Julian Hogg 1946-2024
When Milein Cosman founded her Trust in 2006, and asked Julian to be its chair, Julian had already been hard at work for a quarter of a century in support of her and Hans’s artistic legacies. Their friendship stretched back even longer, to 1964, when Julian went for the first time to the famous Dartington Summer School of Music in Devon.
Julian was then 18 and had just left school, where he had excelled both as a musician and a sportsman. At Dartington that summer he worked as one of the ‘Trogs’ (George Malcolm’s nickname for the small band of music students who assisted the Summer School’s administrator John Amis with the day-to-day practicalities). Hans had been teaching at Dartington since 1958, the year before he joined the BBC — and when Julian met him in 1964 he was very well known as a musical writer and broadcaster, whose classes and more informal discussion sessions were immensely popular with young musicians at Dartington.
Milein also came to the Summer School every year in those days, filling her sketchbooks with drawings both of the many musical luminaries who were teaching and performing there, and of their students and audiences. She was also a well-known figure in the musical world, partly because the Radio Times, where she had been artist of choice for portraits of musicians since 1947, had made her work familiar to everyone.
The story of his first meeting with Hans at Dartington was one of Julian’s favourite anecdotes. Tasked one evening with setting up the stage for Hans’s lecture next day, Julian nervously approached him in the bar to ask what he needed. Hans’s response (after first buying Julian a drink — much appreciated!) was simply ‘a glass of water and an ashtray’. ‘No lectern, chair, table, record player, piano, overhead projector?’ enquired an anxious Julian, keen to ensure nothing was forgotten. Hans agreed to a table and when Julian asked how big it needed to be (did he want to spread out scores or notes?) the answer was, ‘just big enough for the glass of water and the ashtray.’ Next day Julian watched fascinated as Hans lectured in his trademark style, without script or notes yet in immense musical detail, pacing back and forth across the stage, chain-smoking all the while.
1964 was also Janet Baker’s first year at Dartington, giving recitals with Peter Gould and Osian Ellis. After setting up the hall for her first concert, Julian (who had a lovely countertenor voice) stayed on singing there, enjoying Dartington Hall’s lovely acoustics — only to find, on his way out, a group of people gathered outside, who thought they had been listening to Janet Baker rehearsing. Telling the story later, Julian used to joke that being mistaken for Janet Baker was musically his finest hour!
Julian continued his education at the Royal College of Music, where his principal study was the clarinet. While there he shared a flat with two Royal Academy viola players: one was Hilary Hart, Julian’s sister’s schoolfriend, and the other was Roger Bigley who, with fellow-students Peter Cropper, Michael Adamson and Bernard Gregor-Smith, had then just formed the Lindsay String Quartet. Julian listened to some of their early rehearsals in his flat and also their masterclasses down at Dartington with Hans Keller and Rudolf Kolisch — and later, when Hilary and Roger married, Julian was their best man.
After completing his studies at the RCM, Julian joined the BBC. It was the beginning of 1969, ten years after Dartington’s Artistic Director William Glock had arrived as Controller — with Hans Keller at his side — to revolutionise BBC Music Division, and the BBC was an exciting place for a young musician to be. Julian’s first job was to sort and catalogue the recordings received from foreign radio stations. Hans at that time was in charge of the BBC’s orchestral and choral production team and was also chairing the small international working party that was planning the EBU’s international concert series, a new venture to be broadcast live across Europe. However, he was about to run into trouble with the BBC’s board of management, when he became embroiled in the spectacular row that erupted over ‘Broadcasting in the Seventies’, shortly after Julian’s arrival.
To Julian and many other younger staff, Hans’s principled stance against the abolition of the Third Programme and the imposition of generic radio programming was admirable. It was a tumultuous time inside the BBC, as Hans and five senior colleagues led an unprecedented public rebellion of hundreds of production staff against the new plans. As a result, the 1970s were a less happy time for Hans at the BBC professionally, but socially he had excellent relationships with colleagues, and he and Julian were soon good friends. They were both gregarious by nature, with a witty sense of humour, and they shared many extramusical as well as musical interests, not least sport. Hans had been a keen footballer, skier and table-tennis player in his youth, and Julian was an outstanding hockey, cricket and table-tennis player, who quickly found his sporting talent a great social asset at the BBC. According to their colleague Leo Black, who also loved the game, Julian hadn’t played table-tennis for a while when he arrived, but “jumped straight back into the game at my instigation and started beating all and sundry with his age-old pimpled bat, so threadbare and unpredictable as to be technically illegal.”
Julian also revived his cricketing skills in the service of BBC social life, initiating and organising the annual Radio 3 cricket match. One of his later colleagues, Alison Davies, remembers this fondly as an extremely happy part of the social calendar — and of course that Julian’s team tended to win!
