Led Zeppelin II

Led Zeppelin II is the second studio album by the English rock band Led Zeppelin, released on 22 October 1969 in the United States and on 31 October 1969 in the United Kingdom by Atlantic Records. Recording sessions for the album took place at several locations in both the United Kingdom and North America from January to August 1969. The album's production was credited to the band's lead guitarist and songwriter Jimmy Page, and it was also Led Zeppelin's first album on which Eddie Kramer served as engineer.

The album exhibited the band's evolving musical style of blues-derived material and their guitar riff-based sound. It has been described as the band's heaviest album. Six of the nine songs were written by the band, while the other three were reinterpretations of Chicago blues songs by Willie Dixon and Howlin' Wolf. One single, "Whole Lotta Love", was released outside of the UK (the band would release no UK singles during their career), and peaked as a top-ten single in over a dozen markets around the world.

Led Zeppelin II was a commercial success, and was the band's first album to reach number one on charts in the UK and the US. The album's cover designer David Juniper was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package in 1970. On 15 November 1999, the album was certified 12× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for sales passing 12 million copies. Since its release, various writers and music critics have regularly cited Led Zeppelin II as one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time.

## Background

Led Zeppelin II was conceived during a busy period of Led Zeppelin's career from January through August 1969, when they completed four European and three American concert tours. Each song was separately recorded, mixed and produced at various studios in the UK and North America. The album was written on tour, during periods of a couple of hours in between concerts, a studio was booked and the recording process begun, necessarily resulting in spontaneity and urgency, which is reflected in the sound. Several songs resulted from improvisation while touring, including during the instrumental sections of "Dazed and Confused", and were recorded mostly live in the studio.

Recording sessions for the album took place at a wide variety of studios in the UK and US, including Olympic and Morgan Studios in London, England; A&M, Quantum, Sunset, Mirror Sound and Mystic Studios in Los Angeles; Ardent Studios in Memphis, Tennessee; A&R, Juggy Sound, Groove and Mayfair Studios in New York City; and R&D Studios. Some of these were ill-equipped, leading to one Vancouver studio, which had an 8-track set-up without even proper headphone facilities, being credited as "a hut". A more favourable set-up was Mystic Studios in Hollywood, Los Angeles with Chris Huston engineering.

Lead singer Robert Plant later complained that the writing, recording, and mixing sessions were done in many different locations, and criticised the writing and recording process. "Thank You", "The Lemon Song" and "Moby Dick" were overdubbed during the tour, while the mixing of "Whole Lotta Love" and "Heartbreaker" was also done on tour. Page later stated, "In other words, some of the material came out of rehearsing for the next tour and getting new material together."

Page and Kramer spent two days mixing the album at A&R Studios, and the album's production was entirely credited to Jimmy Page, with Eddie Kramer engineering. Kramer was quoted as saying, "The famous Whole Lotta Love mix, where everything is going bananas, is a combination of Jimmy and myself just flying around on a small console twiddling every knob known to man." Kramer later gave great credit to Page for the sound that was achieved, despite the inconsistent conditions in which it was recorded: "We cut some of the tracks in some of the most bizarre studios you can imagine ... but in the end it sounded bloody marvellous ... there was one guy in charge and that was Mr. Page."

## Music and lyrics

The finished tracks reflect the evolving sound of the band and their live performances. Plant had his first songwriting credits on Led Zeppelin II; he had been unable to have his contributions to the writing process credited for the first album because of a prior contract with CBS Records.

### Side one

"Whole Lotta Love" was built around a five-note Page riff. Parts of the lyrics were taken directly from Willie Dixon's "You Need Love", which led to the group being sued for plagiarism, eventually settling out of court. The arrangement also resembles the Small Faces track "You Need Loving". With basic tracks recorded on Page's houseboat, the middle section of the song contained a variety of overdubbed instruments and vocals which were mixed live by Page and Kramer, making full use of stereo panning and other controls available on the desk. The song was edited down to a single in the US, where it became a top 5 hit. In the UK, a single release was cancelled; the group never issued any singles there during their active career together. It was finally issued as a single in 1997. A mainly instrumental version of the song was recorded by CCS and was used as the theme tune to the BBC TV show Top of the Pops, ensuring it was well known by virtually everyone in Britain.

Led Zeppelin performed "Whole Lotta Love" at every gig from June 1969 onwards. It was the closing number of their live shows between 1970 and 1973, often extended to incorporate a rock'n'roll medley towards the end of the set. A different arrangement of the song was played for the Knebworth Fayre concerts in 1979. It was the last song the group ever performed live with Bonham, on 7 July 1980. "Whole Lotta Love" has since been critically praised as one of the definitive heavy metal tracks, though the group have never considered themselves to fit that specific style.

"What Is and What Should Never Be" was primarily written by Plant. It features a variety of dynamics during the track, along with flanged vocals and wide-panned stereo guitars.

"The Lemon Song" was a re-arrangement of Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor", which had become a regular part of the group's live show during 1969. It was mostly recorded live and expanded to include new lyrics, including the sexually-charged phrase "squeeze my lemon" which was borrowed from Robert Johnson's "Travelling Riverside Blues", which the band had played for the BBC radio show Top Gear broadcast on 29 June 1969.

"Thank You" was written by Plant as a love song to his wife, Maureen. Page played twelve-string guitar and Jones played Hammond organ on the track.

### Side two

"Heartbreaker" was mostly written by Page as a showcase for his guitar skills, including an unaccompanied solo in the middle of the song. It quickly became a live favourite, being performed regularly from October 1969 onwards, and throughout the group's career.

"Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)" was purported to be written about a groupie the band encountered while touring the US. The group disliked the track, considering it to be little more than filler, and consequently it was never played live by the group. Plant performed the track live on his 1990 solo tour.

"Ramble On" was written by Plant. The lyrics were inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien, and similar themes appeared on subsequent Led Zeppelin albums. The track made good use of dynamics, moving from a quiet acoustic guitar in the opening, to a variety of overdubbed electric guitars towards the end. It was never performed live by Led Zeppelin during their main career, but Plant has performed the song regularly on solo tours, and it was part of Page and Plant's live set in the mid-1990s. It was finally performed live for the first time by Led Zeppelin at the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert in 2007.

"Moby Dick" was designed as a showcase for Bonham's drum solo. It was originally called "Pat's Delight" (after his wife) and features a variety of drums and percussive instruments played with bare hands as well as drumsticks. It was a regular part of Led Zeppelin's live show, developing to include additional percussion and electronic drums.

"Bring It On Home" was a cover of a Willie Dixon song originally performed by Sonny Boy Williamson II. Led Zeppelin's arrangement includes a faster middle section in addition to the straightforward blues structure of the original. It was played live regularly throughout late 1969 and 1970.

## Artwork

The album sleeve design was from a poster by David Juniper, who was simply told by the band to come up with an interesting idea. Juniper was a fellow student of Page's at Sutton Art College in Surrey.

Juniper's design was based on a photograph of the Jagdstaffel 11 Division of the German Air Force during World War I, the Flying Circus led by the Red Baron. Juniper replaced four of the flyers' heads with photos of the band members, added facial hair and sunglasses to some of the flyers' faces or replaced some with the faces of other people. The blonde-haired woman is French actress Delphine Seyrig in her role as Marie-Magdalene in the film Mr. Freedom, a leftist anti-war satire by William Klein. The cover also pictured the outline of a Zeppelin on a brown background (similar to the cover of the band's first album), which gave the album its nickname "Brown Bomber".

## Release and reception

The album was released on 22 October 1969 on Atlantic Records, with advance orders of 400,000 copies. The advertising campaign was built around the slogans 'Led Zeppelin – The Only Way to Fly' and 'Led Zeppelin II Now Flying'. In the United States, some commercially duplicated reel-to-reel copies of Led Zeppelin II made by Ampex bore the title Led Zeppelin II – The Only Way to Fly on their spine. Commercially, Led Zeppelin II was the band's first album to hit No. 1 in the US, knocking The Beatles' Abbey Road (1969) twice from the top spot, where it remained for seven weeks. By April 1970 it had registered three million American sales, whilst in Britain it enjoyed a 138-week residence on the LP chart, climbing to the top spot in February 1970. Meanwhile, the album reached the top spot in other 5 national albums charts (including Canadian, Australian and Spanish albums charts). In November Ritchie Yorke reported in Billboard that while the album had achieved "staggering" sales, as a hard rock record it was considered unsuitable for North American Top 40 radio stations, who were "dreary and detached from the mainstream of contemporary rock music".

