page_title: Webster Booth
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Webster Booth / Early life
caption_attribution_description: The Soho Road in Handsworth, Birmingham
context_page_description: Webster Booth was an English tenor, best remembered as the duettist partner of Anne Ziegler. He was also one of the finest tenors of his generation and was a distinguished oratorio soloist.
  He was a chorister at Lincoln Cathedral and made his professional stage debut with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, where he performed from 1923 to 1927. He made his West End Debut in The Three Musketeers in 1930. He began recording for HMV in 1929 and made over 500 solo recordings and many duet recordings with Anne Ziegler. He and Ziegler embarked on their famous duettist variety act in 1940. They starred in three musical plays, "The Vagabond King", "Sweet Yesterday" and toured in "And so to Bed" and appeared in several musical films in the 1940s. They made frequent broadcasts together. In 1948 they went on a successful concert tour of New Zealand and Australia.
  When musical tastes changed in the 1950s they decided to emigrate to South Africa in 1956 where they continued their stage work as well as teaching singing in their Johannesburg studio.
context_section_description: Born Leslie Webster Booth  at 157 Soho Road, Handsworth, Staffordshire, on 21 January 1902, he was the youngest of the six children of hairdresser, Edwin Booth and his wife, Sarah (née Webster). Booth joined his two older brothers in the choir of St. Mary's, the local parish church, and at the suggestion of the choir master, Arthur Guest-Smith, did a voice test at Lincoln Cathedral and joined the choir there at the age of nine, receiving a fine musical training under organist and choirmaster G. J. Bennett, and a free education at the choir school. His voice broke at the age of thirteen, so he returned home to do a commercial course at Aston Commercial, now known as Holte Grammar Commercial School, to fulfil his parents' wish that he should become an accountant.
  Booth had been advised by Bennett not to sing for three years after his voice broke, so during that time he played goalie in the school football team and was considered good enough to be offered a place with Aston Villa Colts. He was tempted by this offer but eventually decided to pursue his dream of becoming a professional singer rather than a footballer. His headmaster at Aston Commercial School was Edgar Charles Keey, who would later become his father-in-law when he married Keey's daughter, Winifred, in 1924.
  In his late teens he took singing lessons with Richard Wassall, choir master at St Martin in the Bull Ring, at the Birmingham and Midland Institute. He joined an accountancy firm and was often torn between auditing duties and singing tenor solos in local oratorio performances. At the age of 21 he auditioned for D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, when the company was appearing in Birmingham, and after a second audition in London on the day he was meant to be doing an audit in Wales, he was accepted as a chorister in the company and gave up his desk job.
caption: Soho Road in Handsworth, seen in 2007
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