Cricket was not a game that Hans had ever played, but he and Julian did share a great love of football and the two of them were the centre of many happy Saturday afternoons in the stands with groups of BBC colleagues. They also developed extremely sophisticated betting systems, combining to great effect their detailed knowledge of the game with some pretty impressive statistical analysis.
They even put a sporting spin on their smoking habits, with the ‘Reduced Smoking League’ — participants would report their daily and weekly tallies of cigarettes smoked: fewer cigarettes meant one moved up the divisions, but succumbing to more meant relegation. Since both Hans and Julian carried on smoking for the rest of their lives, this wasn’t exactly a way of giving up, but they had a lot of fun with it.
In 1979 Hans retired from the BBC. Julian had by then moved into programme planning, as ‘Planning Assistant, Current’, responsible for holding together all the day-to-day details of the BBC’s music schedules and making sure everything ran smoothly. Mary Wiegold, who did this job herself at various points when Julian was seconded to special projects (so she knows well its challenges), was struck by how incredibly smoothly everything worked under Julian. “He was totally unflappable,” she remembers, “I never saw him other than charming and calm.”
The year after Hans’s retirement, a new system began to be developed that was to dominate the rest of Julian’s BBC life. The Orpheus computerised music information system was the most advanced of its type in the world; it was developed by the BBC’s Computer Projects team in the early 1980s, at the same time as the BBC was commissioning its revolutionary BBC Micro home computer and creating the ambitious public education programming that was to have a lasting effect on the future of computing in the UK.
Julian was tasked with leading a team of young musically-educated staff to transfer all the diverse information held on Radio 3’s multiple card-indexes — on composers, performers, individual musical works, transmission history and so on — into the new database. It was an enormous task and they worked for two years before the initial version of the system was launched at the beginning of 1984. At that stage the new database was still operating alongside the old card system, but the ultimate aim was to do away with any paper-based system altogether — as can be seen in this wonderful publicity photograph of Julian and some of his team that illustrated the announcement of the new system in the BBC’s in-house newspaper, Ariel.
The work of inputting all this musical information into Orpheus was intricate and demanded a lot of musical knowledge — but it could also be pretty mind-numbing for the young musicians who were doing it. As Sarah Walker, who joined the team in 1988 alongside her PhD studies, remembers, “This was where Julian’s managerial genius came into play.”
Sarah continues:
“Julian welcomed a range of creative and musical people into the office and in return for the drudgery of uploading countless details of pieces onto the computers (there were about ten terminals in the office, with Jules’s desk close to the door, though he later had a tiny office of his own), he fostered an atmosphere of enormous warmth and fun. All manner of personal quirks were accepted, and I can only imagine that we were like a family of very annoying children.
Julian would arrive every morning in full motorcycle gear, having driven in from his home in Croydon. He had affectionate nicknames for every member of the team and catch-phrases galore: for instance, after a lengthy chat around the office kettle, when the inevitable sigh and the words ‘I’d better get on’ were uttered, his ironic response would (without fail) be ‘If you could, please.’
Because of Julian’s fatherly managerial style – firm but fair, and always good-humoured – the team gelled like no other, and stayed in touch long after the office had been disbanded due to cuts, when radio production teams had to input their own details into the database and do their own clash checking. He took a positive interest in everyone’s life, from the health of their cat to their musical ambitions, and when I was invited to audition as a presenter initially for Radio 4 and later Radio 3, Julian was understanding of my occasional absences. Without him, I would not be a Radio 3 presenter today: his encouragement and flexibility made those important early experiences possible.”
Alison Davies, another member of Julian’s team, agrees: “Julian was hugely convivial and great at boosting the morale of his group of young bright people.” She remembers the inevitable frustrations of 1980s computer work — including the unexpected crashes and down-time — at which points Julian would take the team off for some restorative chips in the Yalding canteen, or a pint at the local hostelry. Like Sarah Walker, Alison attributes her later career in the World Service to Julian’s early encouragement: “he enabled people.” Mary Wiegold says the same thing: “Julian was so good at recognising people’s individual strengths and bringing out the best in them.”
“He knew we were all going on to other things and probably didn’t terribly want to be there, but in the meantime fun could be had,” remembers Chris Wood, who joined Julian’s Orpheus team in 1987. “Any occasion deserving it — a birthday, Christmas, a Friday — might be marked by a trip to the Spaghetti House in Goodge Street, riotous occasions of pasta and far too much drinking. These he kept going long after he and practically everyone else had left the BBC, and it is a sign of the affection we all had for him that we would try to make sure we could be there.”