The album also yielded Led Zeppelin's biggest hit, "Whole Lotta Love". This song reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1970, after Atlantic went against the group's wishes by releasing a shorter version on 45. The single's B-side, "Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)", also hit the Billboard chart, peaking at No. 65 in April 1970. The album helped establish Led Zeppelin as an international concert attraction, and for the next year, the group continued to tour relentlessly, initially performing in clubs and ballrooms, then in larger auditoriums and eventually stadiums as their popularity grew.

Led Zeppelin II was not well-received by contemporary music critics. John Mendelsohn wrote a negative review of the record for Rolling Stone, in which he mocked the group's heavy sound and white blues, while writing that "until you've listened to the album eight hundred times, as I have, it seems as if it's just one especially heavy song extended over the space of two whole sides". In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau jokingly referred to the band as "the best of the wah-wah mannerist groups, so dirty they drool on demand", while complaining that "all the songs sound alike", before assigning the album a "B" grade. He nonetheless conceded in 1970 that "Led Zeppelin simply out-heavied everyone" the previous year, "pitting Jimmy Page's repeated low-register fuzz riffs against the untiring freak intensity of Robert Plant's vocal. This trademark has only emerged clearly on the second album, and more and more I am coming to understand it as an artistic triumph."

On 10 November 1969, the album was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America and in 1990 it was certified 5× platinum reflecting shipping of five million copies. By 14 November 1999, Led Zeppelin II had shipped twelve million copies and was certified 12× platinum by the RIAA. The 2014 reissue of the album helped itself get back into the Billboard Top 10 when it got to .

## Legacy and reappraisal

Led Zeppelin II has since been regarded as the quintessential hard rock and heavy metal album. AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine said it "provided the blueprint for all the heavy metal bands that followed it". While crediting the band for essentially inventing metal, Tom Hull said that, after the first album had declared their musical ambition, "the second honed it down to a singular entity, a sound", with subsequent albums expanding on it in "sophisticated, subtler, often quite intelligent" ways, but still indebted to "the basic dumbness" of II – "dumb not in the sense of stupid but of non-speaking. Lyrics are there of course, but as an integral part of the music, a music better appropriated tactilely, through incoherent sensation, than intellectually, literarily."

The album was described as a "brilliant if heavy-handed blues-rock offensive", by popular music scholar Ronald Zalkind. According to Robert Santelli's The Big Book of Blues: A Biographical Encyclopedia (2001), Led Zeppelin "had already begun to move beyond its blues-rock influences, venturing into previously unexplored hard-rock territories". Blues-derived songs like "Whole Lotta Love", "Heartbreaker", "The Lemon Song", "Moby Dick", and "Bring It On Home" have been seen as representing standards of the metal genre, where the guitar-based riff (rather than vocal chorus or verses) defines the song and provides the key hook. Such arrangements and emphasis were at the time atypical in popular music. Page's guitar solo in "Heartbreaker" was an influence on later renowned guitarists Eddie Van Halen, as inspiration for his two-handed tapping technique, and Steve Vai.

Since its initial critical reception, Led Zeppelin II has earned several accolades from music publications, frequently ranked on critics' "best album" lists. In 1989, Spin magazine ranked the album No. 5 on its list of The 25 Greatest Albums of All Time. In 1990, CD Review ranked it sixth on their list of top 50 CDs for starting a "pop/rock" library; an accompanying blurb described the album as "white boy blues with a hard rock edge". In 2000, Q magazine placed Led Zeppelin II at number 37 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 2003, the album was ranked number 75 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, 79 in a 2012 revised list, and 123 in a 2020 revised list. The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

(\*) designates unordered lists.

## 2014 reissue

Along with the group's self-titled debut album and their third album, Led Zeppelin III, the album was remastered and reissued on 2 June 2014. The reissue comes in six formats: a standard CD edition, a deluxe two-CD edition, a standard LP version, a deluxe two-LP version, a super deluxe two-CD plus two-LP version with a hardback book, and as high-resolution, 24-bit/96k digital downloads. The deluxe and super deluxe editions feature bonus material containing alternative takes, backing tracks and the previously unreleased instrumental, "La La". The reissue was released with an altered colour version of the original album's artwork as its bonus disc's cover.

The reissue was met with widespread critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 95, based on 10 reviews. Pitchfork journalist Mark Richardson said, "the reissue sounds as thrilling as ever", while Julian Marszalek of The Quietus noted the bonus disc's "intriguing insight" into the original record's creation. In Rolling Stone, David Fricke wrote, "the alternate takes highlight Robert Plant's ripening vocal poise and, in a rough mix of 'Ramble On', the decisive, melodic force of John Paul Jones' bass and John Bonham's drumming." "As a two-disc set", Consequence of Sound's Michael Madden wrote, "this reissue is both a reminder of the original album's wallop and a closer look at the alchemy of a band increasingly attuned to ideas of progression." Raoul Hernandez from The Austin Chronicle was more critical of the bonus disc, finding it to be "the thinest of extras" offered by the reissue program.

## Track listing

All tracks composed by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, except where noted.

### Original release

### Deluxe Edition (2014)

## Personnel

Led Zeppelin

- John Bonham – drums, backing vocals
- John Paul Jones – bass guitar, organ, backing vocals
- Jimmy Page – guitars, theremin, backing vocals
- Robert Plant – lead vocals, harmonica

Production

- Producer – Jimmy Page
- Recording engineers

George Chkiantz at Olympic Studios, London: "Whole Lotta Love", "What Is and What Should Never Be"

Chris Huston at Mirror Sound, Los Angeles: "The Lemon Song", "Moby Dick"

Andy Johns at Morgan Studios, London: "Thank You", "Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)"

Eddie Kramer at A & R Studios, Juggy Sound Studio, and Atlantic Studios (resp.), New York: "Heartbreaker", "Ramble On", "Bring It On Home"

- Director of engineering and mixing at A & R Studios – Eddie Kramer
- LP mastering – Robert Ludwig
- Executive producer – Peter Grant
- Artwork – David Juniper

Digitally remastered editions

- First 1987 CD mastering [19127-2] –  Barry Diament at Atlantic Studios
- 1994 digital remastering (from the original master tapes) –  Jimmy Page and George Marino at Sterling Sound
- 2014 24 bit/192 kHz digital transfers of the original analogue tapes –  Jimmy Page at Metropolis Mastering, London

Additional engineering for prev. unreleased studio outtakes –  Drew Griffiths at Metropolis Mastering, London

Mastering of prev. unreleased tracks –  John Davis at Metropolis Mastering, London

- All reissues produced by Jimmy Page

## Charts

### Weekly charts

Original release

2014 reissue

### Year-end charts

## Certifications

## See also

- List of best-selling albums in the United States
- List of Billboard 200 number-one albums of 1970

Albums involved in plagiarism controversies

Albums recorded at Olympic Sound Studios

Albums recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders


Albert Ketèlbey

Albert William Ketèlbey (/kəˈtɛlbi/; born Ketelbey; 9 August 1875 – 26 November 1959) was an English composer, conductor and pianist, best known for his short pieces of light orchestral music. He was born in Birmingham and moved to London in 1889 to study at Trinity College of Music. After a brilliant studentship he did not pursue the classical career predicted for him, becoming musical director of the Vaudeville Theatre before gaining fame as a composer of light music and as a conductor of his own works.

For many years Ketèlbey worked for a series of music publishers, including Chappell & Co and the Columbia Graphophone Company, making arrangements for smaller orchestras, a period in which he learned to write fluent and popular music. He also found great success writing music for silent films until the advent of talking films in the late 1920s.

The composer's early works in conventional classical style were well received, but it was for his light orchestral pieces that he became best known. One of his earliest works in the genre, In a Monastery Garden (1915), sold over a million copies and brought him to widespread notice; his later musical depictions of exotic scenes caught the public imagination and established his fortune. Such works as In a Persian Market (1920), In a Chinese Temple Garden (1923), and In the Mystic Land of Egypt (1931) became best-sellers in print and on records; by the late 1920s he was Britain's first millionaire composer. His celebrations of British scenes were equally popular: examples include Cockney Suite (1924) with its scenes of London life, and his ceremonial music for royal events. His works were frequently recorded during his heyday, and a substantial part of his output has been put on CD in more recent years.

