Broadcaster Eleanor Oldroyd combines a love of music and sport. For this month’s Barnes Music Festival she has updated her book on local composers. Richard Nye hears the score...
There was an instant when it almost went wrong. May 6, 2023: the King is ready, the coronation oil prepared and, in a Westminster Abbey taut with expectation, the intro to Handel’s Zadok the Priest is swelling up towards its spinetingling end. Eleanor Oldroyd, BBC Radio’s voice of the day, has rehearsed this moment to within an inch of its life.
But now, in the heat of broadcasting battle, her pacing is fractionally off. “I’d timed my comments to fit over the opening, but such was the magnitude of the occasion that I ended up slowing down,” she recalls over a cuppa at her local café in Barnes. “Fortunately my producer was alive to it.
As the singing neared he just pushed a button and said: ‘Stop talking!’” It wasn’t the first time that Handel had almost eluded her. A keen supporter of Barnes Music Festival, the accomplished broadcaster is the author of Composers of Barnes, a new edition of which has been timed to coincide with the festival’s 12th running this month. Interviewing the living, such as Howard Goodall and Roxanna Panufnik – whose Coronation Sanctus also enthralled the Abbey last May – was the easy bit. Gustav Holst’s association with Barnes is well-known. But Handel? His stay here in 1712-13, a few brief bars before the long concerto of his London life, has been lost in riparian mist. “
We just have no idea what he wrote here,” explains Eleanor. “However, there is a theory that a song from his opera Serse, thanking a plane tree for its shade, was inspired by a tree at Barn Elms. We know that the tree, which is still there, was planted in 1680. So it’s plausible.”
Fourteen composers feature in this new edition of the book.
Quite why Barnes should have proved such a magnet for musical genius, however, is hard to pin down. “No doubt it’s largely coincidence,” admits Eleanor.
“Although it helps to have some peace and quiet. And Barnes people do have a certain pride in their village. Once I was working at Wimbledon with the sports presenter Vassos Alexander, who also lives here, and we got chatting to Michael Stich [Men’s Singles Champion in 1991].
‘What is it with you people and Barnes?’ he asked us. We told him that it was a lovely place to live. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘What I meant was: why are you all so smug?’” In truth, ‘smug’ is not the epithet one would naturally employ for the softly spoken Eleanor Oldroyd, notwithstanding a CV that comfortably entitles her to a healthy dose of personal satisfaction. With sport as the keystone – Paris 2024 will be her 13th Olympics – her broadcasting career has encompassed an impressive body of work, culminating in a unique quartet of royal occasions: one wedding (Meghan and Harry), two funerals (Queen Elizabeth and the late Duke of Edinburgh) and that historic ceremonial marathon last May.
When it comes to her passion for choral music, however, the course of love has run less smooth. A vicar’s daughter brought up to sing in church, she somehow contrived to fail the audition for her school choir. A knock to her confidence, she says, the scars from which reappeared with a vengeance when she was asked to write Composers of Barnes. “Impostor syndrome” kicked in.
She did sing at Cambridge though, where she also engaged in a benign form of stalking – eyeing up the hottest choral scholars during evensong at King’s College Chapel – and today holds her own in the choir at St Mary’s in Barnes. The idea of an inherent contradiction in a love for both culture and sport – the theme of a journalist panel debate in which Eleanor recently took part – leaves her utterly bemused. “It’s odd, but it really only goes one way,” she reflects.
“Very few people in sport would say: ‘I’d never go to the theatre,’ or ‘I’d never go to the National Gallery.’ But on the other side, there are people who look down on sport, perhaps because they don’t understand it, or they were rejected for teams at school. “I feel sorry for classical music people who think like that. Artistic snobbery is a terrible thing and, in the end, it will make you obsolete.
There is nothing wrong with elitism, but nothing would be anywhere without its grass roots “Go back to Handel: he wrote music for people who paid him and that imperative hasn’t gone away. In some ways music and cricket [her first sporting love] face the same challenge: how to be accessible to all. Otherwise they will cease to exist.” There are those, of course, who would say something similar about the monarchy.
For Oldroyd, however, the recent tidal surge of momentous state occasions has proved the opportunity of a lifetime.
“When I first started out in broadcasting, there was a sense that a woman’s voice lacked the depth and authority for something like a state funeral or the Coronation. So, to be a woman doing these events was a statement. For me personally, it was just great timing that they happened when they did. Think of all the fabulous broadcasters who have come and gone in the 70 years since we crowned the late Queen. I was talking to Jim Naughtie before the Coronation and he was so encouraging. Ten years ago he would probably have led the coverage himself.” Was she nervous? “Back in 1997, at Princess Diana’s funeral, I reported from the procession route. That was the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life.
But by the time of the Queen’s funeral, and then the Coronation, I had a further 25 years’ broadcasting under my belt. That really helped. “Also, one of the things about radio is that you’re a bit anonymous. I’m not often recognized and I like it that way. Singing a solo, or leading England out at Lord’s, would fill me with terror. But radio is quite relaxing – there are no eyes on you.
It’s really a case of what you think you can handle. You’re confident when you’re doing what you’re good at.” Handel, one imagines, would have felt pretty much the same.
Eleanor Oldroyd launches the new edition of Composers of Barnes at St Mary’s Church, Barnes on March 5 at 7.30pm. Tickets (with book copy) £15. Visit: barnesmusicfestival.com
