Friday, April 18, 2008

THE BRICKLAYER'S STORY


I was rooting through that section of my vinyl labelled 'miscellaneous' and I came across this, I haven't played it in years, it's not the sort of thing you'd listen to regularly anyhow, but a long time ago it was very popular in England. It's by Gerard Hoffnung, he was born in Berlin in 1925 and went to London in 1939 as a schoolboy refugee. Although he died at the early age of 34 years, he achieved in his short life enough to fill a whole series of lifetimes. He was an artist, teacher, cartoonist, caricaturist, musician and tuba player, broadcaster and raconteur, a much sought after speaker at the Oxford and Cambridge Unions and a prison visitor, a Quaker - these were all facets of a creative personality. He died in 1959. This was recorded at the Oxford Union in December 1958 and was broadcast frequently by the BBC during that era. It's a very famous piece entitled "The Bricklayer's story".

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