Ketèlbey's popularity began to wane during the Second World War and his originality also declined; many of his post-war works were re-workings of older pieces and he increasingly found his music ignored by the BBC. In 1949 he moved to the Isle of Wight, where he spent his retirement, and he died at home in obscurity. His work has been reappraised since his death; in a 2003 poll by the BBC radio programme Your Hundred Best Tunes, Bells Across the Meadows was voted the 36th most popular tune of all time. On the last night of the 2009 Proms season the orchestra performed his In a Monastery Garden, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Ketèlbey's death—the first time his music had been included in the festival's finale.

## Biography

### Early life and education, 1875–95

Albert William Ketèlbey was born on 9 August 1875 at 41 Alma Street in the Aston area of Birmingham, England. He was the second of five children of George Henry, a jewellery engraver, and his wife Sarah Ann, née Aston. The grave accent was Albert's invention: the family name was spelled without it at the time of his birth and there had been several variants of the name in the previous generations. All the children were taught a musical instrument and Ketèlbey's brother, Harold, was later a violinist of note. Albert showed a natural talent for the piano and singing, and he subsequently became head chorister at St Silas' Church in nearby Lozells.

At the age of eleven Ketèlbey joined the Birmingham and Midland Institute school of music (now the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire) where he was tutored by Dr Alfred Gaul in composition and Dr H. W. Wareing in harmony. At the age of thirteen Ketèlbey composed his first serious piece of music, "Sonata for Pianoforte", which, for Tom McCanna, his biographer, "shows a precocious mastery of composition". Ketèlbey competed for a scholarship to Trinity College of Music in London, and received the highest marks of all entrants; the future composer Gustav Holst came second. Ketèlbey entered the college in 1889, studying under G. E. Bambridge (piano), Dr G. Saunders (harmony) and Frederick Corder (composition).

In 1892 Ketèlbey again won the annual scholarship competition and was appointed as the organist at St John's Church, Wimbledon, London. He held the post for the next five years, during which time he wrote several anthems and hymns, the latter of which included "Every Good Gift", "Behold! Upon the Mountains" and "Be Strong! All ye People". It was around this time he added the accent to his surname, with the aim of moving the stress onto the second syllable, rather than the first. In that year he appeared in a series of concerts in London and provincial cities. In March 1892 at the capital's Queen's Hall he played Frédéric Chopin's Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor; the reviewer for The Illustrated London News thought the "brilliant" Ketèlbey played "most beautifully". He won several prizes at the college before being awarded his certificate in 1895. During this period, The British Musician reports, some critics found likenesses between Ketèlbey's music and that of Edward German.

Towards the end of his time at the college Ketèlbey wrote lighter, mostly mandolin-based, compositions. As he still aspired to be a serious composer, he adapted the pseudonym Raoul Clifford in an effort to distance himself from the genre. On leaving the college he became one of its examiners in harmony. He wrote piano pieces as part of his role, and used the pseudonym Anton Vodorinski for the work; he subsequently used the name for more serious works, which he published with French titles.

### Early career, 1896–1914

In 1896 Ketèlbey took up the post of conductor for a travelling light opera company; his father, who wanted his son to be a composer of serious music, disapproved of what he saw as a lightweight role. After a two-year tour Ketèlbey was appointed as musical director of the Opera Comique Theatre—at age 22, the youngest theatrical conductor in London at the time. He moved into a house in Bruton Street, in London's Mayfair, where he wrote the song "Blow! Blow! Thou Winter Wind", to words from Shakespeare's As You Like It. The Opera Comique staged a successful revival of the musical Alice in Wonderland between December 1898 and March 1899, and according to his biographer John Sant, it is possible that Ketèlbey wrote some of the music. This was followed by the comic opera A Good Time from April, for which Ketèlbey wrote the music and songs. Following poor reviews, the short run of the piece ended in May and the Opera Comique closed because of the losses brought about by the production. There, Ketèlbey began a relationship with the actress and singer Charlotte "Lottie" Siegenberg. The couple married in 1906 but the relationship was childless.

Ketèlbey wrote music in the style of the Gilbert and Sullivan works for a comic opera The Wonder Worker, which was staged at the Grand Theatre, Fulham in 1900. The reviewer for the London Evening Standard thought Ketèlbey's score was "attractive though conventional ... No originality is shown in conception or treatment, but the conception is appropriate, and the treatment effective." The same year Ketèlbey began undertaking transcription work at the music publisher A. Hammond & Co, making arrangements of music for smaller orchestras. In 1904 he also began to work for a second music publisher, Chappell & Co, a third in 1907, the Columbia Graphophone Company, and a fourth in 1910, when he worked for Elkin & Co. McCanna considers that "this hack-work may have been tedious, but the experience was invaluable in moulding the composer's fluent writing for both piano and orchestra". Throughout the time working for the companies he continued to compose and publish his own work, comprising organ music, songs, duets, piano pieces and anthems. He worked for Columbia for over twenty years and rose to the position of Musical Director and Adviser, working with leading musicians across a range of musical styles; Columbia released more than 600 recordings with Ketèlbey conducting.

In 1912 the composer and cellist Auguste van Biene offered a prize for a new work to complement his popular piece The Broken Melody. Ketèlbey was the winner of the competition with a new composition, The Phantom Melody, which became his first major success. In the following year he won two prizes totalling £200 in a competition held by The Evening News: second place with a song for female voices, and first place with his entry for male voices. The latter song, "My Heart Still Clings to You", is described by Sant as "a typical tragical-love ballad of this time, and its almost Victorian sentimentality comes through in its words". In the early to mid-1910s Ketèlbey began to write music for silent films—a new growth industry in Britain from 1910 onwards—and he had great success in the medium until the advent of talking films in the late 1920s.

### Rising reputation and success, 1914–46

In 1914 Ketèlbey wrote the orchestral work In a Monastery Garden, which was published in the following year both as a piano piece and in full orchestral form. It was his first major success, his most famous piece, and became known all over the world; by 1920 over a million copies of the sheet music had been sold. There are two competing stories detailing the inspiration behind the piece: although Ketèlbey later said that he wrote the work for an old friend, he also stated that he composed it after visiting a monastery. The musicologist Peter Dempsey considers that "this piece ... remains to this day a world-renowned staple of the light-music repertoire, while McCanna opines that from the first bar, listeners "... might sooner expect such a device in the impassioned world of a [Gustav] Mahler symphony than in a genteel English salon piece". The success of The Phantom Melody and In a Monastery Garden led to Ketèlbey's engagement by André Charlot as the musical director for the 1916 revue Samples! at the Vaudeville Theatre. The appointment led to similar positions at other London theatres, including the Adelphi, Garrick, Shaftesbury and Drury Lane theatres.

Because of the rise in Ketèlbey's popularity, and in sales of his sheet music, in 1918 he became a member of the Performing Rights Society. Except for a brief interval in 1926 when he resigned over a dispute about the allocation of funds to its members, he remained a lifelong member. In 1919 he composed the romantic work In the Moonlight, which his publisher considered to be "a work of striking beauty". In the following year he wrote Wedgwood Blue—a gavotte—and In a Persian Market; the latter became one of his more popular works. The musicologist Jonathan Bellman, calling In a Persian Market "immortal", describes it as "an 'intermezzo scene' for band or small orchestra; reprehensibly demeaning or delightfully tacky". The work was not without its critics; the composer and conductor Nicolas Slonimsky quotes the view of a Russian journal that "the suite ... had its 'immaculate conception' in imperialistic colonial England. The composer's intention is to convince the listener that all's well in the colonies where beautiful women and exotic fruits mature together, where beggars and rulers are friends, where there are no imperialists, no restive proletarians." In The Musical Times, the pseudonymous reviewer "Ariel" described the work as "naive and inexpensive pseudo-orientalism", which led to heated correspondence in the journal over the following months between the composer and the critic.

