Norman Hackforth

Norman Hackforth, Sir Noël Coward's renowned English accompanist and a gifted musician was born in Gaya, Bihar India on 20 December 1908.

Hackforth's relationship with Noël Coward began in 1941, when he succeeded Elsie April and Robb Stewart as his arranger. Hackforth helped Coward write such wartime classics as London Pride and Could You Please Oblige Us with a Bren Gun?.

In 1943, when Coward was touring the Middle East war zone, he met up with Hackforth and engaged him as his pianist on a tour of South Africa. It was a memorable trip for both parties. Hackforth remembered the nerve-wracked first night of the tour in Cape Town, when Coward engaged the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra to open with a selection from Wagner and Rossini. The effect was calculated to "bore the bejesus out of the audience", said Hackforth, after that "they'll be only too delighted to see us".

Coward and Hackforth went on to play throughout southern Africa, from hospital canteens in what is now Soweto, to the Pretoria Country Club.

Lord Louis Mountbatten having asked Coward to extend his tour to the Far East, they arrived in India in the monsoon. Acquiring an upright piano ("from first to last a malign, temperamental little monster"), they spent 10 "hellish" days in the jungle, made worse by not entirely appreciative audiences: Hackforth: "open-necked, sweat-stained khaki shirt, with a lock of damp hair hanging over one eye, and hammering away at the Little Treasure as though he was at his lasp gasp and this was the last conscious action of his life" as Coward sang to 2,000 booing black GIs who had never heard of this "effete limey". Throughout, Hackforth "kept his temper, his sense of humour and his health, which was the most surprising of all, for his looks as resolutely belied his constitution then as they do today", wrote Coward in 1954. "His face is always wan and set in deceptively morose lines and no burning sun, no stinging wind has ever succeeded in tinting lightly its waxen pallor."^[1]

Although Hackforth maintained that they worked together "very amiably, indeed, always", in later years, he was keen to set the record straight on his relationship with Coward, first in his memoirs and latterly in interviews. He was particularly exercised by comments in Coward's "ghastly diaries which really show him up in such a vile light I don't know why anybody ever published them".

Coward underplayed Hackforth's part in his reinvention as a cabaret singer. In 1951, Hackforth was playing for Beatrice Lillie at the Cafe de Paris (which he was also promoting): Noël came to the first night, had a drink with me afterwards and said "Do you think I'd be any good at this cabaret?" I said "Of course you would. I've been trying to get you to do it for years! Why don't you get yourself a good agent and see what happens?" He said "I don't want an agent - you can be my agent." So I was. And I got him his first booking - it wasn't very difficult, I may say, but I actually negotiated it."

In 1954, Hackforth joined Coward in Jamaica, "slaving away every day" on the score for the abortive musical After the Ball. Coward saw it in Bristol the following year: "The orchestra was appalling, the orchestrations beneath contempt and poor Norman conducted like a stick of wet asparagus... The whole score will have to be re-orchestrated from overture to finale and Norman will have to be fired." "Typical Noel Coward exaggeration," wrote Hackforth.

The working relationship with Coward ended that year, when Hackforth was unable to acquire an American permit for Coward's planned cabaret conquest of Las Vegas. Marlene Dietrich found a new accompanist and arranger for Coward, Peter Matz, who become another in the long line of unsung heroes who underscored the career of the supremely gifted genius.

Hackforth also became the voice telling listeners the name of the object a panel had to guess in the BBC’s radio version of Twenty Questions from 1947.

He married Pamela, who died in 1995 and he himself died on 14 December 1996 in Wittersham, Kent in his farmhouse near to his great friends, the family of Sir Donald Sinden.^[2]

1. ^ Middle East Diaries. Noël Coward
2. ^ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-norman-hackforth-1315049.html