It was fitting that former professional violinist, Sally Brooke-Pike, at ninety-one years of age, should host the most musically uplifting event of 2020, writes Judy Fitton.
From her illuminated front garden, towering above the critical corner on Woodwarde and Druce Roads, a Christmas carol service was launched. I and a close neighbour, the eminent conductor and organist Noel Tredinnick, accompanied on flute and piano a massed crowd of fifty or more Dulwich residents singing their hearts out from the road below.
Whilst not musically participating in this event, Sally enthusiastically topped up the glasses of the musicians and entertained us afterwards with yet more wine and mince pies. She had, during her sixty years in Woodwarde Road, become the epicentre of musical activity in Dulwich.
She celebrated her 94th birthday on July 21, 2023, lying in her bedroom in sumptuous splendour, surrounded by friends and family. She ate a single chip, some birthday cake, and drank her favourite tipple – whiskey.
She was on good form, wearing her special pearl necklace and a yellow scarf I’d bought on impulse only days earlier. Yellow was Sally’s favourite colour. She died thirteen days later on August 3, 2023, following a battle with bowel cancer. Friends and family will gather later this month for a spreading of the ashes ceremony.
Sally was born in Notting Hill on the twenty-first of July 1929, the only child of Margery Cooper, an artistic woman whose sister Kathleen was a concert pianist, and George Brooke-Pike, a former rear gunner in the First World War turned (posh) motor salesman. George supplied cars to the Royal Household and in turned received an MVO.
It was in early childhood that Sally first exhibited an interest in music. During a visit to a local tea shop which had live musical entertainment (as was customary at the time) 5-year-old Sally pointed her finger at the violinist and said “I want to do that”. Her future was sealed!
Sally started lessons on her newly purchased violin which continued when the war broke out and she was evacuated with her family to Ampthill. There she learnt with a local teacher who would arrive at their borrowed house in a battered van – its missing front passenger seat replaced by a kitchen chair. Chickens occupied the back of the van from which he would retrieve eggs for a very grateful Marjorie.
As her playing improved, Sally pursued violin lessons with Oscar Lampe, who was for a time the leader of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Meanwhile she continued her uneventful general education at a local school, her only memory of the time being when she was the dinner monitor and was tasked with collecting milk orders on her bike, taking as long as she could in order to miss as many lessons as possible and collecting milk shakes enroute with her complicit best friend.
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Having left academic education as early as possible, Sally went to the Royal College of Music where she studied with the eminent violinist Albert Sammons. This was her natural habitat! A natural, instinctive musician, Sally recalled: “We mostly played duets in the lessons and I copied how he played, I learned so much from him”. Whilst at the College, she also met her future husband Alan Park who had returned from the war where he was a medic and had switched from medicine to music, studying composition and the cello.
At just nineteen, Sally left College to join the Midland Light Orchestra. After several happy years there, she married Alan and the couple moved to a flat in Putney. She soon secured a position in the orchestra of Sadler’s Wells Opera Company, while Alan worked from home as a music copyist with Malcolm Arnold and other leading composers. Although I also joined Sadler’s Wells as principal flute and worked alongside Sally, it was earlier on in our lives that I first met her. Our accidental encounter came about through a mutual boyfriend – my current, and her ex. Sid was playing in a seaside orchestra in the Isle of Wight and whilst visiting him on the island, I was taken to meet his ‘former flame’ Sally who was on holiday with her husband and two baby sons Jonathan and Philip.
In more recent years, it amused us that Sid, when passing through Dulwich, would look us both up, but he always knocked on Sally’s door first.
In 1961 the family, newly expanded with the youngest child Judy, moved to Woodwarde Road. With the children settled in local schools, she and Alan were enjoying life in their new home until disaster struck in 1968. On the way home from a holiday in the Scilly Isles, Alan suddenly collapsed and died of a heart attack. This was completely unexpected and too much to absorb. Two days later, Sally returned to Dulwich and a fraught new life with Jon aged thirteen, Philip twelve, and Judy ten.
Sally somehow prevailed, coping as she always has done, by ‘getting on with it’. She stoically continued working with Sadler’s Wells while simultaneously caring for the children. It was exhausting and difficult but she had no option. She was eventually offered a daytime job as leader of the second violins with the BBC Radio orchestra. Although she supplemented her new position with some evening work, this new arrangement was much more conducive to family life.
Retirement had never been a word in Sally’s lexicon and it was when she reached the magnificent milestone of sixty, and left the Radio Orchestra, that she seriously expanded her musical activities. She began to teach the violin locally and became very much in demand, particularly with young children who flourished under her eccentric, stimulating tuition. There would be regular concerts in her music room where forty-plus parents and friends would congregate to hear their infants perform, accompanied by the charismatic Noel Tredinnick, and a glass of Madeira. Sally loved her pupils and dubbed one little five-year-old her ‘archangel Gabriel’.
Sally had miserably anticipated her youngest child leaving home but needn’t have worried. Empty-nest syndrome didn’t manifest itself with her house usually teeming with people. Along with her many young pupils, one or other of her three grandchildren (aspiring novelist Lucy, entrepreneur Ben, policeman Jack) would be drifting in or out of her house along with members of her string quartet. Performing at weddings and in restaurants, Sally had created quite an enterprise and the merry four musicians were very much in demand. She also expanded her teaching clientele with pupils from music college. The soon-to-be professional violinists were often practising in her music room adorned with a big gold treble clef in the window. Especially enjoyable were the soirées thrown by Sally to showcase and rehearse their graduation recitals. These became very sought after with, on one occasion, some of the audience spilling into the corridor.
My own memories of Sally go back to our giddy freelancing days in London’s West End when one or other of us would be on driving duties. Deputising in shows including Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita and we had such fun, driving up to the Palace theatre and leaving the car behind on Waterloo Bridge. In summer months we wandered through Soho helping ourselves to the free glasses of wine being handed out from open-air art shows, sometimes only just making it to the theatre on time. Sally was unstoppable in all circumstances, including parking. When we couldn’t find a parking space once, she calmly backed the car onto a four-inch high pavement, got out, surveyed the scene and decided it was okay to leave it like that.
Emerging from our first Christmas without Sally, I missed most of all the amazing New Year’s Eve parties she had given for at least twenty-five years and which carried on until Lockdown. Musicians from Dulwich and much further afield would turn up wielding their instruments and a food dish – each of us being assigned something to prepare from cold meat to salads. The mixture – culinary and musically – was gobsmacking. There would be the Trout quintet in the music room where the piano was and the Mendelsohn string octet in the sitting room perhaps with flute and oboe doubling up with the strings – everything was flexible and went on into the early hours, interrupted only by Sally’s unique champagne cocktails at midnight.
Sally’s funeral last September was a source of sadness and celebration. Her eldest son John gave a eulogy and summed her up in one pithy, topical sentence. “Before we all woke up to inequality, my mother was just getting on with it”.
She is survived by her three children, Jonathan, Philip and Judy, three grandchildren, Ben, Lucy and Jack, and three great grand-children.
