Nick Drake

by Patrick Humphries

  Far Leys, the beautiful brick-built house in Tanworth where the Drakes settled in 1952, was bought from a Mr Stanton, a BBC director of music, who had purchased the property during the 1940s. The house stands back slightly from the road, on a lane on the outskirts of the village. Although large, it had the friendly feel of an extremely comfortable, rambling, family home, rather than an air of great elegance. At the front a wooden gate with the house name painted on it, stood open, while at the back french windows opened on to a small terrace and then the garden: a huge expanse of lawn surrounded by shrubs and trees which merged into the countryside beyond.

  One hint of exoticism which the Drake family imported to Tanworth was their Burmese maid, who came to Britain with the family to act as nanny to Nick and Gabrielle. Otherwise, Far Leys was a typically English household, decorated and furnished by the Drakes in the traditional way. The house was cosy and homely, not ostentatious or particularly stylish; pieces of furniture collected during their life together were kept for their familiarity and comfort. It would remain their family home for forty years.

  Gabrielle has nothing but happy memories of growing up in leafy Tanworth. The Drakes were a close family, and from their parents both children inherited a love of music of all sorts. Molly Drake played the piano and sang, and once composed a whole suite of children’s songs for Nick and Gabrielle. During the 1930s, when suave sophisticates such as Noël Coward and Ivor Novello, Al Bowlly and Jack Hylton, were giving the American crooners a run for their money, Molly had even turned her hand to a little amateur songwriting. It is generally accepted that Nick inherited his musical gifts from his mother, but Gabrielle remembers that Rodney also composed, once writing an entire comic operetta about an Englishman who was based out East.

  In 1985 Gabrielle, by this time an actress, told TV Times, ‘It was an idyllic childhood,’ adding: ‘It was exciting living abroad, but the really wonderful thing was coming back to England – seeing snow for the first time and being able to drink water straight from the tap. I remember thinking that was extraordinary.’

  When, that same year, the American writer T.J. McGrath interviewed Rodney and Molly Drake at Far Leys, he asked them about Nick’s childhood. ‘Well,’ said Rodney, ‘he was always very fond of listening to music’. The voice is bright and well-enunciated, a voice of authority, upper-middle-class, worn and shiny like a much-used cricket bat. The pride in his only son’s achievements shines through.

  ‘As a baby he was always conducting,’ added Molly, ‘whenever the music started. He always said he was going to be a famous conductor.’ Rodney remembered Nick being frightened as a child by a piece by Sibelius, The Swan Of Tuonela. Written in 1895, the tone poem had its origins in the Finnish epic which tells of the young hero Lemminkäinen, who journeys to the North Country in search of a wife and dies in the attempt, but is brought back to life by the magical powers of his mother. Sibelius used a solitary cor anglais to represent the swan, which glides on the black waters that surround Tuonela, the land of the dead.

  ‘He was very fond of classical music. He listened to a lot …’ Rodney continued sadly. ‘I don’t know about the early days, but going right to the very end, the night before he died, he was listening to one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.’

  When I asked Gabrielle Drake about growing up with Nick, she spoke of the sheer joy of their childhood together at Tanworth: ‘We came to live in England when Nick was about four and I was eight … My dad was offered a job in Birmingham, and if you served out in the Far East, you had to retire earlier, so he knew he was looking for somewhere to settle over here. We were a very close-knit family, a very happy family. I had a most wonderful childhood … Nick and I were sort of opposites, we never had rivalry. I always used to think that Nick was a great deal more talented than I was. I was devoted to him. As we grew up, I became terribly proud of him.’

  Once settled in Tanworth, Nick and Gabrielle grew up, safe and prosperous, insulated and content, in the calmly Conservative Britain of the 1950s. Gabrielle remembers Nick composing songs even at this very early age: ‘When he was three or four, two of his great passions were cowboys and food. I can remember two songs he wrote then, one was a song about a cowboy in a book, called “Cowboy Small”: “Oh Cowboy Small, Oh Cowboy Small/All the other cowboys, call Cowboy Small”. The other song was about celery and tomatoes.’

