© Kaupo Kikkas
Dorothy Coke's household account book, kept at Brookhill through the war years, is the clearest surviving evidence of how her son's music got made, because Coke did not have a publisher, an agent or an orchestra, and had to buy all three.
Every one of the following entries is charged in the ledger to Roger. Augener, the London music house, four pounds in July 1941. Steinway, three guineas in 1941 and four guineas in 1944, which will be the upkeep of the concert grand. His Majesty's Printer, ten shillings. Goodwin and Tabb, the London orchestral copying and hire firm, one guinea in November 1942. Boosey and Hawkes in the same month, one pound two shillings, with the word "orchestra" written underneath it. A copyist, three pounds, in June 1944. And in December 1943, one line among the fish and the petrol and the wages: "Fairhurst fee R 14. 14."
Harold Fairhurst was the violinist who had given the London premiere of the Elegiac Trio with Sela Trau five months earlier. Fourteen guineas was a professional fee, and Coke paid it. On the same page, eight days apart, are two more entries: "Roger for Liverpool 5" on 2 December and "Roger for London 3" on the 10th. He played at the Royal Institution in Liverpool on 5 December 1943 and at the International Art Centre in London on the 10th, and until these entries were read the only record of either concert was a list Coke had written himself inside the cover of one of his manuscripts. His mother's housekeeping corroborates them.
A year earlier, under 27 October 1942, comes the plainest line of the lot: "R's concert", eight pounds six shillings and sixpence. Two days before that, on his thirtieth birthday concert at Nottingham, the Brookhill Symphony Orchestra had given the first performance of his first symphonic poem, The Lotos Eaters, and the first orchestral performance of the Second Vocal Concerto, with Barbara Welby singing and Coke conducting. Two premieres in one afternoon.
No other figure survives for what one of Coke's orchestral concerts cost, and it was settled out of the housekeeping, in the same column as the dog meat.
There was one professional relationship, and it is only visible in glimpses. The London firm of Hinrichsen held the orchestral material of his works and had some kind of claim on them. Barbara Welby, writing to his mother some years later to ask whether she could take his two piano concertos round the young pianists she knew, has to ask first: "You said something about Hinrichsen sending it all back, so I take it you have the orchestral material of all the works. Has Hinrichsen relinquished all claim on them?" Whatever the arrangement was, it produced no publication that anyone has found, and it ended with the parcels coming back to Derbyshire.
The traces it left on the manuscripts are ambiguous and slightly sour. The wrapper of the Second Vocal Concerto carries a printed Hinrichsen label with a number filled in, "No. 661a.", and a Hinrichsen rubber stamp beside it. At the foot of the first page of the Elegiac Ballade, on a sheet of Augener paper, the firm's name has been inked over until it is barely readable. Somebody went to the trouble of crossing Hinrichsen off that score. The firm's successors can find no trace of any of it. Coke appears in no list of Hinrichsen publications, and 661a is not in the numerical sequence at all: 661 is a wind trio by Kennaway. A number of that kind doubled as a plate number, so its absence means the work was never set up to be printed.
A two-page life of him was printed over the Hinrichsen name in 1946, and it has been read as a publisher advertising an author. It is very probably nothing of the sort. Hinrichsen issued an annual Year Book, an almanac of English musical life whose editors wrote about a great deal in which the firm had no business interest, and Coke's own papers contain a page of the 1944 volume: a report on the Committee for the Promotion of New Music, Tippett and Walton among its members, with Coke's name in two of its lists. The 1946 piece is a numbered article of the same kind, it counts up works that were never published, and it offers nothing for sale. Somebody at Hinrichsen thought him worth two pages. Nobody there was publishing him.
Griselda Brook's story about The Cenci, that he sold the furniture and the pictures to pay for it, is usually told as the moment things went too far. The account book shows that nothing changed in 1959 except the scale. He had been buying his own performances for twenty years.
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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.