals. Alongside this, he taught music at the Royal Grammar School, conducted the St John’s Choral Society, and was in demand as a solo singer. It was Willcocks, keen to update the cathedral choir’s repertoire, who suggested that Sandon should help to bring their early-music output more in line with modern thinking. Visits to the historic music library housed in St Michael’s College, Tenbury, brought further editions of works by a previous organist of Worcester Cathedral, Thomas Tomkins.
Sandon was a great admirer of Willcocks’s talents, not least his ability to shape the larger choral forces demanded by the annual Three Choirs Festival. Sandon always fondly remembered taking part in the 1954 Worcester Festival, at which Ralph Vaughan Williams’s cantata Hodie, received its première, with the composer conducting.
Willcocks took his leave of Worcester to move to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1957. A newly married Sandon would also take his leave later that year. In the interim, while digging in his garden, close to the cathedral precincts, he had found some medieval and Roman pottery. Immediately hooked, he was determined to find out more. Labelling himself a “potaholic”, he then spent 17 years as curator of the Worcester Porcelain Company and the Dyson Perrins Museum. He carried out several important archaeological excavations, which radically altered our understanding of Worcester porcelain. With the assistance of his three sons, he compiled several books, which have become standard texts. In 1997, he also published an entertaining memoir, Living In the Past.
A friendship with the leading antiques expert Arthur Negus led to early television appearances on such programmes as Going for a Song, Collector’s World, and Arthur Negus Enjoys. This blossomed into that popular staple of the BBC’s Sunday-evening schedules, The Antiques Roadshow. On this, his most famous discovery remains Ozzie the slipware owl, bought cheaply in a junk shop and now residing in a Stoke-on-Trent museum.
As a former silent-film juvenile lead, Sandon proved a natural in front of a camera. Once a subject of This Is Your Life, he made other television appearances, including The Great Antiques Hunt, several Children In Need spectaculars, singing and dancing in a cockney music-hall sketch on The Big Breakfast, guesting on Noel’s House Party, and presenting Songs of Praise.
His wife, Barbara, died in 2013.