  Prime Minister Harold Macmillan took the opportunity of a booming economy to remind the nation that they had ‘never had it so good’. Consumer durables were the tangible proof, and cars, television sets and record players were beginning to be visible across the strata of British society. Further highly visible evidence of the boom came with the advent of commercial television in 1955. Besides breaking the BBC’s stranglehold, ITV offered the public the opportunity to view, in their own home, advertisements telling them just what was available out there to buy. Many feared it was the end of civilization as they knew it. But for the Conservatives, such manifest prosperity ensured an uninterrupted span of government lasting from 1951 until 1964.

  The Empire which Rodney Drake and myriad other loyal servants had so diligently served was withering. The demands for independence which followed the end of the war had persisted long into the 1950s, and Macmillan was enough of a realist to discern the ‘wind of change’ sweeping through the African continent. The final flourish of Imperial dignity, and the stagnant end of Empire came in 1956, when Nick was eight. A joint Anglo-French invasion set out to destabilize Egypt’s President Nasser, following his nationalization of the Suez Canal. It ended in a humiliating defeat.

  The Suez débâcle occurred the same year that John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger opened in London. Railing against the values around which men like Rodney Drake had built their whole lives, the play was a clarion call to disaffected ‘Angry Young Men’, and the effect was seismic. Nineteen fifty-six also marked the first British sighting of an alien from a planet called Tupelo, Mississippi. It was the year the writing was first sprayed on the wall, the year the English middle classes were all shook up by the two-pronged attack of John Osborne and Elvis Presley.

  Little of this sneering, urban rebelliousness percolated to secluded Tanworth-in-Arden. Asked about Nick’s youthful musical influences, Gabrielle grimaced: ‘Well, we are talking about our childhoods, and of course it sounds ridiculous now, but someone like Russ Conway was a great favourite of Nick’s, because Nick used to play the piano a lot as a little boy. We both had piano lessons.’

  Rock ’n’ roll was barely tolerated by the BBC. The Drake family listened in to an old-fashioned radio which eventually wound up in Nick’s bedroom, and the music which issued forth was safe and unthreatening: Pearl Carr & Teddy Johnson, Frankie Vaughan, Russ Conway, Ruby Murray … For Nick and Gabrielle, Saturday morning was a favourite time to cluster round the radio, for Uncle Mac’s Children’s Favourites on the Light Programme. For two hours, songs like ‘Champion The Wonder Horse’, ‘Robin Hood’, ‘Nellie The Elephant’, ‘A Windmill In Old Amsterdam’ and ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ kept the nation’s infants mesmerized. It was all very consoling, seated safely at the knee of Auntie BBC.

  British cinema in the 1950s was no less cosy. Thousands of schoolboys like Nick Drake grew up with a fiercely nationalist film industry. Incapable of dealing with the painful legacy of a lost Empire, it dwelt instead on the celebration of a war well won. Films like The Dam Busters, Reach For The Sky, The Wooden Horse, The Cruel Sea and The Colditz Story, seemed so much more reassuring than the ugly questions posed by Teddy Boys, Elvis Presley and the botched imperialism of Suez.

  Well into the seventies the final cinema performance of the night would conclude with the audience standing, more or less to attention, for the National Anthem; but by then the comforting, flickering, black-and-white images of steaming mugs of cocoa and duffle-coats were already period pieces. Gritty Northern realism had subverted the mainstream: the male icons of the mid-sixties were Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, not Richard Todd and
Kenneth More. The new role models questioned and challenged the status quo, rather than epitomizing established values.

  Rock ’n’ roll also created ripples in Britain during the late fifties, but the stone had been dropped a very long way away and the ripples were still very faint. Few authentic rock ’n’ rollers appeared in Britain during that decade – Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were the best-remembered. Jerry Lee Lewis’s tour was cut short after it was revealed that he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin, and Elvis never made it beyond Prestwick Airport in Scotland, where his plane touched down to refuel while taking him home from military service in Germany.

  The soundtrack of South Pacific remained at the top of the UK LP charts from their inauguration in 1958 until March 1960; another popular long-player featured numbers from George Mitchell’s Black & White Minstrel Show. For all the hip, café-society image of the nineties’ Easy Listening revival, the real sugary root of that ghastly phenomenon lay in the singalong pulp which constituted the pre-Beatles, musical dark ages.

