A '78'

All sorts of odd things come in to the charity shop where I work on two days a week but a record which came in this morning caught my eye. It's a 78rpm recording of a song by Richard Tauber.... Richard Who?

Tauber was an Austrian tenor who died in 1948. He spent the years of the Second World War in the UK and remained here, except when he toured in places like the US, until his death.

His importance to me is that my father was a great fan of his and had several of his records. I recall evenings in the late 1950s when he played them on his - for those times - very high-tech stereo gramophone, sitting in his chair in the lovely house we occupied at the end of Cliff Avenue. By his side he often had the weekly airmail Telegraph, printed on flimsy paper, and a bottle of White Cap lager.

I liked many of the records my father played: Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, Dvorak's New World symphony, Beethoven's Emperor and many more - but I cordially loathed Richard Tauber and could never understand what my father saw in him.

So many questions arise from things like this that happened all those years ago. One I would love to have answered is, how did my father come to be such a fan of Mr Tauber? Was it in England before he went abroad - Tauber produced his first record in 1919 - or did he somehow come across him while he lived in East Africa? The answer doesn't really matter but....