Hulme, Derek C(rawshaw) 1924–

PERSONAL: Born May 2, 1924, in Manchester, England; son of Eric Maymon (a drafter) and Phyllis Mabel (Crawshaw) Hulme; married Helen Killoran Horne, January 21, 1950; children: Kyle, Robin, Nevis. Education: Attended Derby School of Art until 1939. Reli-gion: Church of England (Anglican). Hobbies and other interests: Playing the trumpet with Derbyshire dance bands; classical and popular music, including jazz of the 'thirties, 'forties, and 'fifties; lepidoptera recording in the Scottish Highlands.

ADDRESSES: Home—Ord House Dr., Muir of Ord, Ross-shire IV6 7UQ, Scotland. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Clarke Aircraft Products, Derby, England, drafter, 1939–45; Rolls-Royce Ltd., Derby, designer of aircraft engine systems, 1945–63; Highland Safaris, Wildlife Holiday Tours, Muir of Ord, Scotland, partner, 1964–94. Speaker at Shostakovich symposia. Wartime service: Served with Home Guard as anti-aircraft gunner.

MEMBER: Derbyshire Entomological Society (honorary member), Dingwall Field Club (president), other local natural-history societies.

WRITINGS:

Index of Derbyshire Localities, Derbyshire Entomological Society (Derby, England), 1962.

(With F. Harrison and M. J. Sterling) Derbyshire Lepidoptera, 1829–1962, three volumes, Derbyshire Entomological Society (Derby, England), 1985–88.

Dmitri Shostakovich: Catalogue, Bibliography, and Discography, Kyle & Glen Music (Muir of Ord, Scotland), 1982, 3rd edition, Scarecrow Press (Lanham, MD), 2002.

Contributor to journals and natural-history magazines, including DSCH Journal, British Birds, and Entomologist's Record. Founding editor, Gnat, 1958–63.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A supplement to the third edition of the Shostakovich catalogue.

SIDELIGHTS: Derek C. Hulme told CA: "Friends know me as a writer on natural-history subjects—mainly ornithological and entomological articles. I am always being asked, 'How did you come to write a book on Shostakovich?' Others, when I tell them I've written a catalogue of the works of the Russian composer, clearly have never heard of him.

"I am not a scholar, just a very ordinary music lover. I took after-school violin lessons but did not progress much beyond 'The Bluebells of Scotland' stage. My father encouraged me to learn to play our piano, but I soon discovered I was hopeless through a lack of coordination. I loved the English dance bands and listened to the regular tea-time broadcasts of Jack Payne and Henry Hall. My interest in music took a great step forward following my father's purchase of a record player. Then I started going to the Plaza Ballroom in Derby, not to dance, but to listen to the visiting bands.

"As a wartime office boy in a Derby aircraft factory, I was helped in the watchman's office by a pretty blonde typist. To impress her, I lied that I played lead trumpet in a dance band. She started quizzing me incessantly and wanted to hear me play. In desperation I bought a battered, second-hand instrument and practiced like mad. Soon I was playing at country dances in South Derbyshire with the Harmony Dance Band (a rather curious name considering we all played in unison). Later I joined the ten-piece Ambassador Dance band.

"My brother Colin wanted to play an instrument, so I bought him an ocarina. He soon mastered this, so I got him a clarinet. He was a 'natural' and made extraordinary progress. Eventually he formed his own dance band, broadcasting frequently. I began to collect miniature scores to follow broadcasts of orchestral and chamber music, and classical works joined my record collection.

"I saw Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony listed in a monthly release list in late 1943 and decided to buy the album of six expensive recordings. Leopold Stokowski's recording of the symphony thrilled me from the first hearing, and I made a point of looking in the Radio Times for further works of this composer. I started collecting music, press cuttings, and records of Shostakovich. In 1973 I commenced gleaning information on Shostakovich from library books. So that I could understand books, record sleeves, and program notes in Russian, I started learning the language. I visited Leningrad and Moscow in 1975 to buy music and recordings.

"The next stage was to gather my notes together and compile a catalogue of Shostakovich compositions, but there were many opus numbers for which I could find no details of the work. I decided to write to thank Dmitri Shostakovich for all his wonderful music and the pleasure it had given me over the years. I also intimated that I was working on a catalogue and enclosed a list of the blank opus numbers, hoping he would fill in the missing details. He kindly returned my list and added information on his latest works.

"The following March I was in a Kiev record store asking in my pidgin Russian for Melodiya label albums on my 'wants list.' I explained to the counter staff that I was from Scotland. After some minutes a customer came up to me and, in perfect English, said 'I understand you are from Scotland. Do you know John Bennett?' Incredibly, out of the five-million inhabitants of Scotland, I did know John Bennett of Jedburgh. This Russian gentleman said that he had received a letter from Mr. Bennett, who was compiling a complete list of Melodiya classical recordings. I wrote to Bennett, and this led me to Anatoli Zhelezny, the man from Kiev who had posted music scores, books, record catalogues, and articles on Shostakovich for eighteen years in exchange for British dance-band and American jazz records of the 1930s and 1940s.

"The first edition of the catalogue was published privately with a short-term loan from my bank in 1982. It sold quickly, and the many favorable letters received prompted me to continue collecting material. In 1986 Irina Antonovna Shostakovich phoned me when she was visiting London to say, 'My English is not very good, but I wish to thank you for your book on my husband. We think it is the best work on Dmitri Shostakovich, and we use it for research in Moscow.' Greatly encouraged by her endorsement, I posted the greatly enlarged second edition, now 510 pages, to Oxford University Press in 1989, and it was accepted three months later.

"Evidence of the considerable increase in interest in the life and work of Shostakovich is the overwhelming number of new releases and reissues of albums, and the additional musicians recording his compositions. In the third edition of the catalogue, now 820 pages, the index of performers' names alone has swelled by 1,500 in the ten years since the second edition. Thanks to the many Shostakovich enthusiasts, erroneous information has been corrected, the bibliography and broadcast appendices have been greatly expanded, and explanatory notes have been added. I have also extended the cross-referencing of Shostakovich's much underrated light music: the waltzes, polkas, galops, ballets, so-called jazz pieces, and circus tunes."