  Home-grown rock ’n’ roll — on television and in the still thriving variety halls – was essentially a novelty act, a bill-filler put on to placate teenagers between juggling and comedy acts. For all the inroads made by Cliff Richard & The Shadows, Johnny Kidd & The Pirates, Joe Brown, Billy Fury and producer Joe Meek, ‘all-round entertainment’ was still the name of the game in Britain as the fifties lapped, like a slow tide on a pebble peach.

  In the spring of 1957, at the age of eight, Nick was sent away to prep school at Sandhurst in Berkshire. Until then he had lived at home and attended local primary schools, but for the next five years, holidays apart, Eagle House School would be home. He did well at the school, becoming a prefect, and eventually, in his final term, Head Boy. Already Nick was proving to be an ‘outstanding’ athlete, and gained his colours as a ‘fine wing three-quarter’ for the rugby XV. He was in the school choir, and at thirteen, even appeared in the school play, playing ‘Jack Pincher, a detective’ in the old favourite The Crimson Coconut by Ian Hay.

  Twenty-six years after Nick left Eagle House, his former headmaster, Paul Wootton, wrote that he remembered Nick ‘for his fine voice as a leading member of the Chapel choir’. Mr Wootton also mentioned ‘another master … who just may have had some influence on the career in music of Nicholas Drake. This French teacher earned fame, particularly among the boys, for having come second in the Eurovision Song Contest with his song “Looking High, High, High”.’

  Rodney Drake remembered a school report from Eagle House, which he found not long after Nick died: ‘He was a very strong character at school, they always said in the reports we got … His first school, he left it when he was just under fourteen, and he was Head of that school, and they said he was a very strong character. In the report, which I’ve still got, the Headmaster said: “Nobody knows him very well.” ’

  At the end of the Christmas term of 1961 Nick Drake left Eagle House for the last time. After the Christmas holidays he would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and travel the sixty or so miles from Tanworth down to Wiltshire, to study at Marlborough College. As much a product of his heredity as of his times, Nick thought it only natural to attend a fee-paying public school.

  The Duke of Wellington was disingenuous when he claimed that ‘the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’. Like all subsequent military victories, it was won in the slum lean-tos and back-to-back squalor of British cities; in the hamlets and shires of rural England. The officers who blithely but bravely led their troops over the top may well have learned their pluck at Eton (or Marlborough, Harrow, Rugby or Dulwich), but the ‘poor bloody infantry’ certainly didn’t.

  The public-school ethos, based almost entirely on a belief in ‘playing the game’, drew its strength from tradition and continuity. And so it was always understood that N.R. Drake would follow his father and grandfather to Marlborough. It may seem incongruous that someone as enshrined in rock legend as Nick Drake should have had such an establishment upbringing, but quite simply, that is what he was born to. Ironically, Paul Weller, a recent convert to Nick’s work, chose to attack the institution which bred Nick in ‘Eton Rifles’: ‘What chance have you got against a tie and a crest,’ he snarled on The Jam’s 1979 hit.

  It was in January 1962 that Nicholas Rodney Drake entered Marlborough College, which would be his home until July 1966. Having heard so much about the isolation and introspection which blighted his later years, I was more than a little surprised, when talking to his friends and contemporaries from Marlborough, that their abiding memories of Nick Drake were, without exception, of a shy but happy and convivial friend.

  ‘My memories are that he was tall, very gentle, a guy who smiled a lot; a guy who seemed to be enjoying himself.’ (Simon Crocker)

  ‘Nick was reserved. Quiet… Thinking back, how you remember people, when I remember Nick, I remember him with a great big smile on his face.’ (David Wright)

  ‘I remember Nick very clearly. He was a popular guy, quiet and understated. We were in C1 House together. He had flashes of being very, very funny, clever and charming. Not a swanker. A very respected guy.’ (F.A.R. Packard)

  Michael Maclaran, another friend of Nick’s from Marlborough, gave perhaps the most vivid first-hand impression of his teenage friend: ‘Nick was tall and stooped forward, holding his head quite low in his shoulders, as if there was always a cold wind blowing. He had a friendly smiling face and a Beatle haircut … He was always pushing the school clothing and appearance regulations to the limit, with raised seams on his grey flannels, trouser bottoms that were too tight or too flared, did or didn’t have turn-ups and so on. However, he didn’t do this in an extrovert way, and got away with more than some “rebel” types, to the quiet admiration of his peers.’

