I remember during the early years of my professorship at the R.A.M. [Royal Academy of Music], about 1906, I was asked by the Principal to take into my class of students a young man of nineteen or twenty who came from Hucknall in Nottinghamshire. From the moment I heard him at his first lesson, I spotted that here was the nucleus of a good viola-player even though his efforts were rather crude, and I took an interest in him at once.