In 1921 Ketèlbey moved from his home in St John's Wood, where he had been living for the previous seven years, to Frognal, an area of Hampstead, north west London. He installed a billiards table in the basement, which became his favoured form of relaxation. He produced a series of orchestral pieces in the first half of the 1920s, including Bells Across the Meadows released in 1921, and Suite Romantique (1922), which the music critic Tim McDonald considers "impressive". In the following year Ketèlbey wrote In a Chinese Temple Garden, followed in 1924 by Sanctuary of the Heart and Cockney Suite. The last of these contained the finale "'Appy 'Ampstead", which the writers Lewis and Susan Foreman describe as "... a kaleidoscope of passing images, mouth organs, a cornet playing, ... a band, ... shouts of a showman ... with his rattle and a steam engine and roundabout".

In 1923 the composer Frederic Austin wrote the opera Polly, closely based on the 1729 work of the same name by John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch; recordings of Austin's work were published by Columbia's main rival, the Gramophone Company. At Columbia's request Ketèlbey produced his own version of Gay's original. Austin considered that it copied elements of his, and sued for copyright infringement. Acting as a court expert witness, the composer Sir Frederick Bridge thought that the case "... is an awful bore. ... These two good men are good musicians, and they have no business to be fighting over the game. It is not worth the trouble. ... It is rubbish. I am sick of 'Polly'." After three weeks the case ended with the judge finding against Columbia.

Such was Ketèlbey's popularity that by 1924 his works could be heard several times a day in restaurants and cinemas, and in that year the Lyons tea shops spent £150,000 on playing his music in their outlets. He continued to build on his success in 1925 with In a Lovers' Garden and In the Camp of the Ancient Britons—inspired by a trip he took to Worlebury Camp, near Weston-super-Mare. He undertook annual tours of Britain, conducting his music with municipal orchestras, and also worked with the BBC Wireless Orchestra. He was invited to conduct several international orchestras, and spent time in Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland and particularly in the Netherlands, where he built a strong relationship with the Concertgebouw and Kursaal Grand Symphony orchestras. His music was popular on the continent and his obituarist in The Times later reported that one Viennese critic considered that Ketèlbey's music was behind only that of Johann Strauss and Franz Lehár. Continental audiences often called him "The English Strauss".

Ketèlbey was financially successful enough to leave Columbia Records in 1926 to spend more time composing, although he continued to conduct for them on an occasional basis, particularly between 1928 and 1930 when he conducted sixteen of his own works with the company, published as Ketèlbey Conducting his Concert Orchestra. He spent his time undertaking annual conducting tours and composing, and in 1927 he published By the Blue Hawaiian Waters and the suite In a Fairy Realm, while in the following year he wrote another suite, Three Fanciful Etchings. His works continued to sell well, and in the October 1929 issue of the Performing Right Gazette his publisher described him as "Britain's greatest living composer"; when the advertisement was mentioned in The Musical Times, the anonymous writer wrote "we sympathise with Mr Ketèlbey in being thus raised to a pinnacle which he himself, we are sure, would be very far from claiming." Sant writes that Ketèlbey subsequently became Britain's first millionaire composer. In February 1930 he began what became an annual series of concerts at the Kingsway Hall, conducting a new work, The Clock and the Dresden Figures. In a review of the 1933 concert, the critic S.R. Nelson wrote that "as a descriptive writer Ketèlbey really does take some beating. He has the happy knack of combining infinitely melodious themes and the cleverly diluted likeness of the authentic atmosphere."

The introduction of talking films in 1927 with The Jazz Singer and the subsequent growth of the medium had a serious impact on composers and music publishers involved in the film industry as it heralded a decline in the sales of sheet music. Although Ketèlbey's income from this source declined, the period was also marked by a rise in the popularity of the radio and gramophones and his new compositions were successful with audiences at home. By the early 1930s over 1,500 broadcasts of his work were made on BBC Radio in a year, and more than 700 on continental radio stations, including a weekly Sunday programme of his music, sponsored by Decca Records on Radio Luxembourg. For this programme he wrote the theme music, "Sunday Afternoon Reverie", with the melody based on the musical notes D E C C A.

Ketèlbey wrote an intermezzo—A Birthday Greeting—in 1932, on the sixth birthday of Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II). His connection to royalty continued in 1934, when his march A State Procession was played to accompany the arrival of King George V at a Royal Command Performance; the king requested that the march should be played again during the interval, and he and the queen stayed in the royal box to listen to the piece. In the following year Ketèlbey wrote the march With Honour Crowned for the King's silver jubilee; the work was played for the royal family at Windsor Castle before Ketèlbey conducted its first public performance at Kingsway Hall. The work was played at that year's Trooping the Colour and at the Jubilee Thanksgiving Service at St Paul's Cathedral.

Ketèlbey continued to conduct on his annual tours during the Second World War, but these were on a smaller scale because of travel restrictions. He also continued with his annual concerts at Kingsway Hall, and introduced a new march, Fighting for Freedom, which he had written in a supportive response to Winston Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" speech. Apart from composing and conducting, he also acted as a Special Constable during the war.

### Post-war; retirement and death, 1946–59

The winter of 1946–47 was harsh, and in February the sub-zero temperatures burst the water main outside Ketèlbey's Hampstead home. With his house partially flooded, he lost most of his correspondence, manuscripts and papers, and he and his wife both contracted pneumonia. The couple were taken to the Regent's Park Nursing Home, where Lottie died two days later. He sold his house and moved temporarily to the Hendon Hall Hotel, where he had a nervous breakdown. He spent the remainder of the year staying in hotels in southern England; in Bournemouth he began a relationship with Mabel Maud Pritchett, a hotel manageress, and the couple married in October in the following year.

In 1949 Ketèlbey and his new wife moved to the Isle of Wight, and purchased Rookstone, Egypt Hill, in Cowes, where he partly retired, although he composed occasionally. Tastes in popular music had changed during and after the Second World War and his music declined in popularity; his income in 1940 had been £3,493, which dropped to £2,906 in 1950—a particularly steep drop when wartime inflation is considered. McCanna writes that apart from a commission for the National Brass Band competition in 1945, Ketèlbey produced nothing memorable after the war, and his biographer Keith Anderson considers that in the postwar period Ketèlbey's work "... lacked novelty. Of the handful of works published ... most were reworkings of old material, although the composer attempted to disguise the origins". The BBC also began to ignore his work. In their 1949 Festival of Light Music, none of his compositions were played, which he found distressing. In his letter to the Director-General of the BBC, Sir William Haley, Ketèlbey said the exclusion was "a public insult". His music still found an audience: in 1952 and 1953 With Honour Crowned was again played as a slow march at the Trooping the Colour ceremony.

Ketèlbey died in his Cowes home of heart and renal failure on 26 November 1959. By the time of his death he had slipped into obscurity. Only a handful of mourners attended his funeral, which was held at Golders Green Crematorium in London.

## Music

Under his own name and at least six pseudonyms, Ketèlbey composed several hundred works, about 150 of them for the orchestra. In the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Phillip Scowcroft writes, "His gifts for melody and sensitive, colourful scoring ensured continuing popularity with light orchestras and bands until after 1945. The most popular of his hundreds of pieces emphasize emotionalism and sometimes exaggerated effects at the expense of structure and harmonic subtlety."

### Early works and serious music

Ketèlbey's early compositions are classical and orthodox in form, reflecting the training at Trinity College. The first substantial work was a piano sonata (1888); it was followed by a Caprice for piano and orchestra (1892), a Concertstück for piano and orchestra (circa 1893) and a piano concerto in G minor (1895). Ketèlbey's piano writing was notable for its brilliance, and the composer's own performance of the solo part of the Concertstück brought out that quality. As a student, Ketèlbey composed a cadenza for the first movement of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto, judged "clever and effective" in performance in 1890.

For the chamber repertoire, Ketèlbey composed a string quartet (c. 1896) and a quintet for piano and wind (1896) which won the Costa Prize and the College Gold Medal. His 1894 Romance for violin and piano was praised as "a charming, musicianly work". His other early works include choral pieces, including the anthems "Every good Gift"; "Behold upon the mountains", and "Be strong, all ye people" (all 1896). After these works he moved professionally into conducting light opera, and serious music became the exception rather than the rule in his compositions.

Ketèlbey's concert music was less well known in England than in continental Europe, where he conducted many programmes of his own works for the Concertgebouw Orchestra and others. The composer's more avowedly serious music was less widely esteemed by his compatriots. In a 1928 profile the magazine The British Musician commented, "There is no need to explain here why his serious music, whether written thirty years ago or as recently as 1927 ... has not won the popularity of, say, Edward German's dances: it is pleasant music, delightfully scored; but it is not so fascinating as that from which it derives—the music of the Viennese writers of dance music, of Delibes and Gounod and the like." The reviewer added, "Albert Ketèlbey's works of the Monastery Garden type are by far the best that anyone in this country has written, and they represent the end to which he was born."