  Nick’s housemaster at Marlborough was D.R.W. Silk. Although he went on to become Warden of Radley College and President of the MCC, like James Hilton’s immortal Mr Chips, Dennis Silk still has clear and fond memories of the hundreds of Marlburians who passed through C1 House. Thirty years after last seeing him, his face lit up at the mention of the teenage Nick Drake: ‘My abiding memory is the degree to which everybody liked Nick. One can honestly say that he had not an enemy in the place. I suspect he had one face for the staff, and another for his chums, who found him very amusing. It was not what you would call a sparkling sense of humour, but a rather dry, ironic sense of humour.

  ‘He was reasonably industrious, but his heart was not really in anything academic except English. A very dreamy pupil. Very. “Wake up, Drake.” “Oh sorry, sir.” Always very polite … But deep down, there was something we never got near to. And there was a whole way of life there that I can’t claim … to have penetrated, although we always got on well.’

  Marlborough College was founded in 1843 for the purpose of educating impoverished clergymen’s sons. The school was housed in a Queen Anne-style mansion which, according to Marlborough archivist Dr T.E. Rogers, had been ‘an aristocratic home until about 1751, when it became a very fashionable coaching inn on the London to Bath route. The coaching inn went bankrupt when the railways killed off the coach trade.’

  The portents for Marlborough were ominous. Some of the school’s early buildings were designed by the architect who went on to build Wormwood Scrubs prison. Like many of its predecessors, and successors, Marlborough was founded on a system which bordered on the brutal. Flogging and birching were commonplace, conditions spartan and ascetic; it was all part of the high-Victorian belief that mortification of the flesh helped enlighten the soul and elevate the moral spirit.

  Hopes of a benign beginning for the school were almost immediately dashed by ‘The Great Marlborough Rebellion’ of 1851. In his definitive history The Public School Phenomenon Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy wrote: ‘By 1851, Marlborough was like France in 1789 … Years of savage, unjust, but also inefficient tyranny were about to be overthrown.’ Over a period of five days Marlborough pupils r
ebelled against the vicious regime of near-starvation and brutality. It was the most violent upset in the history of Britain’s public-school system. Order was eventually restored, but as Dr Rogers noted, there were ‘very Spartan conditions right up until 1975’.

  Eminent Marlburians who preceded Nick at the school include the craftsman, poet and political activist William Morris; poets Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley, Louis MacNeice and John Betjeman; Conservative politicians R.A. (‘Rab’) Butler and Henry Brooke; round-the-world yachtsman Sir Francis Chichester; and the travel writer Bruce Chatwin. During the 1920s the school was attended by one Anthony Blunt, later curator of the Queen’s pictures, and later still the most infamous British spy since Kim Philby.

  Betjeman loathed his days at Marlborough; the old dining room, he later recalled, always smelt of Irish stew. The school spanned the main road through Marlborough, and the road was straddled by a bridge known to pupils as ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, as it took them from the boarding houses into their classes.

  During Nick’s time the school’s population was 800, all boys, all boarders, all away from home. Dennis Silk recalled the routine: ‘Classes until lunchtime, classes after lunch on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Half holidays on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and after lunch on half days, games. So it was work, work, games, prep, house prayers, more prep, bed. We bored them silly.’

  It was while at Marlborough that Nick really began to blossom and bloom. Here he was exposed to friendships and influences which would endure. Nick was one of a freewheeling group of pupils who shared a love of rock ’n’ roll, smoking cigarettes and draught beer. There was a mutual antipathy to school regulations, lessons and homework. David Wright remembers listening with Nick to the Cassius Clay—Henry Cooper bout of 1963, on a transistor radio on top of the Mound, one of the many medieval sites which circle Marlborough.