Meanwhile, Hans’s health was deteriorating rapidly in retirement. Motor neurone disease was not diagnosed until 1984, the year before he died, but already in 1981 he was having physical difficulties. Knowing how important it was for Hans to be able to continue writing, Julian began going regularly to Hampstead after work in the evenings to help him.
This watercolour of Hans dictating to Julian in the garden of Hans & Milein’s home at Frognal Gardens was painted by Milein in September 1981. “I had no idea she was doing it,” remembered Julian, to whom Milein later gave the painting in memory of all he did over the next five years as Hans’s amanuensis.
It must have been exhausting for Julian, spending evenings in Hampstead taking dictation from Hans after a full day’s work managing the Orpheus office, before riding back home on his motorbike all the way to Croydon where he would type up Hans’s writings. By the time Hans died in 1985, Julian had typed hundreds and hundreds of letters, articles and reviews, and even the whole of Hans’s final book, The Great Haydn Quartets, which Hans dictated to him in the same way he used to lecture — from memory with scarcely a glance at the scores of these works he knew so well. It was the product of a lifetime’s deep engagement with this music, and it would never have been written without Julian.
Having seen this book through to publication in the difficult weeks after Hans’s death, Julian went on to help Milein embark on the enormous task of sorting through Hans’s papers, during which they found the manuscript of another book (Criticism) that Hans had written back in 1976 and had never got round to publishing. Julian set to work typing and editing, and the book was published with remarkable speed by Faber & Faber scarcely over a year after it was found.
Milein had asked Julian to act as Hans’s literary executor, but after the publication of Criticism Julian felt he had done all he could, and that further work on Hans’s archive would be better done by the academic musicologist Christopher Wintle. His stepping aside at this point was another example of Julian enabling others, and Christopher went on to edit many more volumes of Hans’s writings and to establish his archive at Cambridge University.
Julian transferred his energies to helping Milein with her own work. Her chosen artistic executor, Peter Black, moved to Glasgow in 1998, to take up a new post at the Hunterian Gallery. This coincided roughly with Julian’s retirement from the BBC, giving him more time to help Milein. Much to his surprise — as he often said — Julian transformed himself into an excellent exhibition curator and imaginative promoter of Milein’s work.
And so it was natural that when Milein set up The Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust in 2006, it was Julian she chose for its chair. There was no one else who had such detailed knowledge of and commitment to both her own and Hans’s work, and such a long and close friendship with them both. Julian ran the Trust for fifteen years, and its many achievements under his leadership are chronicled in detail here. This ‘Story of the Trust’ was written while Julian was still chair, and in his characteristically modest way he tried to downplay his own role — he was much more concerned to ensure that everyone else’s contribution was properly recorded, rather than his own.
But in truth, all this would not have happened without Julian. And what the ‘Story of the Trust’ does not fully record is Julian’s loving care for Milein herself. Just as he had known that, for Hans, the most important thing was to keep writing, Julian also knew what Milein needed. One of her greatest joys was to see her work exhibited and Julian worked enormously hard to ensure that this continued to happen. Another joy was reconnection with her childhood home and recognition as an artist there as well as in Britain. And in seeing her artwork gradually sorted, catalogued, placed in institutions and published — the Lebenslinien/ Lifelines volume was a particular highlight — she knew that her legacy would be safe.
Above all was friendship. Milein and Julian were as gregarious as each other and Frognal Gardens was always full of friends old and new. For Milein’s 90th birthday Julian organised a truly extraordinary celebration that brought 250 of her friends and family to the Wigmore Hall, followed by another 150 to Burgh House in Hampstead. To Milein herself it was all a wonderful surprise: she thought that she was going to the Wigmore Hall simply for lunch in its restaurant with her cousin, Leo Goldschmidt, to show him her drawings exhibited there. Instead they walked in to find the whole place full of everyone she knew — and, to cap it all, after lunch she was ushered upstairs for a special concert in the Hall in her honour.
Of course, all these things were not achieved without the contribution of so many others. Yet again, Julian’s remarkable team-building skills were in evidence as he ensured a wonderfully warm and happy family of helpers for Milein as she grew older.
After Milein’s death, Julian worked harder than ever to ensure that she and Hans would be remembered. Hans’s centenary in 2019, followed by Milein’s in 2021 provided the perfect opportunity to cement their legacies — though the Covid-19 crisis almost derailed the celebration of Milein’s. Julian was utterly determined that this should not happen: it is notable that the only exhibitions that did manage to take place in person before her centenary year was out were those he organised himself.
At the end of Milein’s centenary year, Julian announced his retirement from the Trust. Everyone knew then — and we know it even more now — that he is irreplaceable.