### Light orchestral

Ketèlbey, a capable player of the cello, clarinet, oboe, and horn, was a skilled orchestrator. He generally followed the normal style for light music of his day: picturesque and romantic, with colourful orchestral effects. Reviewing a collection of Ketèlbey's music, the authors of The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music commented in 2008, "when vulgarity is called for it is not shirked—only it's a stylish kind of vulgarity!" Many of Ketèlbey's pieces are programmatic, typically lasting between four and six minutes. His penchant for arranging his works for various combinations of instruments makes them harder to categorise than the works of many other composers. His first two pieces to make a mark with a wide public were The Phantom Melody (1911) and In a Monastery Garden (1915), both best known in their orchestral versions, but originally written for cello and piano and for solo piano respectively. For the familiar orchestral version of the second of these pieces the composer published a synopsis:

> The first theme represents a poet's reverie in the quietude of the monastery garden amidst beautiful surroundings—the calm serene atmosphere—the leafy trees and the singing birds. The second theme in the minor expresses the more 'personal' note of sadness, of appeal and contrition. Presently, the monks are heard chanting the "Kyrie Eleison" with the organ playing and the chapel bell ringing. The first theme is now heard in a quieter manner as if it had become more ethereal and distant; the singing of the monks is again heard—it becomes louder and more insistent, bringing the piece to a conclusion in a glow of exultation.

Ketèlbey followed the same basic formula for many of his most popular later works. For In a Persian Market his synopsis notes "the camel drivers approaching, the cries of beggars, entry of beautiful princess (represented by a languorous theme given at first to clarinet and cello and then full orchestra) ... she watches the jugglers and snake-charmers ... the Caliph passes by, interrupting the entertainment ... all depart, their themes heard faintly in the distance, and the marketplace becomes deserted." Ketèlbey establishes the eastern setting in the opening section, employing the distinctive melodic intervals, A–B–E. The orchestral players are instructed to sing at two points in the score, a descending motif representing beggars crying for baksheesh. Although one contemporary critic belittled the music as "pseudo-orientalism", McCanna comments that "The princess portrayed by the big romantic theme is a cousin of the princesses in Stravinsky's Firebird".

Ketèlbey sought to repeat the exoticism of In a Persian Market in several later pieces. Among them is In a Chinese Temple Garden (1923), described as an "oriental phantasy", with episodes depicting a priestly incantation, two lovers, a wedding procession, a street brawl and the restoration of calm by the beating of the temple gong. Another example is In the Mystic Land of Egypt (1931), which, like its Persian predecessor, opens with a vigorous march theme followed by a broad romantic melody. Again, the composer employs unconventional musical devices for colour—in this case a chromatic scale, descending at each appearance until the closing bars, where it is inverted. In 1958, the critic Ronald Ever wrote that Ketèlbey was noted for his use of "every exotic noisemaker known to man—chimes, orchestra bells, gongs (all sizes and nationalities), cymbals, woodblocks, xylophone, drums of every variety". Ever commented that Ketèlbey's exoticism had left an immovable impression of eastern music on western ears, to which "Oriental music is Ketèlbey music: the clashing cymbals; the little pinging bells; the minor modes; the amazingly graphic mincing step created by rapidly reiterated notes; the coy taps on the woodblock."

Among Ketèlbey's light orchestral works with a wholly British flavour is Bells Across the Meadows (1921), redolent, in the words of McDonald, of "rose-entwined thatched cottages standing amidst gardens full of hollyhocks with a gentle brook bubbling on its rustic way and cows grazing peacefully in the pastures beyond". Urban life was evoked in the five-movement Cockney Suite (1924), described by The Times as "character pieces complete with leering saxophone, cheeky mouth-organ, and some infernally catchy tunes". Ketèlbey depicts successively a royal procession from Buckingham Palace to the Houses of Parliament; an East End pub, with a main theme based on the Cockney ditty "'Arf a pint of mild and bitter"; a waltz at a palais de danse; a sombre glimpse of the Cenotaph in Whitehall; and in the finale, "'Appy 'Ampstead", a picture of the August Bank Holiday fair on Hampstead Heath.

Much of the music Ketèlbey wrote as accompaniment to silent films between 1915 and 1929, though lucrative at the time, has proved ephemeral, although he reused and rearranged some of it in solo pieces for amateur pianists. With the requirements of cinemas of all sizes in mind, his film music was published in the "Bosworth Loose Leaf Film Play Music Series" in versions for solo piano or for small orchestras. The titles offered included Dramatic Agitato, Amaryllis (described by the composer as "suitable for use in dainty, fickle scenes"), Mystery ("greatly in favour for uncanny and weird picturizations"), "Agitato Furioso" ("famous for its excellence in playing to riots, storms, wars, etc.") and Bacchanale de Montmartre (for "cabaret, orgy and riotous continental scenes").

### Instrumental works

In addition to arrangements for solo instruments of his popular orchestral works, Ketèlbey wrote a range of music for organ and for piano. Some of the more serious of these pieces were published under his "Vodorinski" pen name. Among the organ works are Pastorale and Rêverie dramatique, both dating from about 1911. The piano works include the early classical pieces such as the 1888 Sonata, and shorter items in a more popular style, such as Rêverie (1894) and Les pèlerins (1925), by way of A Romantic Melody (1898), Pensées joyeuses (1888), In the Woodlands (1921), A Song of Summer (1922), and Légende triste (1923). The musical influences on his piano works were on the whole conservative: for the early works McCanna mentions Haydn and Mendelssohn in this context. Much of the piano music published in the years after the First World War was aimed at a domestic audience; it requires only a modest technical proficiency to play and is simple in structure with deft harmonies. The most commercially successful of the Vodorinski works was the Prelude in C minor (1907). McCanna comments that not only the title but the material is reminiscent of Rachmaninoff: "the music turns out to copy some of the more illustrious composer's features, notably the final fortissimo statement of the melody in the bass". Ketèlbey followed Chopin's model in several waltzes in the key of A major, including La grâcieuse (1907) and two different pieces under the title Valse brillante (1905 and 1911).

### Songs

Throughout his career Ketèlbey composed songs, providing the words for most of those written after 1913. His first, unpublished, song, "Be Still, Sad Heart" dates from 1892, and during the rest of the 1890s he wrote songs for children as well as sentimental ballads like "Believe Me True" (1897) for their seniors. Many had words by Florence Hoare, whose other lyrics included English words for songs by Tchaikovsky, Gounod and Brahms. Ketèlbey's popular ballads included "The Heart's Awakening" (1907), "My Heart-a-dream" (1909), "I Loved You More Than I Knew" (1912), "My Heart Still Clings to You" (1913), "Will You Forgive?" (1924), and "A Birthday Song" (1933). He wrote patriotic songs for use in three wars: "There's Something in the English After all" (1899, during the Boer War), "The Trumpet Voice of Motherland is Calling" (1914, for the First World War) and "Fighting for Freedom" (1941, during the Second World War). His sole Shakespeare setting, "Blow! Blow! Thou Winter Wind" (1898, revised 1951), was written as incidental music for a production of As You Like It.

## Reputation and legacy

The obituarist for The Musical Times wrote that "Ketèlbey's especial fame ... consisted in his phenomenal success as a composer of light music. His remarkable gift for alluring tunes, rich in homely sentiment, was reflected in the immense popularity of [his] pieces". McCanna opines that Ketèlbey's popularity

> lay in its memorable expressive melodies combined with its ability to set the scene by enhanced use of different kinds of colour: local colour in the choice of characteristic settings, often with explicit narrative captions printed above the music; musical colour in the form of exotic scales and harmonies; orchestral colour in the novel use of singing by the players and of sound effects executed by the drummer.

During his tenure at Columbia, Ketèlbey promoted the works of several composers, including Haydn Wood, Charles Ancliffe, Ivor Novello, James W. Tate and Kenneth J. Alford, helping to increase the popularity of British light music. Ronnie Ronalde made In a Monastery Garden his signature tune from 1958, while Serge Gainsbourg used the theme of In a Persian Market for his 1977 song "My Lady Héroïne".

