1944

Most of what is known about the mental illness that shaped Coke's adult life comes from his niece, writing forty and seventy years afterwards, and from the gaps in his concert calendar. For one year there is something better. His mother kept a pocket diary in 1944, and thirteen openings of it survive. It is written in soft pencil, much of it faint, and it records the weather, the wages, the shopping in Mansfield and Kirkby, and her son.

On Friday 4 February she wrote: "Roger went to Alderley Edge to see Dr Craig. Frightful business getting him off early." Alderley Edge is in Cheshire, sixty miles away across the Peak. Five days later he went again, and this time the entry is four words long and does not need any others: "He came back much worse."

On the 18th she took him to Nottingham, with Julie Baud and the man Freeman in the car. "Awful day. He saw Dr Tennant but refused to sign. I came home." Under the Lunacy Act then in force a person could be admitted to a mental hospital only on a doctor's certificate, or by signing himself in. Who refused is not clear from the entry: either the doctor declined to certify, or Coke declined to commit himself. Either way the journey came to nothing, and his mother drove home alone.

Three days later: "Awfully cold day. R getting bad. Was with him in Music Room for 1 1/2 hours." Nothing else was written down about those hours. The room is the one built for his twenty-first birthday, with the gallery and the Steinway and the circular windows, and in February 1944 his mother sat in it with him for an hour and a half because there was nothing else to be done.

Then, on Saturday 4 March: "Roger went out at about 11 and never got home till about 6. The Kirkby police rang up and he had been on the line."

Griselda Brook remembered being taken by her uncle for long walks along the railway lines to visit his friends in the signal boxes. They became her friends too, and taught her how to pull the heavy levers. The walks were a habit rather than an occasion, and she was somewhere between five and seven while they were going on: she was born on 10 December 1938, so on the day the Kirkby police rang she was five. "Such behaviour was completely illegal and very dangerous," she wrote, "but I remember my grandmother blaming me for letting him do such a thing. There had been a police complaint, I believe." Her memoir and her grandmother's diary were written seventy years apart, neither with the other in view, and here they meet: the police complaint she half-remembered has a date.

What the diary chiefly gives, though, is proportion. The bad days are entered in the same hand and the same ink as the sausage and mash, the Red Cross meeting, and an afternoon spent gardening with eight little boys. "Roger having a bad day" sits above "did some gardening". In May he is "a little better"; in June "rather poorly". The pattern across eight months is fluctuation rather than decline, which is what made the years of work possible.

The doctors were paid out of the same account book as the coal. Dr Craig had four guineas, Dr Tennant of Northampton seven, and Dr Johnstone, the family doctor, thirteen pounds nineteen shillings for a bill covering "Roger and self". Cigarettes appear in the accounts almost every week.

And in June of that same year, on the page after the one that pays Dr Tennant, the ledger pays three pounds for copying. Whatever was happening to him in 1944, music was still being written out fair and sent somewhere. Between them the diary and the account book establish what neither could alone: the illness and the work were not alternating phases of his life. They were the same months, in the same house, entered on facing pages in his mother's hand.

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© Simon Callaghan 2026. This account was written from my own research archive on Roger Sacheverell Coke, with AI assistance in drafting. Every statement in it rests on a document listed on the sources page.