Dempsey, writing in 2001, considered that Ketèlbey's "late-Romantic tone miniatures ... are deserving of reappraisal". The composer's reputation has improved over time, and the cultural historian Andrew Blake identifies a "form of 'cult following'" for him. In the 21st century, Ketèlbey's music is still frequently heard on radio and in a 2003 poll by the BBC radio programme Your Hundred Best Tunes, Bells across the Meadows was voted thirty-sixth most popular tune of all time. The last night of the corporation's 2009 Proms season included In a Monastery Garden to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Ketèlbey's death; it was the first time the tune had been included in the festival's finale. Tim Page, the music critic for The Washington Post, considers that Ketèlbey's work expresses an "ornate, perfumed, genteel Orientalism [which] found expression in miniatures"; he adds that "all of Ketèlbey's music is pretty weird—deeply derivative yet unmistakably personal, tidy in form yet grandiose in execution, amiable and often touching despite its unashamed mawkishness."

## Notes, references and sources

English composer and pianist (1875–1959)

Musicians from Birmingham, West Midlands


Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom

Princess Beatrice (Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore; 14 April 1857 – 26 October 1944), later Princess Henry of Battenberg, was the fifth daughter and youngest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Beatrice was also the last of Queen Victoria's children to die, nearly 66 years after the first, her elder sister Alice.

Beatrice's childhood coincided with Queen Victoria's grief following the death of her husband on 14 December 1861. As her elder sisters married and left their mother, the Queen came to rely on the company of her youngest daughter, whom she called "Baby" for most of her childhood. Beatrice was brought up to stay with her mother always and she soon resigned herself to her fate. The Queen was so set against her youngest daughter marrying that she refused to discuss the possibility. Nevertheless, many suitors were put forward, including Louis Napoléon, Prince Imperial, the son of the exiled Emperor Napoleon III of France, and Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, the widower of Beatrice's older sister Alice. She was attracted to the Prince Imperial and there was talk of a possible marriage, but he was killed in the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879.

Beatrice fell in love with Prince Henry of Battenberg, the son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine and Julia von Hauke and brother-in-law of her niece Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine. After a year of persuasion, the Queen, whose consent was required pursuant to the Royal Marriages Act, finally agreed to the marriage, which took place at Whippingham on the Isle of Wight on 23 July 1885. Queen Victoria consented on condition that Beatrice and Henry make their home with her and that Beatrice continue her duties as the Queen's unofficial secretary. The Prince and Princess had four children, but 10 years into their marriage, on 20 January 1896, Prince Henry died of malaria while fighting in the Anglo-Asante War. Beatrice remained at her mother's side until Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901. Beatrice devoted the next 30 years to editing Queen Victoria's journals as her designated literary executor and continued to make public appearances. She died aged 87 in 1944.

## Early life

Princess Beatrice was born on 14 April 1857 at Buckingham Palace, London. She was the fifth daughter and youngest of the nine children of the reigning British monarch, Queen Victoria, and her husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (later the Prince Consort). The birth caused controversy when it was announced that Queen Victoria would seek relief from the pains of delivery through the use of chloroform administered by Dr John Snow. Chloroform was considered dangerous to mother and child and was frowned upon by the Church of England and the medical authorities. Queen Victoria was undeterred and used "that blessed chloroform" for her last pregnancy. A fortnight later, Queen Victoria reported in her journal, "I was amply rewarded and forgot all I had gone through when I heard dearest Albert say 'It's a fine child, and a girl!'" Albert and Queen Victoria chose the names Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore: Mary after Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, the last surviving child of King George III of the United Kingdom; Victoria after the Queen; and Feodore after Feodora, Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, the Queen's older half-sister. She was baptised in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace on 16 June 1857. Her godparents were the Duchess of Kent (maternal grandmother); the Princess Royal (eldest sister); and the Prince Frederick of Prussia (her future brother-in-law).

From birth, Beatrice became a favoured child. The elder favourite daughter of Prince Albert, the Princess Royal, was about to take up residence in Germany with her new husband, Frederick ("Fritz") of Prussia. At the same time, the newly arrived Beatrice showed promise. Albert wrote to Augusta, Fritz's mother, that "Baby practises her scales like a good prima donna before a performance and has a good voice!" Although Queen Victoria was known to dislike most babies, she liked Beatrice, whom she considered attractive. This provided Beatrice with an advantage over her elder siblings. Queen Victoria once remarked that Beatrice was "a pretty, plump and flourishing child ... with fine large blue eyes, [a] pretty little mouth and very fine skin". Her long, golden hair was the focus of paintings commissioned by Queen Victoria, who enjoyed giving Beatrice her bath, in marked contrast to her bathing preferences for her other children. Beatrice showed intelligence, which further endeared her to the Prince Consort, who was amused by her childhood precociousness.

He wrote to Baron Stockmar that Beatrice was "the most amusing baby we have had." Despite sharing the rigorous education programme designed by Prince Albert and his close adviser, Baron Stockmar, Beatrice had a more relaxed infancy than her siblings because of her relationship with her parents. By four years of age, the youngest, and the acknowledged last royal child, Beatrice was not forced to share her parents' attention the way her siblings had, and her amusing ways provided comfort to her faltering father.

## Queen Victoria's devoted companion

In March 1861, Queen Victoria's mother Victoria, Duchess of Kent, died at Frogmore. The Queen broke down in grief and guilt over their estrangement at the beginning of her reign. Beatrice tried to console her mother by reminding her that the Duchess of Kent was "in heaven, but Beatrice hopes she will return". This comfort was significant because Queen Victoria had isolated herself from her children except the eldest unmarried daughter, Princess Alice, and Beatrice. Queen Victoria again relied on Beatrice and Alice after the death of Albert, of typhoid fever, on 14 December.

The depth of the Queen's grief over the death of her husband surprised her family, courtiers, politicians and general populace. As when her mother died, she shut herself off from her family—most particularly, the Prince of Wales, (whom she blamed for her husband's death), with the exception of Alice and Beatrice. Queen Victoria often took Beatrice from her cot, hurried to her bed and "lay there sleepless, clasping to her child, wrapped in the nightclothes of a man who would wear them no more." After 1871, when the last of Beatrice's elder sisters married, Queen Victoria came to rely upon her youngest daughter, who had declared from an early age: "I don't like weddings at all. I shall never be married. I shall stay with my mother." As her mother's secretary, she performed duties such as writing on the Queen's behalf and helping with political correspondence. These mundane duties mirrored those that had been performed in succession by her sisters, Alice, Helena and Louise. However, to these the Queen soon added more personal tasks. During a serious illness in 1871, the Queen dictated her journal entries to Beatrice, and in 1876 she allowed Beatrice to sort the music she and the Prince Consort had played, unused since his death fifteen years earlier.

The devotion that Beatrice showed to her mother was acknowledged in the Queen's letters and journals, but her constant need for Beatrice grew stronger. The Queen suffered another bereavement in 1883, when her highland servant, John Brown, died at Balmoral. Once again, the Queen plunged into public mourning and relied on Beatrice for support. Unlike her siblings, Beatrice had not shown dislike for Brown, and the two had often been seen in each other's company; indeed, they had worked together to carry out the Queen's wishes.

## Marriage

### Possible suitors

Although the Queen was set against Beatrice marrying anyone in the expectation that she would always stay at home with her, a number of possible suitors were put forward before Beatrice's marriage to Prince Henry of Battenberg. One of these was Napoléon Eugéne, the French Prince Imperial, son and heir of the exiled Emperor Napoleon III of France and his wife, Empress Eugénie. After Prussia defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon was deposed and moved his family to England in 1870. After the Emperor's death in 1873, Queen Victoria and Empress Eugénie formed a close attachment, and the newspapers reported the imminent engagement of Beatrice to the Prince Imperial. These rumours ended with the death of the Prince Imperial in the Anglo-Zulu War on 1 June 1879. Queen Victoria's journal records their grief: "Dear Beatrice, crying very much as I did too, gave me the telegram ... It was dawning and little sleep did I get ... Beatrice is so distressed; everyone quite stunned."

After the death of the Prince Imperial, the Prince of Wales suggested that Beatrice marry their sister Alice's widower, Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse. Alice had died in 1878, and the Prince argued that Beatrice could act as replacement mother for Louis's young children and spend most of her time in England looking after her mother. He further suggested the Queen could oversee the upbringing of her Hessian grandchildren with greater ease. However, at the time, it was forbidden by law for Beatrice to marry her sister's widower. This was countered by the Prince of Wales, who vehemently supported passage by the Houses of Parliament of the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, which would have removed the obstacle. Despite popular support for this measure and although it passed in the House of Commons, it was rejected by the House of Lords because of opposition from the Lords Spiritual. Although the Queen was disappointed that the bill had failed, she was happy to keep her daughter at her side.

Other candidates, including two of Prince Henry's brothers, Prince Alexander ("Sandro") and Prince Louis of Battenberg, were put forward to be Beatrice's husband, but they did not succeed. Although Alexander never formally pursued Beatrice, merely claiming that he "might even at one time have become engaged to the friend of my childhood, Beatrice of England", Louis was more interested. Queen Victoria invited him to dinner but sat between him and Beatrice, who had been told by the Queen to ignore Louis to discourage his suit. Louis, not realising for several years the reasons for this silence, married Beatrice's niece, Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine. Although her marriage hopes had been dealt another blow, while attending Louis's wedding at Darmstadt, Beatrice fell in love with Prince Henry, who returned her affections.

### Engagement and wedding

When Beatrice, after returning from Darmstadt, told her mother she planned to marry, the Queen reacted with frightening silence. Although they remained side by side, the Queen did not talk to her for seven months, instead communicating by note. Queen Victoria's behaviour, unexpected even by her family, seemed prompted by the threatened loss of her daughter. The Queen regarded Beatrice as her "Baby" – her innocent child – and viewed the physical sex that would come with marriage as an end to innocence.

Subtle persuasions by the Princess of Wales and the Crown Princess of Prussia, who reminded her mother of the happiness that Beatrice had brought the Prince Consort, induced the Queen to resume talking to Beatrice. Queen Victoria consented to the marriage on condition that Henry give up his German commitments and live permanently with Beatrice and the Queen.

Beatrice and Henry were married at Saint Mildred's Church at Whippingham, near Osborne, on 23 July 1885. Beatrice, who wore her mother's wedding veil of Honiton lace, was escorted by the Queen and Beatrice's eldest brother, the Prince of Wales. Princess Beatrice was attended by ten royal bridesmaids from among her nieces: Princesses Louise (18), Victoria and Maud of Wales; Princesses Irene and Alix of Hesse and by Rhine; Princesses Marie, Victoria Melita and Alexandra of Edinburgh; and Princesses Helena Victoria and Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein. The bridegroom's supporters were his brothers, Prince Alexander of Bulgaria and Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg.

The ceremony – which was not attended by her eldest sister and brother-in-law, the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, who were detained in Germany; William Ewart Gladstone; or Beatrice's cousin, Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, who was in mourning for her father-in-law – ended with the couple's departure for their honeymoon at Quarr Abbey House, a few miles from Osborne. The Queen, taking leave of them, "bore up bravely till the departure and then fairly gave way", as she later admitted to the Crown Princess.

## Queen Victoria's last years

After a short honeymoon, Beatrice and her husband fulfilled their promise and returned to the Queen's side. The Queen made it clear that she could not cope on her own and that the couple could not travel without her. Although the Queen relaxed this restriction shortly after the marriage, Beatrice and Henry travelled only to make short visits with his family. Beatrice's love for Henry, like that of the Queen's for the Prince Consort, seemed to increase the longer they were married. When Henry travelled without Beatrice, she appeared happier when he returned.

The addition of Prince Henry to the family gave new reasons for Beatrice and the Queen to look forward, and the court was brighter than it had been since the Prince Consort's death. Even so, Henry, supported by Beatrice, was determined to take part in military campaigns, and this annoyed the Queen, who opposed his participation in life-threatening warfare. Conflicts also arose when Henry attended the Ajaccio carnival and kept "low company", and Beatrice sent a Royal Navy officer to remove him from temptation. On one occasion, Henry slipped away to Corsica with his brother Louis; the Queen sent a warship to bring him back. Henry was feeling oppressed by the Queen's constant need for his and his wife's company.

Despite being married, Beatrice fulfilled her promise to the Queen by continuing as her full-time confidante and secretary. Queen Victoria warmed to Henry. However, the Queen criticised Beatrice's conduct during her first pregnancy. When Beatrice stopped coming to the Queen's dinners a week before giving birth, preferring to eat alone in her room, the Queen wrote angrily to her physician, Dr James Reid, that, "I [urged the Princess to continue] coming to dinner, and not simply moping in her own room, which is very bad for her. In my case I regularly came to dinner, except when I was really unwell (even when suffering a great deal) up to the very last day." Beatrice, aided by chloroform, gave birth the following week to her first son, Alexander. Despite suffering a miscarriage in the early months of her marriage, Beatrice gave birth to four children: Alexander, called "Drino", was born in 1886; Victoria Eugenie, called "Ena", in 1887; Leopold in 1889; and Maurice in 1891. Following this, she took a polite and encouraging interest in social issues, such as conditions in the coal mines. However, this interest did not extend to changing the conditions of poverty, as it had done with her brother, the Prince of Wales.

Although court entertainments were few after the Prince Consort's death, Beatrice and the Queen enjoyed tableau vivant photography, which was often performed at the royal residences. Henry, increasingly bored by the lack of activity at court, longed for employment, and in response, the Queen made him Governor of the Isle of Wight in 1889. However, he yearned for military adventure and pleaded with his mother-in-law to let him join the Ashanti expedition fighting in the Anglo-Asante war. Despite misgivings, the Queen consented, and Henry and Beatrice parted on 6 December 1895; they would not meet again. Henry contracted malaria and was sent home. On 22 January 1896, Beatrice, who was waiting for her husband at Madeira, received a telegram informing her of Henry's death two days earlier.

Devastated, she left court for a month of mourning before returning to her post at her mother's side. The Queen's journal reports that Queen Victoria "[w]ent over to Beatrice's room and sat a while with her. She is so piteous in her misery." Despite her grief, Beatrice remained her mother's faithful companion, and as Queen Victoria aged, she relied more heavily on Beatrice for dealing with correspondence. However, realising that Beatrice needed a place of her own, she gave her the Kensington Palace apartments once occupied by the Queen and her mother. The Queen appointed Beatrice to the governorship of the Isle of Wight, vacated by Prince Henry's death. In response to Beatrice's interest in photography, the Queen had a darkroom installed at Osborne House. The changes in the family, including Beatrice's preoccupation with her mother, may have affected her children, who rebelled at school. Beatrice wrote that Ena was "troublesome and rebellious", and that Alexander was telling "unwarrantable untruths".

## Later life

Beatrice's life was overturned by the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901. She wrote to the Principal of the University of Glasgow in March, "... you may imagine what the grief is. I, who had hardly ever been separated from my dear mother, can hardly realise what life will be like without her, who was the centre of everything." Beatrice's public appearances continued, but her position at court was diminished. She, unlike her sister Louise, was not close to her brother, now Edward VII, and was not included in the King's inner circle. Although their relationship did not break down completely, it was occasionally strained, for example when she accidentally (but noisily) dropped her service book from the royal gallery onto a table of gold plate during his coronation.

After inheriting Osborne, the King had his mother's personal photographs and belongings removed and some of them destroyed, especially material relating to John Brown, whom he detested. Queen Victoria had intended the house to be a private, secluded residence for her descendants, away from the pomp and ceremony of mainland life. However, the new king had no need for the house and consulted his lawyers about disposing of it, transforming the main wing into a convalescent home, opening the state apartments to the public, and constructing a Naval College on the grounds. His plans met with strong disapproval from Beatrice and Louise. Queen Victoria had bequeathed them houses on the estate, and the privacy promised to them by their mother was threatened. When Edward discussed the fate of the house with them, Beatrice argued against allowing the house to leave the family, citing its importance to their parents.

However, the King did not want the house himself, and he offered it to his heir-apparent, Beatrice's nephew George, who declined, objecting to the high cost of maintenance. Edward subsequently extended the grounds of Beatrice's home, Osborne Cottage, to compensate her for the impending loss of her privacy. Shortly afterwards, the King declared to Arthur Balfour, the prime minister, that the main house would go to the nation as a gift. An exception was made for the private apartments, which were closed to all but the royal family members, who made it a shrine to their mother's memory.

### Queen Victoria's journals

Upon Queen Victoria's death, Beatrice began the momentous task of transcribing and editing her mother's journals. The hundreds of volumes from 1831 onwards contained the Queen's personal views of the day-to-day business of her life and included personal and family matters as well as matters of state.

Queen Victoria had given Beatrice the task of editing the journals for publication, which meant removing private material as well as passages that, if published, might be hurtful to living people. Beatrice deleted so much material that the edited journals are only a third as long as the originals. The destruction of such large passages of Queen Victoria's diaries distressed Beatrice's nephew, George V, and his wife Queen Mary, who were powerless to intervene. Beatrice copied a draft from the original and then copied her draft into a set of blue notebooks. Both the originals and her first drafts were destroyed as she progressed. The task took thirty years and was finished in 1931. The surviving 111 notebooks are kept in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.

### Retirement from public life

Beatrice continued to appear in public after her mother's death. The public engagements she carried out were often related to her mother, Queen Victoria, as the public had always associated Beatrice with the deceased monarch.

The beauty of Beatrice's daughter, Ena, was known throughout Europe, and, despite her low rank, she was a desirable bride. Her chosen suitor was Alfonso XIII of Spain. However, the marriage caused controversy in Britain, since it required Ena to convert to Catholicism. This step was opposed by Beatrice's brother, Edward VII, and Spanish ultra-conservatives were against the King's marriage to a Protestant of low birth, as her father, Prince Henry, was the son of a morganatic marriage. Thus, they considered Ena to be only partly royal and thus unfit to be Queen of Spain. Nonetheless, the couple wed on 31 May 1906. The marriage began inauspiciously when an anarchist attempted to bomb them on their wedding day. Apparently close at first, the couple grew apart. Ena became unpopular in Spain and grew more so when it was discovered that her son, the heir-apparent to the throne, suffered from haemophilia. Alfonso held Beatrice responsible for having brought the disease to the Spanish royal house and turned bitterly against Ena.

During her time as Queen of Spain, Ena returned many times to visit her mother in Britain, but always without Alfonso and usually without her children. Meanwhile, Beatrice lived at Osborne Cottage in East Cowes until she sold it in 1913, when Carisbrooke Castle, home of the Governor of the Isle of Wight, became vacant. She moved into the Castle while keeping an apartment at Kensington Palace in London. She had been much involved in collecting material for the Carisbrooke Castle museum, which she opened in 1898.

Her presence at court further decreased as she aged. Devastated by the death of her favourite son, Maurice, during the First World War in 1914, she began to retire from public life. In response to war with Germany, George V changed the name of the royal house from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor and at the same time adopted it as the family surname, to downplay their German origins. Subsequently, Beatrice and her family renounced their German titles; Beatrice stopped using the style Princess Henry of Battenberg, reverting to only using her birth style, HRH The Princess Beatrice. Her sons gave up their style, Prince of Battenberg. Alexander, the eldest, became Sir Alexander Mountbatten and was later given the title Marquess of Carisbrooke in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. Her younger son, Leopold, became Lord Leopold Mountbatten and was given the rank of a younger son of a marquess. He was a haemophiliac, having inherited the "royal disease" from his mother, and died during a knee operation in 1922 one month short of his 33rd birthday.

Following the war, Beatrice was one of several members of the royal family who became patrons of The Ypres League, a society founded for veterans of the Ypres Salient and bereaved relatives of those killed in fighting in the Salient. She was herself a bereaved mother, as her son, Prince Maurice of Battenberg, had been killed in action during the First Battle of Ypres. Rare public appearances after his death included commemorations, including laying wreaths at the Cenotaph in 1930 and 1935 to mark the 10th and 15th anniversaries of the founding of the League.

### Last years

Even in her seventies, Beatrice continued to correspond with her friends and relatives and to make rare public appearances, such as when, pushed in a wheelchair, she viewed the wreaths laid after the death of George V in 1936. She published her last work of translation in 1941. Entitled "In Napoleonic Days", it was the personal diary of Queen Victoria's maternal grandmother, Augusta, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. She corresponded with the publisher, John Murray, who greatly approved of the work. She made her last home at Brantridge Park in West Sussex, which was owned by Queen Mary's brother, Alexander Cambridge, 1st Earl of Athlone, and his wife, Princess Alice, who was Beatrice's niece; the Athlones were at the time in Canada where the Earl was governor-general. There, Beatrice died in her sleep on 26 October 1944, aged eighty-seven (the day before the 30th anniversary of her son, Prince Maurice's death). After her funeral service in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, her coffin was placed in the royal vault on 3 November. On 27 August 1945, her body was transferred and placed inside a joint tomb, alongside her husband, in St Mildred's Church, Whippingham. Beatrice's final wish, to be buried with her husband on the island most familiar to her, was fulfilled in a private service at Whippingham attended only by her son, the Marquess of Carisbrooke, and his wife.

## Legacy

Beatrice was the shyest of all of Queen Victoria's children. However, because she accompanied Queen Victoria almost wherever she went, she became among the best known. Despite her shyness, she was an able actress and dancer as well as a keen artist and photographer. She was devoted to her children and was concerned when they misbehaved at school. To those who enjoyed her friendship, she was loyal and had a sense of humour, and as a public figure she was driven by a strong sense of duty. She was Patron of the Isle of Wight Branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution from 1920 until her death. Music, a passion that was shared by her mother and the Prince Consort, was something in which Beatrice excelled. She played the piano to professional standards and was an occasional composer. Like her mother, she was a devout Christian, fascinated by theology until her death. With her calm temperament and personal warmth, the princess won wide approval.

The demands made on Beatrice during her mother's reign were high. Despite suffering from rheumatism, Beatrice was forced to endure her mother's love of cold weather. Beatrice's piano playing suffered as her rheumatism got gradually worse, eliminating an enjoyment in which she excelled; however, this did not change her willingness to cater to her mother's needs. Her effort did not go unnoticed by the British public.

In 1886, when she agreed to open the Show of the Royal Horticultural Society of Southampton, the organisers sent her a proclamation of thanks, expressing their "admiration of the affectionate manner in which you have comforted and assisted your widowed mother our Gracious Sovereign the Queen". As a wedding present, Sir Moses Montefiore, a banker and philanthropist, presented Beatrice and Henry with a silver tea service inscribed: "Many daughters have acted virtuously, but thou excellest them all." The Times newspaper, shortly before Beatrice's marriage, wrote: "The devotion of your Royal Highness to our beloved Sovereign has won our warmest admiration and our deepest gratitude. May those blessings which it has hitherto been your constant aim to confer on others now be returned in full measure to yourself." The sentence was, as far as it dared, criticising the Queen's hold over her daughter.

She died at Brantridge Park, the home of her niece, Princess Alice, and her husband, the Earl of Athlone, at the time serving as Governor General of Canada. Osborne House, her mother's favourite home, is accessible to the public. Her Osborne residences, Osborne and Albert Cottages, remain in private ownership after their sale in 1912.

## Titles, styles, honours and arms

### Titles and styles

- 14 April 1857 – 23 July 1885: Her Royal Highness The Princess Beatrice
- 23 July 1885 – 14 July 1917: Her Royal Highness The Princess Beatrice, Princess Henry of Battenberg
- 17 July 1917 – 26 October 1944: Her Royal Highness The Princess Beatrice

### Honours

British honours

- 1 January 1878: Order of the Crown of India
- 8 January 1919: Dame Grand Cross of the British Empire
- 12 June 1926: Dame Grand Cross of St John
- 11 May 1937: Dame Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order
- Royal Order of Victoria and Albert
- Royal Red Cross

Foreign honours

- Grand Cross of St. Catherine
- 11 September 1875: Dame of the Order of Queen Saint Isabel
- 25 April 1885: Dame of the Golden Lion
- 27 May 1889: Dame of the Order of Queen Maria Luisa

### Arms

In 1858, Beatrice and the three younger of her sisters were granted use of the royal arms, with an inescutcheon of the shield of Saxony and differenced by a label of three points argent. On Beatrice's arms, the outer points bore roses gules, and the centre a heart gules. In 1917, the inescutcheon was dropped by royal warrant from George V.

## Issue

## Ancestry

British princess, youngest child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

Burials at St. Mildred's Church, Whippingham

Companions of the Order of the Crown of India

Dames Grand Cross of the Order of St John

Dames Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire

Dames Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order

House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (United Kingdom)

Ladies of the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert